Eleanor Lerman (born 1952) is an American poet, novelist, and short story writer.
Life and career
Lerman was born in the Bronx, and raised there and in Far Rockaway. She is a lifelong New Yorker, and is of Jewish heritage.
Early years
Lerman wrote poetry while in high school, with the encouragement of a sympathetic teacher:
As a writer, I have been rescued more than once in my life. The first time was by a high school English teacher who told me, that I'd better not read my poetry to the rest of the class (a bit too much East Village raunch, I guess, for my classmates) but encouraged me to be a writer, because while my work wasn't his taste, it was good.
At age 18 she left home and moved from the Bronx to Greenwich Village, where she found an unusual job:
Person wanted to sweep up in harpsichord factory. That was the ad in the Village Voice that I answered in 1970 when I was eighteen years old and looking for a job so I could support myself in the city, where I was headed to join the revolution. ...
Lerman's job was in a workshop, founded by Wolfgang Zuckermann, that produced and shipped kits from which amateurs built harpsichords, at the time a minor cultural phenomenon.
It was the harpsichord kit factory where I worked, the long-lost Greenwich Village of artists and gay bars and roller-skating queens, along with my neighbor, a film producer, who introduced me to a community of writers, and my boss, Michael Zuckermann [Wolfgang's younger brother], who gave me the job because he said I had soulful eyes (I hope I still do!), which in the psychedelic days was the only qualification you needed, I guess, to make harpsichord kit parts (I graduated from the sweeping up part pretty quickly) that made me believe it was possible to actually live the life of a writer. ... At the time, Zuckermann Harpsichords was housed in the first floor of a small, quirky 19th century building on Charles Street. Michael not only gave me a job, he gave me a tiny apartment upstairs. The whole operation employed about five girls, who drilled pin blocks, used a table saw and a lathe, but also worked on eccentric machines that Michael had made himself out of sewing machine parts ... Sometimes we ran out of parts and I was supposed to write what we needed on a blackboard. Instead, ... I used the blackboard to write poems.
The active artistic surroundings of Greenwich Village led to her being recognized and encouraged as a poet. The film producer mentioned in the quotations given here was named Harrison Starr; he had been executive producer for the notable counterculture film Zabriskie Point (1970).
The film producer, who lived in a carriage house on the lane behind the harpsichord workshop, had to walk through our space every day to get his mail, and he began stopping by the blackboard to read my poetry. One day, he said something to me like, You know, that's pretty good. You ought to try to get your work published. It had never occurred to me that was possible until he suggested it. ... Since I had no idea how to actually get a book published, I took the manuscript of poems I had and sent them to Viking, the press that published Cohen, and some very kind person there wrote me back and suggested trying Wesleyan University Press, which I did, and in 1973, they published my first book of poetry.
Armed Love and its aftermath
This volume, Armed Love, attracted positive critical attention and indeed was nominated for a National Book Award. Not all reviews were positive; X. J. Kennedy, writing in The New York Times, had harsh words for Lerman's technique as a poet and, more controversially, hinted at criticism of Lerman's choice of subject matter, which included illegal drugs and lesbian sexuality. Drawing on the recently introduced system of film ratings, Kennedy described Armed Love as "XX rated".
Lerman describes her experience of youthful fame as "devastating"—not as a result of Kennedy's criticism, but rather from the burden of notoriety it created: