Beauty is a Verb - Time to Brag

I’m so proud of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability that I have to come out of my root cellar and talk about it. Collaborating with poets Sheila Black and Jennifer Bartlett to edit the anthology and with Lee and Bobby Byrd at Cinco Puntos Press to get it published has been an invigorating and rewarding experience.

Since the first books appeared barely a month ago ago, the praise has been coming. It received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, and poet/critic Ron Silliman wrote that it will be one of the defining poetry anthologies of the twenty-first century. Poets Molly Peacock Naomi Sahib Nye and disabilities scholars Lennard Davis and Anne Finger have all given it powerfully positive endorsements. Recent readings in Philadelphia, Berkeley, Albuquerque, and Las Cruces have impressed the crowds that they have drawn with more coming up in New York, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C. and Ann Arbor. Two weeks after publication, the anthology showed up as number six on the Poetry Foundation’s list of best selling poetry anthologies (behind Caroline Kennedy, Garrison Keillor, Harold Bloom, David Lehman and Jeffrey Yang).

What is so special about Beauty is a Verb? At 383 pages, it is the first comprehensive anthology to focus entirely on the work of poets with physical disabilities – most of them, visible disabilities. Moreover, each poet in the book is represented not only by his/her poems but by an essay about their work as well. (For the handful of poets who are no longer living, such as Larry Eigner, the essay was supplied by a scholar who knows that poets work well. In Eigner’s case, it is Michael Davidson.) The book proceeds from “First Voices” like Eigner, to voices of the disability poetry movement like Jim Ferris, to the work of more lyrical poets such as Sheila Black, and finally to experimental writers like Denise Leto in a section called “The New Language of New Embodiment.”

With Beauty is a Verb in hand, college instructors will no longer have the excuse of lack of quality material for not including the work of writers with disabilities in poetry or literature classes just as they now do African American, Latino or GLBT writers. The anthology itself could be used as a course text. The diversity of style, subject and opinion is quite amazing. While not ever reader will be up to the intellectual challenge of David Wollach’s pieces, any high school student can become engaged in a discussion of Laura Hershey’s “Telling” or Hal Sirowitz “A Step Above Cows.” If the readers of Lisa’Gill’s poems send a reader in search of work by Bogan, Zukofsky and Wendell Berry, readers of Jillian Weise’s “The Amputee’s Guide to Sex” may send them in quite a different direction. The writers in the book dialogue, diverge from, and disagree with each other. It would be a willfully obtuse reader who could walk away after reading Beauty and not have gained something from it.

Cinco Puntos owners Lee and Bobby Byrd deserve a great deal of credit for taking a chance on Beauty is A Verb. While they are used to dealing with quality work, this was a considerable undertaking for a small independent publisher. The other the other editors and I, as well as the intelligent reading public, owe them a tremendous debt.

More information at

At Last - An Anthology of Disability Poetry

In September Cinco Puntos Press will release Beauty is a Verb: The New Disability Poets, edited by poets Jennifer Bartlett and Sheila Black, and Wordgathering editor Michael Northen. When it appears, it will be the first anthology since J. L. Baird’s Towards Solomon’s Mountain in 1986 to concentrate solely on the work of poets with physical disabilities. A few excellent anthologies of disability literature have been published before such as Kenny Fries’ Staring Back, and John Lee Clark’s Deaf American Poetry, but Fries’ book included samples of a variety of literary genres, while Clark’s book focused only on Deaf poets. Beauty is a Verb, moreover, goes Towards Solomon’s Mountain one better by including along with the poetry, essays by each of the poets related to their work.

The anthology is arranged in a way that will be useful both to readers new to the field of disability literature and those all ready familiar with it. It begins with a short essay by Northen summarizing the brief history of disability poetry and then introduces poets like Larry Eigner and Vasser Miller who, before ADA, pioneered the field. In the case of writers who are no longer living, a scholar in the field has contributed the essay. The next section introduces those poets such as Jim Ferris and Kenny Fries who “came out,” leading the way by writing about their non-typical bodies and identifying as disability writers. The work in this section pushes hard against stereotypes while at the same time demonstrating how disability poetry contributes to poetry theory and poetics in general.

The third section of the anthology, gives the reader writers who, although they may not identify as a poet of disability per se, have consciously written poetry that takes aim at normative images of disability while at the same time keeping an eye on their own artistic development. This section is typified by the work of Laurie Clements Lambeth and Stephen Kuusisto. The final section of poetry hosts the work of the most experimental writers, those whose work derives from embodiment but who do not share the urgency to identify with a disability community that that the poets in section two do. Writers in this group, like Norma Cole and G. S. Giscombe are probably the most recognized by poetry literati.

Beauty is a Verb is truly a first of its kind and Cinco Puntos deserves credit for backing it. It may be true that poetry does not sell and that most poetry anthologies have little to distinguish them or, if they do, it is difficult to see what kind of contribution they make. Bartlett, Black and Northen’s anthology is different. It is an important work that merits a place not only on the personal bookshelf but in the college syllabus.

Ninth Year for Disability Poetry Contest

In a field as relatively new as disability poetry, nine years is a long time, but the 2011 contest beginning in April will mark ninth year that the Inglis House Poetry Contest has been going. In addition to the modest monetary prize, each year the Inglis House Poetry Workshop, which sponsors the contest, publishes a chapbook of poetry culled from the best submissions. Last year’s book was called Their Buoyant Bodies Respond from a line by Liz Whiteacre, one of the winning poets.

As in previous years, the contest is divided into two categories. The first is open to all writers and must be on a disability-related topic. The second is only open to writers with a disability and may be on any topic. Guidelines are available at www.wordgathering.com. As in the past, there is no entry fee.

South African poet Liesl Jobson was the winner of the very first contest in 2003, and her winning poem “Praise Poem For an African Girl” was featured in Why Can’t You See Me, the first of the chapbooks. Since that time the list of winning poets with disabilities has included the work of writers with growing influence in the genre such as Paul Kahn, Sheila Black, Ona Gritz, Ellen LaFleche, Jimmy Burns, Patricia Wellingham-Jones and, most recently, Liz Whiteacre. Writers from over a dozen countries have been featured in the contest chapbooks.

The only major change in the contest throughout the past eight years has the expansion from one category in the contest after the first two years, to the current two categories. As the “Foreword” in Their Buoyant Bodies Respond says, “We were thrilled at the response to the [initial] contest and received some excellent work, but were chagrined that most of the entries were from able-bodied writers who were writing about disability. In order to help remedy this situation without discouraging those writers who were already submitting, after the second year of the contest, we expanded the contest to include two categories.”

Perhaps the purpose of the Inglis House Poetry Contest and its chapbooks comes through in a winning poem from last years contest by Teddy Norris”, an able-bodied writer:

For My Disengaged Intro to Poetry Student

I watch you in my early morning class:
twitchy with boredom, the yearning
for the opiate of your I-pod written on your face;
I can almost feel your fingers’ itch
to text someone, anyone, on your waiting cell.

This, while I yearn to have you understand
how even half a poem might knit a heart, explode
a head, memorialize the very hair of the dead,
of be the breaking news.

Later from my office where I am grading your essay,
I see her – also early class, front row – wearing her heavy
book bag, working her way across the snowy lot
with her awkward gait. Not far from her car she slips and
over-balanced, tips like a bowling pin and goes down hard.

Minus sound, the scene seems slowed. At first she flounders
as she tries to rise – there’s no one near – and I can’t hear
if she cries out, can't hear the sound of her prosthesis
on the pavement.

Soon she rights herself, leans briefly on the nearest car,
as I turn from the window like a voyeur
and wonder how, tomorrow I might tell you
before you amble from my class,
that hers is the poem you have yet to read.

Laura Hershey, Poet

The death of poet Laura Hershey last night came as a shock to most who knew her work. She was the embodiment of the disability rights/activist poet. In an age when poets with disabilities find themselves increasingly challenged to choose between the poet as artist and the activist as doer, she continued to be both. Laura said that her visit to Nairobi to attend a women’s forum in 1985 solidified her resolve to use her use emerging talent as a poet to work for the betterment of all people with disabilities. Though she respected the talents of those in poetic academe, poetry for Laura meant social engagement. Her most widely known poem “You Get Proud By Practicing” was turned into a poster, recited by choral groups and often cited at disability rights gatherings. Her spirit of dedication will be missed.

When she passed away Laura was just completing an interview with Wordgathering, the online journal of disability and poetry. The interview is scheduled appear in mid-December.

Call For Poetry for Disabilty Poetry Anthology

Poets Sheila Black and Jennifer Bartlett are putting together an anthology of
poets with physical disabilities. Below is their call for poems and essays.

We are ideally looking for poets with physical disabilities, although we are
not excluding submissions from abled-poets writing about a poet with a
physical disability. The format will be 3-5 poems and a short open-ended
essay (750- 1000 words). The essay should address how disability manifests
itself (or doesn't) in your work. The essay can also discuss identity or
anti-identity poetics.

Please send 7-10 poems, a short publishing biography (include your book
titles) and a one paragraph description of an essay you would like to write
to rejennifer@gmail.com AND sheilablack@hotmail.com.

Deadline July 1st. Also, email with any questions.

Please see the request and description below:

Yet our goal is not to produce a book that is strictly polemical but rather
one that looks at poetry first. The spectrum of poets writing on the topic,
especially today, articulate disability in specific and surprising ways. While
the poets who make up this proposed anthology are poets whose aesthetic lens
has been torqued or shaped by their bodies, the group is eclectic as fits
the topic—for not only is each disability unique, but even within a single
person the *experience *of disability is a dynamic one. Some poets we plan
to include, while forethinkers in the poetry world, are not known as
“disability poets.” Rather, they came to have bodily differences later in
life. Some are activists and heavily entrenched in Disability Studies.
Others, while not activists, write about their singular experience, in ways
that are formally and philosophically challenging. In addition, the poets
included represent many different modes and movements in modern poetry. Part
of what is so energizing about considering the current landscape of disability
poetry is the degree to which thinking about disability enlists or engages
viscerally many of the core concerns animating other poetry movements from
the New Formalists to the New Sincerity to the Gurlesque. The mediations on
the body and commodification, and on the very nature and being of beauty,
that drive many of the poets in this collection are concerns that are not
only universal, but also acutely urgent in our times.

A Map of This World

Occasionally it is useful to look back at how far we’ve come – or haven’t come. When A. J. Baird placed the first call for poetry by writers with disabilities in an issue of Kaleidoscope in 1983, his intent was to replace the pity-filled and patronizing poetry that turned people with disabilities into poster children with “Tough-mind poetry grounded in physical fact.” Now in 2010, when poets like Sheila Black or Laurie Clements Lambeth write nuanced poetry that is not only artful but explodes the older patronizing images of disability, it is easy to forget that their work rests on some intermediary writers whose poetry may not have been quite as sophisticated but which was never the less barrier-breaking. One of the most impressive of these was Dara McLaughlin, whose book A Map of This World, now almost out of print, should probably be required reading for any poet who thinks she has something new to say about disability.

Any reader opening McLaughlin’s book does not even have to get as far as the first poem to realize that this writer is out to change some perceptions about disability and that she is not going to be subtle about it. The first heads up comes table of contents announces such titles, "The Exact Color of My Pubic Hair," "Twenty-Two Stupid Things to Say to a Crip," and "Yes, the Paralyzed Girl Can Have Babies." She also makes a point of politicizing the dedication, “Dedication: For Santo, Marla, Daina raised by a wheelchair mom and we did fine.”

McLaughlin works in two directions. The first, as the titles suggest, is in content. She is not offering easy solutions. There is no glossing over the realities of depending upon a wheelchair rather than her legs, but she also avoids platitudinous images.


Some mornings
damn them
some mornings I forget

I unfurl my pillow, turn around
and there it is
the "chair", sitting there, waiting

the necessary demon -
empty until I shake my hear free of demons
slip out of bed to nestle my body into its curve


Though McLaughlin does to some extent sound her barbaric yawp, she also is searching for new possible forms of expression for disability in poetry. This is the second direction in which it works. The book experiments with list poem, haiku sequence, odes, prose poems and forms with no particular names. Not all of these are successful, but that is what experimentation is about.
Her use of the term "Staring Back" in a poem title references Kenny Fries’ anthology of the same name, very popular when McLaughlin was writer. It is a move that disability theorist David Mitchell suggests is necessary for writers in this new field.

A Map of this World was McLaughlin’s only book of poetry, but it is sufficient to warrant her consideration as an important voice in disability poetry during the 1990’s. You will probably have to find a used copy on line somewhere, but if you can do it, the book is well worth the effort.

Beauty is a Verb

This year’s Associated Writers Programs (AWP) conference held in Denver, Colorado next month will include at least one panel discussion on disability poetry. The title of the panel is, Beauty is a Verb – The New Disability Poetics and is described by itself organizer, poet Sheila Black, as following:

“This panel will discuss how the poetry of disability seeks to tackle and refigure traditional discourses of the disabled around an interrogation of "normalcy" and of the notions of beauty and function that have been so foundational to Western culture and aesthetics. The panel will focus on poetic strategies, including the subversion of historical discourses and the decentering of the subject through which a range of disabled poets have sought to address these issues.”

Black will be joined the panel by four other poets/scholars Barbara Crooker, Jennifer Bartlett, Ann Bogle, and Ellen McGrath Smith . Michael Northen, an editor of Wordgathering will moderate the panel. The panel promises to be exciting with this opinionated and diverse group. It is a chance to hear first hand about many of the issues raised in disability literature by the writers themselves. Sample poetry from each of the panelists can be seen in the current issue of Wordgathering.