Jennifer Bartlett was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and educated at the University of New Mexico, Vermont College, and Brooklyn College. Bartlett is the author of Derivative of the Moving Image (UNM Press 2007), (a) lullaby without any music (Chax 2012), and Autobiography/Anti-Autobiography (Theenk, 2014). Bartlett also co-edited, with Sheila Black and Michael Northen, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. In December 2014, she co-edited, with Professor George Hart, a collection of the poet Larry Eigner’s letters and participated in a “roundtable” on disability and poetics for Poetry Magazine. Bartlett has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Fund for Poetry, and the Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut. She is currently writing a full-length biography on Eigner, and recently had a residency at the Gloucester Writer’s Center. Bartlett has taught poetry and disability awareness at Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls, United Cerebral Palsy, the MS Society, and New York Public Schools. Bartlett has had mild cerebral palsy since birth.
from Autobiography/Anti-Autobiography
By Jennifer BartlettAdded: Thursday, October 29, 2015 / From "Autobiograph/Anti-Autobiography" (Theenk, 2014). Used with permission.to walk means to fall
to thrust forwardto fall and catch
the seemingly random
is its own system of gesturesbased on a series of neat errors
falling and catchingto thrust forward
sometimes the body misses
then collapsessometimes
it shatterswith this particular knowledge
a movement spastic
and unwieldyis its own lyric and
the able-bodied aretone-deaf to this singing some
falling
is of its own grace
some
falling
rather occurs
out of laziness or distraction
here, the entire frame is shaken
these are the falls
where I tell myself
you shouldn't have fallen
I mean to inflict
while the critic of the world watches
o stupid, stupid world