Literary Mama

Ona Gritz is a poet with a lot of talent whose work is really starting to get around. Since the publication of Left Standing, her work has appeared in a number of magazines including Disabilitiy Studies Quarterly and Barefoot Muse . Her prose essays about the writer's life are also catching on. One will be coming up in a future issue of Lilith while another is being reprinted in The Utne Reader . Despite the crisp, non-sentimantal poetry Gritz writes related to disability, she also has a regular column in Literary Mama , a column that reflects on the myriad issues that arise for the woman who is both a disciplined writer and a mother. Finally, Gritz was recently part of an exciting dialogue on writing and disability with poets Kathi Wolfe, Linda Cronin and Patricia Wellingham-Jones in Wordgathering. She is definitely a poet to keep on your radar.

Deaf American Poetry

For anyone with even a passing interest in Deaf culture, Deaf American Poetry edited by John Lee Clark and published by Gallaudet University Press is essential reading. It is also a book that anyone teaching a course in disability literature needs to keep handy on their shelf. Quite simply, what Clark does is chart the development of Deaf poetry in the United from the poems written by deaf writers in from the early 1800’s up through today. He accomplishes this by introducing each poet in historical and social context, then supplying and exam of the poets work. The journey takes the reader from John R. Burnett to contemporary poets like Raymond Luczak and John Christopher Heuer. Along the way the way poets tackle such a wide range of topics as whether a Deaf poet can actually pray (no lie – that is the kind of ignorance that the Deaf faced) to the linguistic and translation issues of American Sign language poetry.
The resistance to translation comes from a somewhat different direction than some readers might expect. As Clark points out, something is always lost in translation, which is why ASL poets like Clayton Valli strenuously resisted having their work translated into print until he was able to see what a poet of the caliber of Ray Luczak could do with his work. Was Valli right in resisting? That is something readers will have to judge, but Luczak’s rendering of Valli’s popular poem “A Dandelion”it does give readers not literate in ASL some sense of what creating poetry in ASL is about. Other writers have tried incorporating ASL poetic techniques into traditional print poems.
Naturally, anyone trying to define the parameters of a genre are going to include as well as exclude, so we do not really know who Clark may have excluded among contemporary poets who are biologically deaf, but who do not consider themselves part of Deaf culture. Every anthology is political to some extent, though, and Clark’s book is an extremely important one.

Hyperlexia Journal

Hyperlexia: A Literary Journal Celebrating the Autistic Spectrum is looking for fiction, poetry, and personal essays. The deadline for the inaugural issue are December 31.

The editors offer the following submission guidelines:

• Hyperlexia is interested in honest, thoughtful, well-written poetry and prose about being autistic and loving someone with autism. We want genuine and truthful writing about autism. Our journal is a celebration of real life with autism, both the good and the bad. You can be serious, sad, or funny. We believe in respecting the diversity of the human mind and discriminatory writing or hatred of any kind will not be published.



• Submissions should be 1500 words or less.


• Send submission inside the body of the email, as well as attached as a Word doc.

Submissions can be sent to submissions@hyperlexiajournal.com. The journal itself will be found at www.hyperlexiajournal.com.

Foust, Lambeth and LaFleche: Three Worth Reading

Wordgathering has just reviewed the work of three new poets whose work deserves further mention: Rebecca Foust, Ellen LaFleche and Laurie Clements Lambeth.
So here goes.

Foust’s Dark Card centers around the experience of the poet and her son, who has Aspergers. The title refers to the card of the “idiot savant” that she has to continually play in order to help her son navigate through the cruelty, both intentional and unintentional, that he encounters on a regular basis. Foust also explores the emotional terrain of the narrator herself. In both cases, the book is remarkably free of standard clichés of disability.

Freedom from clichés is also one of the many virtues of Lambeth’s Veil and Burn , a book in which the author explores the unravelings of her own nervous system. The book sandwiches poems with prose fragments to tell the story, but it is not a story in any conventional linear sense. Mix sexuality, optic neuritis, horses, hypothesthesia, Georgia O’keefe, Alfred Hitchcock and you get…well a book of disability poetry much too rich and complex to describe in this paragraph. It's better to check out the Wordgathering review.

Less structurally complex but equally as emotionally sophisticated is Lafleche’s Estella, With One Lung. While Foust’s invectives against the medical establishment occasionally border on rant, LaFleche’s more subtle accusations are actually much more cutting. Estella follows the life a blue collar woman and her family from the time of her refusal of further chemotherapy through her death. The major drawback of LaFleche’s work is that it is still in manuscript form – one that some publisher really needs to grab.

All three of these works presage good things for disability poetry. They are pushing the genre, each author in her own way. Surely bookstores can make room on the shelves for quality work like this, but they will only do it if college instructors recommend these to their classes and readers of poetry request them. Please do.

Sharon Wachsler and Breath & Shadow

Though it is late, it is still appropriate to add Dispoet’s two cents to recognizing Sharon Wachsler, who has stepped down this year as the poetry editor of Breath & Shadow for health reasons. As Sharon tells it, the creation of Breath & Shadow was something that was more or less thrust upon her over five years ago. Once she had it handed to her, though, she pursued it with a passion which has made it one of America’s pioneering small literary magazines.

Breath & Shadow was the first quarterly literary magazine in the country to be totally written and published by writers with disabilities. Wachsler imbued the magazine with her own personality, drawing to her talented poets and writers with disabilities from around the country who were more politically vocal than those appearing in Kaleidoscope but did not always have the academic pedigrees or connections that sometimes seems requisite for Disability Studies Quarterly. Moreover, because of Wachsler’s hard work and creativity, B & S has always been free to anyone with access to a computer. Her ongoing dialogue with readers about just what disability is and the platform that she provided for writers, especially poets, with disabilities has and is continuing to help shape the genre of disability literature in the United States.

The job of poetry editor for Breath & Shadow has now been handed over to Arden Eli Hill, who comes with his own credentials. If poetry style of the editor is any indication, the magazine will be in for a change. While Wachsler’s own political-style poetry is about as subtle as a vaudeville pie in the face, Hill’s put a much greater emphasize on literary innovation. It should be an interesting transition to watch.

Sixth Annual Poetry Contest

The Inglis House poetry contest, the first annual nationwide contest for disability poetry, began accepting entries for this year’s contest on April 1. As in the past five years, the contest has two categories. The first is open to all writers, but poems must relate to disability. The second is open only to writers with a disability but may be on any topic. For further details, just check the guidelines on the Inglis House Poetry Workshop website. There is no entry fee. The contest ends June 1.

A Short History of Disability Poetry

Like African-American and feminist literatures, disability literature has a shape and a history to it. Unlike those genres, however, very little writing about disability literature is available. Perhaps the greatest amount writing has come in the region theatre. Published last summer, Victoria Ann Lewis' first of its kind anthology of disability drama, Beyond Victions and Villain is certain to have an impact on thinking in the field. When it comes to disability poetry, though, despite the growing number of individual writers, there has been very little done to look at disability poetry as a genre in itself. There is, of course, the writing of Jim Ferris; Petra Kuppers' work is also beginning to make its way into the public eye. Still much more is needed, especially for the beginning or casual reader. That's where Michael Northen's
A Short History of Disability Poetry published in last month's issue of Wordgathering is useful. While it may not have the academic rigor of Kuppers or the poet's play of words that Ferris' essays achieve, "A Short History..." gives the average reader on the street a good feel for the trajectory of disability poetry: how disability poetry came into being, what it is trying to accomplish, and some of the key players in the field. It won't be surprising to find out that some of these latter include Kenny Fries, Steven Kuussisto, Floyd Skloot, Karen Fiser, Sheila Black, and, of course, Ferris himself. What may surprise readers a bit is the role some of the almost invisible pioneers of disability poetry like Josephine Miles, Larry Eigner, and Vassar Miller. Northen's essay certainly needs to built upon. His insights do not run as deep as those of Ferris or Kuppers, but for the unitiated or those who just want to try get a basic grasp of what disability poetry is and what it seeks to offer, it is a good place to start.

Audio Chapbook

One of the most surprising things about David and Daniel Simpson's Audio Chapbook is that it has not been published sooner. Nearly as surprising is that what they have accomplished is not done more frequently. The Simpson brothers, who are accomplished musicians as well as poets, are both blind and have chosen to publish their first book of poetry not in a traditional print medium and not even in braille, but as a CD. This was a felicitous choice because their work comes across beautifully in this format. There also a certain poetic justice in the fact that while a sighted person can enjoy Audio Chapbook every bit as much a non-sighted listener, they are the secondary consideration when it comes to the structure of the CD.

David Simpson leads off with his poem "Driving Blind," a great pick for someone who might be listening to the CD in the car:

With the windows closed and the Carly Simon tape turned up loud
I can't hear a thing out side the Hond Civic we're speeding in.
"Hey, why are you swerving left and right." I ask.
"To avoid a tractor trailor," she says, hardly missing a beat in her duet with Carly.
Its the stuff that dreams are made of.

From this opening poem, the Simpsons' poems range far and wide covering an amazing range of material. While many of the poems are very obvious contributions to the genre of disability poetry in their to description of experiences from a perspective that is inaccessible to a sighted person, it is in the context of this knowledge that other poems that make no direct reference to blindness are imbued with an even richer meaning. The subjects range from Euclid to religion, from condoms to Heidegger.

One of Dan Simpson's special interests in this volume is the exploration of the nature and value of poetry itself:

We all have something of the poet in us
which is why the book store clerk passing through ailes of Danielle Steele
and waiting for new words, has stopped telling her boyfriend that she loves him
and the crane opeator who would take the Phillies over Frost any day
nevertheless searches his mind before resigning himeself to sweatheart, darling, honey,
names already used up by previous lovers.

Audio Chapbook is much more than truth in advertising. And much more than a quick precis like this can capture. It deserves to be experienced.