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.
[3] 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.
...[4] 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!
[8] 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.
[10] 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: The "double X" warning made me briefly notorious and from the Sunday morning that review came out and then on for a long time, my phone didn't stop ringing.
I got invitations to go everywhere with everybody--but the problem was that in reality, I was a pretty much uneducated, inexperienced Jewish kid from the Bronx with an admittedly nasty streak, but I was scared to death of all these people.
Her fourth book, Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds, won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 2006, given by the American Academy of Poets and The Nation magazine.
In awarding the prize, Tony Hoagland wrote, "Eleanor Lerman's poems have sociological savvy, philosophical rue, historical recognition, and vernacular resilience.
[14] In her novel, Radiomen, Lerman ventures into speculative fiction with a story that involves radios, aliens, a bartender at Kennedy Airport, and a dog with unusual ancestry.
The verse is crammed with specific, vivid references to the real world; for example, the tools and harpsichord plectra mentioned in the conclusion of "The Farm in Winter", from The Mystery of Meteors (2001): Elsewhere Lerman has complained of the personal cost (distraction, the annoyance of friends) of collecting the mental material of her poems from everyday experience; see "Being a poet", cited below.