Yo, Publishers!

Disability poetry has come of age. With the work of poets like Kenny Fries, Jim Ferris, Karen Fiser, Tom Andrews, Floyd Skloot, Stephen Kuusisto, Paul Kahn, Sheila Black et al, you’d think that publishers would be salivating over the chance to be the first to put together a really top shelf collection of these writers’ works. Sure, there are the old anthologies of the 80’s that strained to find enough quality poetry to fill their pages: Towards Solomon’s Mountain, Despite This Flesh and With Wings. They served an important purpose in trying to carve out a fledging genre, but twenty years later the landscape has changed. Even Kenny Fries’ Staring Back, which has become almost the bible of imaginative literature for Disabilities Studies courses, could only devote a modest amount of space to poetry. There is a big hole on the book store shelves where anthologies of gay, Chicano, feminist and African American poetry sit. If there is a publisher out there interested, I’m volunteering my services to put one together.

Even more important, there is an essential work on disability poetry just longing for publication. It’s Petra Kuppers’ Disability Culture Poetry: Pleasure and Difference. Kuppers is already a well-respected scholar in the Disabilities Studies community, both for her work in drama and her book Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge. In Disability Culture Poetry she combines energy, insight and scholarship in a series of essays that explores the work and themes of many of the genre’s best writers. While it may be true that making one’s way through much disabilities research is a lot like taking brewer’s yeast, Kupper’s work is not only easy to swallow, it is downright delicious. She is able to take advantage of her experiences in teaching to come up with a work that provides something new for both the beginning literature student and the seasoned disabilities scholar. And her style could only belong to someone who knows poetry from the inside out. It is no exaggeration to say that Kuppers work is cutting edge and that there is nothing in disabilities literature quite like it. While I can understand that purveyors of Hallmark poetry may not be interested, it is unfathomable to me that a university press would not want to snap this up – especially one with Disability Studies courses. In the words of one of our American icons, “I pity the fool…”