DISPOET

Beauty is a Verb - Time to Brag

2011-11-01T13:10:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-06T06:23:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-21T09:23:00.000-07:00

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

2010-11-27T12:50:00.000-08:00

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

2010-06-10T16:11:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-23T19:09:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-18T19:29:00.000-07:00

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.

Paul Kahn: Something Close to Beautiful

2010-01-04T19:23:00.000-08:00

Early New Years Day of this year, poet, playwright, critic and essayist Paul Kahn died. Paul was not connected with an academic institution. He was not a bullhorn for any particular disabilities movement. Because of that, his work will go unnoticed by most, and that is a pity because, in many ways, Paul was just the sort of man whose work provides the bricks and mortar of disabilities literature. His was the voice that disabilities literature was meant to express in all of its unresolved complexity.

One senses that the protagonist of Kahn’s most successful play, The Making of Free Verse, Joshua was in many ways his alter ego. Joshua, a writer with muscular dystrophy, both embraced and resented his wheelchair. While frustrated with the way that he was perceived by those who could walk and by the medical system in general, he was equally cynical about political correctness.

Asked to write about his few of disability literature Kahn responded, “ I was recently asked to write something about the literature of disability… My first impulse was to say no: there’s nothing different about us. But then I realized that this was a conditioned, reflexive response to an oppressive society which scorns us for our differences, which tells us that we are unworthy of love and incapable of living productive, happy lives. .. A more considered response would be to say that we and, therefore, our arts are not fundamentally different, but we do embody in a more dramatic way, the universal human condition.”

It was from this particular perspective that Kahn does put his own stamp on disability literature and contributes to its development. One of Kahn’s gifts was that he was able to look find these commonalities in looking unsentimentally at his own particular body.

Body, gruff husband,

there you are again-

always disappointingly the same.

Never get more handsome.

Always on minute inspection

ominously changed – more sags and creases,

the flesh slipping off the bone,

a map of entropy.

Yet he could also be wondrously hopeful, as in his marvelous poem “Katharine’s Room.”

In Katharine’s room I do not hate my body anymore.

In Katharine’s room I am happy to have this body

that can feel her friendly heat.

I am happy to let he sculpt me

with her kindness and her hands.

She remakes me into something close to beautiful.

Kahn frequently wrote of sexuality, but was able to strike a balance that often seems difficult for poets who write from wheelchairs. While seeing himself as a sexual being, he did not feel the need to overcome stereotypes through shock. His work is open, but not in your face.

As a drama writer for Opening Stages, he had the opportunity to interview other playwrights with disabilities, like Charles Mee, who took very different approaches to the role of accessibility and drama. While Mee insisted that all of the major roles he wrote were capable of being played by anyone regardless of physical ability, race or gender, regardless of subject, Kahn insisted that his plays actually grapple up front with issues of disability.

Kahn’s work was continually in progress. He provides no quick fixes or easy. It is likely that when the first – and long overdo – comprehensive anthology of disability literature appears, Kahn’s work will be missing from it.It is not always true that we stand on the shoulders of giants. Sometimes we stand on firm ground created unnoticed by others now gone.

Literary Mama

2009-06-25T18:35:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-23T04:19:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-28T10:01:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-28T08:46:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-17T04:12:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-11T04:00:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-10T04:11:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-09T18:31:00.000-07:00

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.

Unfortunate Demise

2007-09-26T15:03:00.000-07:00

Journals, especially print journals, that dedicate themselves to creative literature related to disability are so few in number that it is truly unfortunate when one of them ceases to publish. This is the case with Mindprints, a literary journal edited by Paul Fahey through Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria, California since 2001. It is rare enough to find a college that willingly devotes an entire publication to creative disability writing, but one of such high quality in both appearance and material is truly unique. Fahey deserves our gratitude for providing this venue for so long. With his retirement, the journal itself retires. Yes, there still Kaleidoscope and such online alternatives as Wordgathering and Breath & Shadow - and all are excellent in their own ways. But the choices are far too few. Mindprints will definitely be missed.

Ona Gritz

2007-07-16T03:59:00.000-07:00

Ona Gritz is a poet whose work deserves much wider attention. Gritz is mostly noted as a children’s author, but as a writer with CP, she also merits much more recognition from the disabilities community. Some of her strongest work deals directly with disability and what is particularly striking about her poems on disability is the lack of a surfeit of emotion that detracts from the experience of the poem. She is neither angry nor resigned, neither sentimental nor heroic, and, thankfully, does not pass a torch of responsibility or solution off to God. In “Hemiplegia”, she conveys her own experience.

Left, my bright half, gets all of it...
soft sharp prickly wet lined.
But press your head against my right shoulder,
I sense weight but no warmth.

Her prize-winning poem “First Anniversary”, written for poet Dan Simpson, she says considers a different aspect of disability,

One night, you asked the color

of my hair then repeated the word brown,

an abstract fact to be memorized.

The dark strands were splayed

on your chest

Gritz’s only published book of poetry, Left Standing, was put out by Finishing Line Press as part of a women’s writing series and is, unfortunately, not too readily available. Nevertheless, if you can get it, the search is well worth it. The book deals with her parents, one in each half of the book. One of he highlights of the book is her poem “Til Death” in which her mother finally escapes from her marriage to her father by being cremated rather than buried next to him. The poem ends:

Sealed from Jewish heaven, like Lilith,
she shrugged. She’d had enough of him in life.
Fifty years, shrill spats. Silent treatment,
separate beds. At last it was official, eternal.
The way she saw it, he dug this grave.

For those beginning writers who think that poets can only be successful through the use of $50 words and extra-textual literary allusions, Left Standing should be mandatory ready. Without pretense or fanfare, Gritz shows you how it’s done.

Helen Reconstructed

2007-07-04T15:05:00.000-07:00

David Mitchell, one of the toughest-minded critics emerging from the Disability Studies movement, has chastised poets and writers of life narrative who focus on their personal experiences and do not foster a sense of solidarity with others who identify as disabled. In particular, Mitchell believes that in their literary works, writers need to reference the cultural contributions of other writers and artists with disabilities. One example of such cultural cross-referencing is Noria Jablonski’s short story, “One of Us” in which she alludes to Todd Browing’s Freaks, Eng and Chang, Violet and Daisy Hilton, and Alice Dumant Dreger’s book of the same title.

In the genre of poetry, there is the work of Michelle Burke and Kathi Wolfe, both of whom base a collection of poetry on Helen Keller. If there is a literary ancestor for disability literature, it is Keller. Both embraced and reviled by writers within the DS movement, Keller is the Phillis Wheatley of disability literature.

Burke and Wolfe come to focus on Keller from different directions and with different motivations. Wolfe, who is visually impaired, has had Keller held up to her as a model since early childhood – a model whom Wolfe rejects:

I don’t want to be
goody-two shoes Helen.
I want to baptize
my new sneakers in the mud

It was not until doing graduate work and being introduced to the socialist leanings of Keller, that Wolfe changed her perspective. As Wolfe sees it, “Helen Keller Keller is the most famous person with a disability in history, and how people perceive Helen impacts how they perceive all of us with disabilities.”

Burke came to an interest in Keller later in her life. A social worker and political activist she returned to OSU for a graduate seminar in “Gender and Disability.” Already interested in poetry, Georgina Kleege’s Blind Rage motivated her to write poetry about Helen Keller. An issue Burke faced as a sighted person that Kleege and Wolfe did not was the validity of her attempt to understand Keller. She tried to view Keller through various voices – first, second, and third person – finding eventually, she finds that she must address Keller, through the eyes of a woman of the twenty-first century, with all of the knowledge that entails.

Both writers make extensive use of the facts and documents of Keller’s life. One of Wolfe’s poems is actually a “found poem” from among of Keller’s writings. The creativity used in deconstructing and re-imaging Keller’s life is evident in both and, while at times, they cover some of the same territory – such as Keller’s aborted engagement- each has poet has her own distinctive style. Wolfe’s poetry tends more towards the didactic and concerns itself with social questions. At the same time, she implicitly establishes a more personal relationship with Keller.

Burke, on the other hand, is more tuned to the artistic demands of the poem and the philosophical questions that art and beauty surface. In “Phallogocentrism,” for example, she begins:

They cling to the walls as the crowds rush by.
Marginalia – the woman, the cripple,
the hooded, the desired.

Then conflating the figures of Helen of Troy and Keller, looks at the way that men have co-opted the concept of beauty, ending with the words,

…the backward
glance. The come-hither stare. How we love
the Venus de Milo, all that broken beauty.

Whatever their differences in styles, both Burke and Wolfe answer Mitchell’s criticism.

Journal of Literary Disability

2007-06-21T18:24:00.000-07:00

In May 2007 the Journal of Literary Disability published its first issue and, to the great benefit of disability literature in general, dedicated its first issue to disability poetry with the subtitle “Disability and/as Poetry.” Edited by David Bolt and Jim Ferris – one of the pivotal figures in disability poetry – this issue of JLD should become one of the classic sources in the field. In his introduction, Bolt states that the purpose of this issue was to “introduce literary disability to disability scholars,” and, indeed, it is a primer for those interested in the field. In addition to Ferris, this first issue includes writing from many of “the usual suspects” including Stephen Kuusisto, Petra Kuppers, David Mitchell, Sharon Snyder and Susan Schweik. Styles range from playful work of Kuusisto and Kuppers to the more formal work of Mitchell and Snyder. Readers of this issue encounter not only reflection on works of well-known able-bodied authors like Wilfred Owen, William Carlos Williams and Robert Pinsky, but on the work of poets with disabilities that the general reader of poetry may not know such as Floyd Skloot, Josephine Miles, and Mark O’Brien.

The Journal of Literary Disability is a much-welcome contribution to a field which is just beginning to get academic recognition beyond its own discipline. It also provides a nice contrast to Wordgathering, which just put out its second issue in June. Both provide non-stereotypic, non-sentimental forums for disability poetry. While Wordgathering is more likely to appeal to the average poet, teacher or reader who is unfamiliar with disability writing, the JLD provides the kind of academic rigor disability scholar and historian Paul Longmore appealed for that lends academic respectability to the field and provides grist for future research.

Wordgathering

2007-03-12T10:26:00.000-07:00

A new online journal that has just made it appearance should be of interest to writers with disabilities and writers interested in writing about disability – in other words, readers of Dispoet. The journal is called Wordgathering and joins the ranks of periodicals like Breath & Shadow, Disability Studies Quarterly and Audacity as venues that are helping to build up a genuine core of disabilities literature. At this time Wordgathering limits itself to poetry and related interests but shows promise of branching into other literary forms as well. In addition to poetry Laura Hershey, Paul Kahn, Barbara Crooker, Kobus Moolman and others, the first issue of the journal includes a review of Sheila Black’s How to Become a Maquiladora, an interview with novelist Tracy Koretsky about her book Ropeless and an essay on poetic form by Daniel Simpson. Of course, one solid issue won’t determine the journal’s future among the mass of other online productions, but, in the meantime, it is definitely worth checking out.

On the Outskirts

2006-09-03T14:37:00.000-07:00

On the Outskirts, is this year’s offering of disability poetry from the Inglis House Poetry Workshop. While it continues to serve up outstanding poetry from writers like Sheila Black, Ellen LaFleche, Paul Kahn, Christine Stark and Kobus Moolman, this chapbook has added something new – essays about disability poetry. Some of these essays focus on the writing itself. Dan Simpson’s essay, “Line Breaks the Way I See Them” considers the impact of the lack of sight on poetic form. Liesl Jobson looks back through her poem “Listening to Voices” to consider the effect of mental illness on writing. Barbara Crooker discusses the influence of raising a son with autism on her poetry. In addition two these are two essayist who take a broader look at disability poetry. Jim Ferris’ essay, “Crip Poetry” tries to discern the characteristics of disability poetry and to tie it in to the tradition of body-centered poetry. Paul Kahn questions whether there is in fact such a thing as a disability sensitivity. Taken together, these give the reader a great deal to chew on, and if On the Outskirts is a bit overstuffed for a saddle-stapled chapbook, the visually enticing cover by Elijah Northen is more than enough to invite the reader in.

Sheila Black

2006-08-23T05:39:00.000-07:00

We called ourselves cripples
Because that was the word we could not use.
-Sheila Black, “Physical Therapy”

It always exciting to discover a poet whose work speaks with the quiet defiance of personal knowledge but whose artistry raises her above the mere shouts of activist rhetoric. Such is the work of Sheila Black. Black is the real deal.

Black was born with X-linked hyperstomia (XLH) better known as vitamin D resistant rickets, a condition which two of her children also share but which is so rare that she did not meet another individual with XLH until adulthood. Black’s poetry reflects the experiences of growing up with the particular body that she has and with society's reaction to it.

The year they straightened my legs,
the young doctor said, meaning to be kind,
Now you will walk
on your wedding day, but what he could not
imagine is how even on my wedding day
I would arch my back and wonder
about the body I had before it was changed.

She does not just limit herself to a critique of medical practice which, almost by its very nature, locates disability in the individual body. She goes forward not just to claim, but to love the body that was rejected by standard concepts of normalcy.

the crooked body they spoke of,
the body which made walking so difficult
…was simply mine
and I loved it as you love your own country
the familiar lay of the land, the unkempt trees

While she does not shrink from expressing opinions that run against the current of common thought, you will not find the obligatory buzzwords of poststructuralism in Black’s poetry. Without a single reference to the social construction of disability, she describes the discovery of a sense of community upon for the first time meeting others with XLH like herself.

We could be anywhere but we are
here with our stories. Timidly we pull
them out like rare coins, only to discover
how common they are at this table.

The one disappointing aspect of Black’s poetry is that there is so little of it available. Though her poetry has received recognition by winning prizes both from Main Street Rag and the Inglis House Poetry Contest, her first book, House of Bone, will not be available until 2007. It should be a publication well worth waiting for. This is true not only because of her art itself, but because the field of disability poetry is one in which, when thinking of a significant body of work, the first names that come to mind – Ferris, Fries, Andrews, Kuusisto, Skloot – are men. It would be good to be able to add Black’s name to that list.

Yo, Publishers!

2006-08-15T20:08:00.000-07:00

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…”

Dan Simpson

2006-08-05T06:05:00.000-07:00

In his essay “Line Breaks as I See Them,” poet Daniel Simpson relates a story that exemplifies the impact that disability has in shaping the very form that a writer’s work may take. As an emerging poet at the University of Pennsylvania, Simpson became a protégé of Gregory Djanikian, a writer whose work he very much admired. Like Djanikian, Simpson came to subscribe to the idea that even lines in a poem gave it a pleasing look on the page. For the last few years, however, Simpson has been corresponding regularly by email with well-known poet Molly Peacock. In one discussion of his work, Peacock asked Simpson why he wanted his lines to be even.

"Having lines of relatively same length can make a poem look beautiful on the page, but that’s a painterly thing to do. Why do you care how it looks on the page? You’re blind an that seems like a particularly sighted concern. Besides that, you’re a musician. Wouldn’t it make more sense in the context of your life to treat the poem and its line breaks more like a musical score than a painting?"

Peacock went on to say, “And if one line sticks out like a shirt billowing on a clothesline, and the next line hangs like a limp little sock next to it, so be it. What do you care?”

It made a lot of sense. Simpson sat down and wrote the opening lines to his next poem:

His rage hung in the house like a shirt billowing on a clothesline,
her silence
like a sock
beside it

He also went back to examine the images that he had been using in his previous work and realized that a number of things he had written used imagery based upon the perceptions of a sighted writer.

Simpson isn’t revisionist. He does not disavow his earlier work. Nor should he. What he has done…what he is currently contributing are two important aspects of a disability aesthetic. The first is to do what few other poets with disabilities other than Jim Ferris have done, let the form of poem reflect the body from which it comes. The second is to examine the inherited language of poetry and translate it into work which expresses his own experience rather than an assumed one. Both are important tasks, but of the two, the first is more difficult.

South African Poets

2006-07-09T06:09:00.000-07:00

Though most Americans think of disability literature as emerging from national concerns, either overtly political (for example the ADA, ADAPT or the independent living movement) or as attempts to refute the negative representations of disability that have been nurtured in the shadow of Emersonian individualism and self-sufficiency, there are other disability literatures that are generating important work as well. One of these is South African disability literature, especially poetry.

A good place to start in South African disabilities poetry is with Liesl Jobson. Jobson’s work struggles with some of the same issues as American writers like Karen Fiser or Jim Ferris. In the opening to her poem “Angels, the Voices”

Angels, the voices
don’t like prozac
don’t like lithium
don’t like doctors
presupposing
the things
I hear

she contests the medical model of disability. Further in the poem, though, she writes

Angels, the voices
dig holes in unlikely spots
to bury bad pills and
toxic religion

coupling religion and medicine together as responsible for the negative views of disability. While religion in much American disability poetry tends to function as a salve that counterbalances the need for political action (in ways that echo Marx’s reference to religion as the opiate of the masses), in South African writing religion – i.e Christianity – is frequently coupled with political oppression.

Political/economic oppression has a much larger role in the landscape of South African disability poetry than in American. The literal landscape is a key featureas well, in much South African work. The writing of Kobus Moolman, poet, playwrite and editor of the literary journal Fidelities is a case in point. In poems like “Limpopo Village” and “On the Outskirts,” he describes both the physical legacies of colonialism

stump of bone, blackened wood
blade that belongs to rusted iron

and the threat posed by the dispossessed

twisted wire fence that lets
all the outskirts in

Moolman has recently put together a collection of disability poetry and prose that explores uniquely African themes. It should be interesting to see the perspective that this collection adds to such anthologies as Kenny Fries, Staring Back.

One other African writer deserves to be mentioned here, Deaf Nigerian poet Sylvester Nurudeen Oseremen Nurudeen (aka Urdeen). Urdeen’s work is raw, forceful and unrelenting in its attack on African Christianity for its appropriation of the disabled for the church’s own benefit:

so they came in search of me
someone with a difference
a handicap they thought I have
someone to test their faith upon
someone to put their church on the map
someone sickly,
someone like “urdeen the deaf”

At the same time it is both evocative of the landscape and fingering a problem recognizable to all disabled,

But yet the thought creeps at me…
A ghostly sheep out of an African plain
The truth creeps at me
Like sunlight into dew

You are feared urdeen,
The image says

Unfortunately, editors and readers interested in Urdeen’s work quickly find themselves flooded with nuisance e-mail once they attempt contact him. So, beware. It’s too bad. He has a lot to offer.

Is There a Disability Culture Writing?

2006-07-06T19:00:00.000-07:00

June 2006’s issue of Breath & Shadow has taken an unprecedented step and, in an editorial the size of a novella, tried to thrash out the question of whether there is anything that can be called disability culture writing and, if so, what it is. The editorial takes the form of a virtual round table among the editorial staff.

Editor Sharon Wachsler contributes some interesting observations culled from both her role at B&S and her personal experiences as a writer with and without a disability. One thing Wachsler notes is that there appear to be a loose core of characteristics that differentiate the work of writers who have had lifelong disabilities from those who have acquired disabilities in early adulthood. The writings of those with acquired disabilities tend to have a greater a sense of outrage and frustration and, having grown up non-disabled, feel a greater sense of entitlement to freedom and independence. By contrast, those with lifelong disabilities, while also showing frustration, more readily embrace their disability and identify with the disabled community. The writings often reflect a disability pride.

Wachsler also observes another division in the work she receives. The bulk of the poetry seems to come from writers with a mental illness whereas much more fiction comes from writers with physical disabilities. This last observation, if true, may have some grounding in the nature of poetry as opposed to fiction. Fiction writers Anne Finger and Noria Jablonski, both point out that poetry is often a very individualistic and self-referential form of expression whereas fiction demands that the writer put themself in the role of others, if only to be able to develop characters. Despite the fact that the field of disability literature is dominated by poetry and life narrative writing, it may be easier for a writer with a physical disability (especially one present since early life) to be able to put themselves into the minds of a number of characters, than it would be for a person working against mental illness.

So grab a pint of Guinness, set aside some time and mull over this latest offering from Breath & Shadow. You may not agree with them (they don't even agree with each other), but Wachsler and her posse – Chris Kuell, John Allen and Paul Kahn – have given us something to think about.

Floyd Skloot

2006-03-12T13:12:00.000-08:00

Unlike the work of such poets as Jim Ferris, Kenny Fries, Tom Andrews or even, Karen Fiser with whom he has much more in common, there is very little in Floyd Skloot’s most recent book of poetry, Approximately Paradise to let a reader know that he has any sort of disability. In a prior collection, Music Appreciation, Skloot allotted the third section of his book to “The Virus” which marked the onset of his disability, but one has to read his remarkable memoir In the Shadow of Memory, in order to understand enough about his disability to know what Skloot really brings to the table in Music Appreciation. Not only did it leave him with the inability to walk, but it left him with a mind, which according to Skloot himself, had more holes than Swiss cheese.

My initial first impression was that Skloot was shooting for a sort of neo-formalism, which gave snapshots of various literary and visual artists: Thomas Hardy,
Carson McCullers, Paul Gaughin, James McNeill Whistler among many others. However, when I hit his poem, “Home Repairs” the last few lines stopped me

he worked by himself,
a storm of plaster around his shoulders,
the air thick with mold and age, nothing left
to mark the past but bare wall, a tapestry
of cracks, and a door that would not stay closed.

It took those sledge hammer lines to hit me before I realized, that these poems were not merely about a potpourri of artists, but that in fact, Skloot was writing about himself. I went back and reread the poems. “Gauguin in Oregon” is not just a fanciful, but (as I knew from In the Shadow of Memory) about his inability to know at times whether or not was hallucinating.

Of McCullers he writes,

When no one
else is there, she will unfurl her fist and dare
the simple left-hand of a Scarlatti sonata.
She will seek a Schubert song, her strong
soprano voice flooding the lost notes.

And Skloot is doing the same. He is not challenging us with political rhetoric or dishing out Foucaultian discontinuities, but in a much more subtle and aesthetically satisfying way, using his own experience with disability to deepen his art. Approximately Paradise may not make many Disability Studies curriculum lists, but it is well worth reading.

Unleashing the Art - An Update

2006-03-10T05:43:00.000-08:00

Poetry and Disability: Unleashing the Art is the name of the upcoming poetry conference at Inglis House in Philadelphia. This conference is unique in that it attempts to assemble both poets with disabilities and able-bodied poets in one forum to share readings and ideas about the craft of poetry. Featured poets include Maria Fama, Dana Hirsch, Therése Halscheid, Dan Maguire, Stuart Sanderson, J. C. Todd and Colleen Webster, all from the Delaware Valley region. While the morning session gives the poets a chance to read and discuss some of their own works connected with disability. The afternoon workshops offer participants a chance to work on various aspects of writing and presentation. The conference, which takes place April 1, also launches the 2006 Inglis House Poetry Contest.

Poetry & Disability Conference

2006-01-15T06:46:00.000-08:00

On April 1, 2006, the Inglis House Poetry Workshop will be hosting a poetry conference entitled Disability & Poetry: Unleasing the Art. The conference, which will take place in Philadelphia, is partially underwritten by a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. It will include readings, panels discussions and workshops. For more information and registration see the Inglis House Poetry website. It is worth checking out.

Something Close to Beautiful

2005-07-29T04:25:00.000-07:00

For the third year in a row the Inglis House Poetry Workshop will be producing a chapbook of poetry related to disability. The tentative title of this year’s chapbook, Something Close to Beautiful comes from a line in poet Paul Kahn’s prize-winning poem “Katharine’s Room.” Readers’ familiar with the high quality of the writing in the workshop’s last chapbook, Dancing With Cecil, will not be disappointed. If they are active readers in disabilities literature, they will notice names more familiar to them: Stephen Kuusisto, Jim Ferris, Laura Hershey, Steven Brown, Sharon Wachsler. The presence of these writers marks a slight shift in balance from talented poets who have written poems about disabilities to writers who live in. Something Close to Beautiful is scheduled to appear in early fall 2005. It is book worth watching for.

Cummings Faux Pas?

2005-07-28T19:37:00.000-07:00

While by in large the Disability Studies movement has provided a service to literature in general through its literary archeology, there are times when like any missionary movement its zealousness carries it just a little too far into the realm of fancy for a credible reading of a text. This would be harmless enough, if the implications of the reading were not that the artist is somehow being prejudicial or short-sighted. Such a missionary reading of e. e. cummings well known “In Just-" poem occurs in Sharon Snyder’s article “Infinities of Form.” Snyder appears convinced that somehow cumming’s lame balloon man is an outsider who is someone set apart from all of the “undifferentiated” children who are enjoying spring together and that cummings can only resolve the problem by transforming this figure with a disability into a figure of myth – namely Pan.

For me, Snyder’s telling phrase is “The poem takes three separate runs at the disabled figure…” Cummings can be accused of many things, but writing by the seat of his pants is not one of them. Anyone who has taken the time to examine even a few of his poems knows, that cumming’s work is carefully wrought and that each word is exactly where cummings wants it to be. His poems do not “take runs” at anything. He sees the whole poem as a unified picture and I believe he means the reader to see it the same way. He is not using the poem as a sort of psychotherapy to work through an issue.

I won’t pretend to know just what cummings means to say, but I will take a run at an interpretation which I hope is a bit fairer. I believe the poet is giving us a feeling for the mythic joy and renewal that comes to us each spring; it’s a joy that children in particular seem to be tuned to. Pan is an integral part of this process and is there (in each stanza) with us – quite the opposite of an alienated figure.

Just why Snyder wants to set up a straw man here, I won’t try to guess. As any tele-evangelist knows, you can prove anything you want using the Bible. You are sure to find a passage that supports you. The same is the true of poetry. There are plenty of real writers and issues in literature to be unearthed by Disability Studies scholars without having reinterpretations that belong on Swift’s flying island of Laputa. Such interpretations do the advancement of Disabilty Studies in literature no service.

Disability Artist?

2005-05-24T04:24:00.000-07:00

Steven Brown of the University of Hawaii has thrown out the question, “What is Disability Art?” He also provides an answer. His answer is that it is art whose central theme expresses the lived experience of disability. Brown extends the meaning of lived disability to include those who are relatives or caretakers of a person with the issue of disability constantly. When asked if he is a disability artist, Brown replies that he is always an artist with a disability regardless of the topic, but he is a disability artist only when his writing has directly to do with disability.

While Brown’s answer may appear at a quick glance to provide straight some straight forward answers, on closer inspection, it may raise more questions than it answers. The first is a question of degree. As Kuusisto points out (see last post), blindness is not necessarily just a dark or light proposition. Even ignoring social context for the moment, how limited does a person’s sight need to be for it to be a disability. If he is an artist, at what point does he become an artist with a disability?

A second question that arises is whether a writer like Kuusisto or Jim Ferris (see previous post) is really only a disability writer producing disability art when they intend to do so. By analogy does a writer who is African-American or a woman or gay only produce African-American, feminist or queer art when they consciously make otherness a central theme of their work? Certainly, not all of Kuusisto’s poems in Only Bread, Only Light deal with the topic of physical vision, yet a good case could be made that it affects his vision as an artist in all of his work.

Finally, what about Brown’s laudable – from my point of view – attempt to make the definition of disability art broader by including those on whom disability has had a profound affect. Certainly, Barbara Crooker’s poetry exploring autism after twenty years of raising an autistic son (see previous post) would seem to qualify her work as disability art and Brown’s definition provides for that. On the other hand, can a straight, white, male ever be said to produce queer, African American or feminist art, regardless of the subject?

Brown’s definitions provoke these questions and while one may feels this is counting angels on the head of a pen, if anyone is to claim that there is a poetry of disability or that poets with disability deserve consideration in the same way as other minority groups in the United States, they are questions that need addressing.

Only Bread, Only Light

2005-05-21T07:08:00.000-07:00

Stephen Kuusisto's book of poems Only Bread, Only Light is an amazing book in many ways. As Kuusisto explains in his acclaimed autobiographical work, Planet of the Blind, he was born with extremely limited sight - 20/200 in his best eye on a good day. Blindness is not always total blackness as many suppose; it is often an almost surrealistic vision comparable to living permanently behind a toy kaleidoscope that continually turns. What Kuusisto does, particularly in the first section of Only Bread, Only Light is to give us some sense of world that world is like and how it shapes his art. He says in the title poem:

At times the blind see light,
And that moment is the Sistine ceiling

Grace among buildings - no one asks
For it

As with Milton, light and grace are key players in Kuusisto’s poems, but music is never far away either,

the music lets me stand -
Freed from opinion into guess
A place I need as some need ends.

This sense of music and grace inform his understanding of poetry

As I get older
The incidental lyric slips
Through the dark trees
But honestly I can't tell
What it means -

As one reads these poems a certain feel, an aesthetic emerges that seems inseparable from the person writing. Like Kuusisto, I can't honestly tell what it means either, but it takes the reader into a world that I think only this poet could guide you through. Of course, any one who weaves Juliana of Norwich and Pascal into his poetry and comes up with a poem entitled "Dante's Paradiso Translates Poorly in Braille" has got me hooked from the start.

Toward A Crippled Poetics

2005-05-08T08:46:00.000-07:00

Jim Ferris’ essay, “The Enjambed Body: A Step Toward a Crippled Poetics”,which appeared in the Summer 2004 Georgia Review surpasses anything else I have read that discusses poetry and disability. No one who has not lived with a disability could have written it. It is not just that Ferris brings both personal and academic knowledge to the piece, but that it is immeasurably more creative than the sort of pedantic pieces one tends to expect from literary theorists. My prediction is that if a significant amount of disabilities literature if ever amassed to make it a recognized literary field (as African-American or Gay/Lesbian literature has), this essay will be one of its classics.

Ferris’ basic image is a comparison of his own feet to feet in poetry. Poetry grows out of the body and one can look at poem as a body. Ferris own legs were of increasingly different length as he grew; they were uneven. This leads naturally to his image of uneven feet in a poem and further to enjambment. His is an image of protest against traditional forms to which one is supposed to adhere. While that is hardly a case that needs much arguing in modern poetry, Ferris insight is to tie that protest to the concept of disability, and the fact that by its very nature, disability goes against what society takes to be its norms. Just as the poet is measured against conventional constructs of what poetry should be, i.e. certain forms, the person with a disability is measured against norms of bodily appearance or function. For Ferris, the insistence on a poet’s forcing his own natural style of writing poetry into the constraints imposed by structures inherited from the past is comparable to his experience of physicians forcing his own unconventional legs into braces in order to make them conform to a structure that was not their own.

The essay is a braiding together of physical facts about Ferris’ own body (e.g. the measurements of his leg length), his own experiences of these facts, and quotes from poets on poetic theory. The construction itself is uneven in a conventional sense and this unconventionality allows a secondary metaphor comes in. Ferris looks to the molecule, specifically to the molecules in polyprophylene, a resin that has a remarkable flexibility and strength. The molecules in this polymer are “tightly ordered but unsymmetrical” and it is this arrangement that when excited by heat allows it to be flexible and shaped into whatever is needed. The application to poetry, of course, is obvious.

A Poetics of Disability

2005-05-03T19:00:00.000-07:00

As philosopher Susan Wendell points out in her pioneering work, Rejected Bodies, aside from a common label, there is little that all persons who are considered disabled can be said to share. Rather than being defined by what they are, individuals with disabilities, tend to be defined by what they are not - that mythical average person. Because of this, it is difficult to say that there is a disabilities point of view. Wendell believes, nevertheless, that there are perspectives that the disabilities community can lend to the mainstream merely by virtue of their having lived through experiences that by definition, the non-disabled have not lived through.

A similar question might be asked about a poetics of disability. Are there experiences that a writer with disabilities can bring to a poem that an able-bodied writer can not? Poet Stuart Sanderson hints at this in his poem, “Experts”:

They know everything about you,
Except your name.
You don’t communicate
With other people well
Therefore your are retarded.
Education, forget about it.
You can’t have any feelings of love
Towards another human being
Because you are in a wheelchair.
The Experts read their textbooks
But their books are filled with cold words.
Instead, you know within
You are smarter than
The Experts.

Though Sanderson’s poem is immediately about the medical establishment, his point could apply to poetry as well. Obviously, he has the inside track on what it is like to have CP and be in a wheelchair, but can someone with a disability contribute a perspective to poetic theory that someone without a disability cannot? Can there be a poetics of disability?

The Poetry of Autism

2005-04-24T09:15:00.000-07:00

Autism is not the subject of much poetry, but in the 2005 issue of Mindprints , Barbara Crooker, the book’s featured poet, has given us five poems that explore this important issue. In “The Autistic Boy and His Mother,” Crooker lays bare the feelings of a parent try to make the shift from the envisioned ideal child to the reality that is her son:

A lusty, lively son
was what she wanted, not
this dear Mr. Dopey, still

blissfully filling his diapers
at four

The poet knows firsthand whereof she speaks. Her own son, now twenty years old, is autistic. Like many parents whose children have disabilities she has found herself fighting the education system to get what is best for her son. Crooker’s poems not only explore family dynamics and parental feelings but try also to come to an understanding of the autistic mind itself, as in “Autism Poem: The Grid”:

He loves things that are perforated:
toilet paper, graham crackers, coupons
in magazines, loves the order of tiny holes,
the way boundaries are defined.

Mindprints’ editor Paul Fahey deserves credit for giving enough space in his publication to allow these poems to speak. Barbara Crooker has been widely published. Her work can be seen on line at www.barbaracrooker.com.

Disabilities Poetry Contest

2005-03-18T03:42:00.000-08:00

The annual Inglis House Poetry Contest is now underway. Now in its third year this contest is open to both writers with disabilities and able-bodied writers. There is one new twist to this year’s contest. In the past all writers were asked to submit poems somehow connected to the top of disability. This year there are two categories. The first is open to all writers and the topic, like last year is disabilities. The second category is open only for writers with disability and seeks poetry on any topic. Information about the contest can be found at http://www.geocities.com/IHPoetry.

Kaleidoscope and Mindprints

2005-03-13T06:55:00.000-08:00

To my knowledge there are only two nationally disseminated hard copy magazines that dedicate themselves to work of writers and artists with disabilities - Kaleidoscope and Mindprints. These magazines provide a chance to look first hand at how individuals with disabilities view themselves and the world through literary essays, fiction, poetry, photography and art. One of the oldest and most respected forums is Kaleidoscope, a magazine that seeks high quality literature and art from the disabilities community. In the mission statement included at the front of every issue since 1979, the editors state it is “not an advocacy, rehabilitation or independent living journal.” Instead it expresses the experiences of disability and seeks to challenge and overcome “stereotypical, patronizing, and sentimental attitudes about disability.” A second and newer literary journal featuring writing/photography by and about individuals with disabilities is Mindprints which comes out of the Learning Assistance Program at Allan Hancock College. Mindprints is no Special Ed workshop project. Under the editorship of Paul Fahey, it is an exuberant, high quality production that is starting to get the wider readership it deserves. It is, as its cover proclaims, a literary journal.

Don't Turn Away

2005-03-12T14:16:00.000-08:00

It is not often that you pick up a small, rather unassuming book of poetry and immediately get hooked, but this is precisely what happened to me with Patricia Wellingham-Jones’ Don’t Turn Away: Poems About Breast Cancer. As one reviewer implied, this is a book that should be carried around in the hip pocket of many more nurses. I would add – by husbands, boyfriends, sons, and fathers of women with breast cancer as well. It’s a book that neither feels sorry for itself not puts on shows of self-bravado. From the first poem in which the author’s initial diagnosis appears almost from the margins like Icarus in Breugel’s landscape to the last page, this book is an honest chronicling of one woman’s experience with breast cancer and subsequent mastectomy. The poems range from the ironic humor of “Put a Sock in it” to the taut title poem, but they are never self-indulgent. In their very concreteness, they lend themselves to universality – something most of us wish more of our poems do. Don’t Turn Away deserves a wide audience. Another poet who writes of her experiences with breast cancer is Susan Downe. These are featured in her book Little Horse which includes poetry on a variety of other topics as well. I have only seen Downe’s poetry on the web, so I can’t vouch for the entire book. Still, I like the spare, direct style of what I’ve seen so far and think it definitely deserves a reading.

Poetry Read at Penn State

2005-03-11T03:45:00.000-08:00

On April 4 there will be a poetry reading of Dancing With Cecil at the Penn State Campus at State College, PA. The reading is being sponsored by the Penn State Library Disability Services. Dancing with Cecil is a collection of poetry about disabilities that resulted from the top work submitted to the last year's Inglis House Poetry contest. When the book was distributed last fall, it met with such an enthusiastic reception that this reading was organized. Readers include nationally known poet Barbara Crooker. Another reading is in the works for Kutztown University on April 16.

Magazines for Writers with Disabilities

2005-03-08T17:33:00.000-08:00

Several online magazines have popped up on line within the last few years. One that I particularly like is Audacity magazine. What is great about Audacity is that it is looking for writers for the magazine. If you e-mail the editor, she'll get right back to you with what you need to do. You'll need to be willing to submit a photo, though. Once she gets your work, she'll get it into the next month's edition if she decides to use it. The format is attractive too, so its a great place to get started if you want to get your work out there. Another good looking on-line magazine is Breath and Shadow. Once again, the editor gets back to you quickly. This magazine is a little tougher to get into because its gives first preference to writers from New England in general and Maine in particular, but if you have quality work, they may use it anyway. Take a look at these venues. Let's support the people who are trying to help us get our work out there.

Dispoet

2005-03-05T07:28:00.000-08:00

In the belief that even an old fart can learn new tricks, I am casting these words into the blogfield to see if anything grows. For the past seven years I have been the facilitator of a group of poets with physical disabilities and, though, in a meagre way we have had some successes, its time for a sea change. Other than me, everyone in the group is in a wheelchair and many have limited use of their hands. Chapbooks have been great, but their reach is limited and it’s a one way conversation. The Internet has opened new territory for those of that can use it, as has adaptive equipment like Johnston switches (aka clickers) that allows one or two members to write poetry on the computer using their head. Still, the group is trying to connect to others. That’s one reason for this post. I personally would like to know how other writers with disabilities feel about their work – the purpose, the process or the product. That’s another reason.