Beauty is a Verb
Beauty is a Verb : The New Poetry of Disability
Copyright © 2011 by Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black and Michael Northen.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in case of brief quotations for reviews. For information, write Cinco Puntos Press, 701 Texas, El Paso, TX 79901 or call at (915) 838-1625.
Printed in the United States.
First Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beauty is a verb : the new poetry of disability / edited by Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black, and Michael Northen. -- 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: “Beauty is a Verb is the first of its kind: a high-quality anthology of poetry by American poets with physical disabilities. Poems and essays alike consider how poetry, coupled with the experience of disability, speaks to the poetics of each poet included. The collection explores first the precursors whose poems had a complex (and sometimes absent) relationship with disability, such as Vassar Miller, Larry Eigner and Josephine Miles. It continues with poets who have generated the Crip Poetics Movement, such as Petra Kuppers, Kenny Fries and Jim Ferris. Finally, the collection explores the work of poets who don’t necessarily subscribe to the identity of ‘crip-poetics’ and have never before been published in this exact context. These poets include Bernadette Mayer, Rusty Morrison, Cynthia Hogue and C. S. Giscombe. The book crosses poetry movements—from narrative to language poetry—and speaks to and about a number of disabilities including cerebral palsy, deafness, blindness, multiple sclerosis and aphasia due to stroke, among others.”— Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-935955-05-4 (pbk.)
1. People with disabilities, Writings of, American. 2. American poetry—21st century. 3. American poetry—20th century. 4. People with disabilities—Poetry. I. Bartlett, Jennifer, 1969- II. Black, Sheila (Sheila Fiona) III. Northen, Michael, 1946- IV. Title.
PS591.D57B43 2011
811’.60809207—dc23
2011022269
Special thanks to Sue Austin, whose “Portal, 2008” graces the cover of Beauty is a Verb. Sue is currently working on a performance piece titled “Testing the Water” that will premier during the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games in London. Learn more about her work at http://www.trishwheatley.co.uk/suehome.html.
Book and cover design by the inimitable JB Bryan of La Alameda Press.
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO
TOM ANDREWS, LARRY EIGNER, ROBERT FAGAN,
LAURA HERSHEY, JOSEPHINE MILES AND VASSAR MILLER,
WITHOUT WHOSE WORK THIS BOOK WOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE.
Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black and Michael Northen would like to thank our contributors. We would also like to thank Lee, Bobby and John Byrd, publishers extraordinaire for their belief in this project, and also Jessica Powers and everyone else at Cinco Puntos.
Jennifer Bartlett would like to thank for their direct help with suggestions, editing, daily feedback and/or childcare: Sheila Black, Michael Northen, Peter Littlefield, Morgan Ritter, David Weinberg, Nancy Wendel, Anne Foltz, Ava Capote, Michael Foley, Marie Stewart, John Stewart, James Yeary and Lisa Jarnot. In addition, for their constant support: Janet Rodney, Julia Hecomovich, Jeff Hoover, Sam Lohmann, Tara O’Connor, Rachel Peskin, Thomas Mitchell, Eric Chappelle, Barbara Beck, Deanna Ortiz, Anne Beyer, Tom Beyer, Maryrose Larkin, Royal Alvis, Brigit Nagel, Charles Bernstein, Susan Bee, Norma Cole, Ron Silliman and Edwin Torres. And the people without whom poetry would not be possible: Jim Stewart, Lee Bartlett, Emma Bartlett, Roxann Beck-Foley, Nathaniel Tarn, Andrea Baker, and as forever, Jeffrey.
Sheila Black wishes to thank her husband Duncan Hayse for his stellar proofreading skills and keen brain. Co-editors, Jen and Mike, without whom this project would have remained the ghost of an idea; dear friends: Karen Bucher, Cathy Carver, Michelle Granger, Melissa Kwasny, Michele Marcoux, Candice Morrow, Marnie Nixon, Bernadette Smyth, Megan Snedden, Stephanie Taylor, Carrie Tafoya, Michele Valverde and Connie Voisine for their unfailing good advice and support. Her children Annabelle, Eliza and Walker Hayse, who have helped me in every way they possibly could. Her parents Clay and Moira Black, and amazing sisters Samantha and Sarah, and last but not least, Lenore Parker, for all her wise counsel over many years, and the late Robert Fagan, for being such a wonderful poetic mentor.
Michael Northen is grateful for the support of his wife Lora and children Patrick, Maura, Melissa, Maya and Elijah. Special thanks to the Inglis House Poetry Workshop, especially Stuart Sanderson, Dana Hirsch, Yvette Green, Steve Parker and Denise March, without whom there would have been nothing to contribute to this book. He thanks his mother Elvera Northen and his brother Ed, for his continued belief in poetry. Finally, thanks to co-editors Sheila Black and Jennifer Bartlett for all their hard work, and to Jim Ferris for his encouragement and support.
CONTENTS
PREFACE, Jennifer Bartlett
A SHORT HISTORY OF AMERICAN DISABILITY POETRY, Michael Northen
EARLY VOICES
Larry Eigner MISSING LARRY: THE POETICS OF DISABILITY IN LARRY EIGNER, Michael Davidson
Six Poems
Tom Andrews from Codeine Diary
The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle
Vassar Miller SWIMMING ON CONCRETE: THE POETRY OF VASSAR MILLER, Jill Alexander Essbaum
If I Had Wheels or Love
Dramatic Monologue in the Speaker’s Own Voice
The Common Core
Subterfuge
Robert Fagan Less
Proem
Stiege
Josephine Miles THE VOICE OF “REASON,” Susan Schweik
Doll
Album
Motive
Intensives
Payment
THE DISABILITY POETICS MOVEMENT
Jim Ferris KEEPING THE KNIVES SHARP
Poet of Cripples
Normal
Poems with Disabilities
From the Surgeons: Drs. Sofield, Louis, Hark, Alfini, Millar, Baehr, Bevan-Thomas, Tsatsos, Ericson, and Bennan
Lost Hyoid
Kenny Fries from STARING BACK: THE DISABILITY EXPERIENCE FROM THE INSIDE OUT
Excavation
Body Language
Beauty and Variations
Petra Kuppers THE SOUND OF THE BONES
The Origin of My Wheelchair
Crip Music
from Spherical Song Cycle
Daniel Simpson LINE BREAKS THE WAY I SEE THEM
School for the Blind
Broken Reverie
About Chester Kowalski I Don’t Know Much
A Few Things
Laura Hershey GETTING COMFORTABLE
Working Together
Telling
Morning
Thousand Island
Jillian Weise from THE DISABILITY RIGHTS MOVEMENT AND THE LEGACY OF POETS WITH DISABILITIES
The Amputee’s Guide to Sex
The Old Questions
The Devotee
The Body in Pain
Kathi Wolfe HELEN KELLER: OBSESSION AND MUSE
On the Subway
Ashes: Rome, 1946
She Loved Hot Dogs So Much
The Sun is Warm: Nagasaki, 1948
John Lee Clark TRANSLATING AND READING ASL POETRY
Deaf Blind: Three Squared Cinquain
Clamor
Beach Baseball
Long Goodbyes
LYRICISM OF THE BODY
Alex Lemon AND NOW I SEE
Mosquito
It Had Only Been Dead a Few Hours
Other
Good
And No More May I Be
Laurie Clements Lambeth RESHAPING THE OUTLINE
Hypoesthesia
The Shaking
Seizure, or Seduction of Persephone
Dysaesthesia
Brian Teare LYING MEDITATION
5 poems from The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven
Ona Gritz A CONSCIOUS DECISION
Hemiplegia
No
Prologue
Because You Can’t See My Photographs
We Are Everywhere
Stephen Kuusisto DIGRESSIONS ON POETRY, PROSE AND A LINGONBERRY BUSH
Letter to Borges from Houston, Texas
Borges: They Are Knocking the Wind Out of Me in Iowa City
Letter to Borges from Estonia
Letter to Borges in His Parlor
Only Bread, Only Light
Sheila Black WAITING TO BE DANGEROUS: DISABILITY AND CONFESSIONALISM
Playing Dead
What You Mourn
Reconstruction
Objects Waiting to Be Dangerous
Raymond Luczak LISTENING SIDEWAYS TO THE BEAT OF A POEM
Consonants
Instructions to Hearing Persons Desiring a Deaf Man
Ablutions of the Tongue
Hummingbirds
Anne Kaier RIVER CREATURE
Cosseted
Accoutrements
The Examining Table
Hal Sirowitz ZOMBIES ARE LOOSE
A Step above Cows
Legal Drugs
A Famous Ball Player
Avoiding Rigidity
Lisa Gill MAPPING CAESURA: THE ENCOMPASSING BODY
from The Relenting: A Play of Sorts
Wicker-Work: A Sestina for Zukofsky
My Inquietude Constrained Briefly by Louise Bogan
The Undering and Other Great Inhumanities on 3.6 Acres
TOWARDS A NEW LANGUAGE OF EMBODIMENT
Norma Cole WHY I AM NOT A TRANSLATOR — TAKE 2
Speech Production: Themes and Variations
C.S. Giscombe ON A LINE BY WILLIE MCTELL
from Giscome Road (Northern Road, 2)
from Prairie Style: Two Monster Poems
Amber DiPietra from MY NOTEBOOK HAS A RIGID SPINE OR HOW TO OPERATE THE BODY IN WRITING
bunny baby fast and slow
Ellen McGrath Smith “HEARING A PEAR”: THE POETRY READING ON A NEW FREQUENCY
Afraid of the Rake
The Magic Word Is Partager
Spelling Down
Theodore Enslin, Poet of Maine
Denise Leto OULIPO AT THE LAUNDROMAT
Plaza Series. 1
The Lost Word Association
26 Tries
Crane of Angles
Jennifer Bartlett EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP
5 poems from Autobiography
Cynthia Hogue THE CREATURE WITHIN: ON POETRY AND DIS/ABILITY
Green surrounds the mind of summer
In a Mute Season
Radical Optimism
Danielle Pafunda MEAT LIFE
In this Plate My Illness is Visible
In this Plate My Illness is a Wire that Can Easily Cut Meat and Bone
In this Plate I Receive My First Diagnosis
In this Plate My Traumadome Has Come Unzippered
In this Plate My Illness Splits Time
Rusty Morrison To Saturate The Matter Of The Present
Ill-timed (24.1) & Ill-timed (24.2)
Ill-timed (24.3)
Ill-timed (24.4)
Ill-timed (24.5)
David Wolach Body Maps And Distraction Zones
(muted domestic pornography)
3. (corporeal self-punishment)
(forced feeding 1)
Kara Dorris Benign Bone Tumor City
Self-Portrait with Framing Effect
Breton’s Song of the Lark
Fairytale: How Spring Comes to the Land of Snow and Icicles / (Dream Map)
Wanting to Be a Girl
Gretchen E. Henderson Poetics/ “Exhibits”
Exhibit “H”
Exhibit “U”
Bernadette Mayer Statement On Poetics
Sonnet Edmund Leites
4th of July Demon Moped
Chosca Mass Tinek
EYJAFJALLAJOKULL
Notes
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Works Cited
Publishers Note: Cinco Puntos is pleased to offer this anthology as an e-book. E-book technology makes the book accessible to many more people than the print book alone. Many e-book readers reflow text, altering it’s structure. For prose, this isn’t a problem but it can dramatically alter the way a poem reads. We encourage readers to refer, where possible, to the print book to see
each poet’s exact intent with their poems
Jennifer Bartlett
PREFACE
(for Reginald Shepard)
For me, the idea for Beauty is a Verb can be pinpointed to one single moment, December 10, 2005, the day Norma Cole read at the Bowery Poetry Club for the Segue Reading Series. A few years earlier, after a stroke, Cole lost and regained her ability to speak. Now, she used her temporary aphasia and slurred speech to compose a poem that noted a list of words she could no longer enunciate. The result of her reading this work was alternately hilarious and devastating. Cole laughed at the ridiculous, yet utterly wrenching, situation of a poet losing words, and the audience laughed with her. Yet, it wasn’t as simple as that. Although the audience laughed, they were also visibly uncomfortable. From the sophistication of Cole’s work and her genius as a person, one can guess that this was no accident. Can an entire anthology be sparked by one reading of one poet? I am sure crazier things have happened in this world we called poetry.
After, I began to consider a series of questions. What did it mean to have a disability poetics? What was the history of the movement? What about poets, much like myself, who have a disability, but do not align themselves with identity poetry or the disability poetics movement? How do they fit into such a context, if at all? Shortly after, I was invited by Sheila Black and Michael Northen to participate in a panel exploring many of these ideas at the 2009 Associated Writing Programs Conference in Denver. Over cocktails, the idea of our anthology, this anthology, was born.
While Beauty is a Verb includes many views of disability, we hope to consistently consider the social model of disability. It is for this reason that we primarily chose poets who have a visible disability. In this the poets’ difficulty becomes twofold: a struggle with physical limitations (which, in themselves, can be a construction) coupled with society’s critique of the non-normative body. We mean to explore not only what is means to have a genre called “Disability Poetics,” but to look at poetry influenced by an alternate body and how this intersection forms a third language. Hence, we include not only poets who created and embrace the disability/crip poetics movement but also those who might resist such a classification and have never been considered in that exact context.
There are absences in the collection: we did not include poets writing about HIV/ AIDS or cancer. While these disabilities without a doubt fit into the social model, they could be arguably classified as illness. We also did not include alcoholism. As Michael Davidson notes, most poets could be looked at through a disability lens, even poets such as Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg and Robert Duncan—all of whom had vision problems of some variation. In addition, the collection tends to lean toward poets who are dedicated to publishing with independent presses: we did approach a few poets who publish with mainstream presses who declined to participate. Mainstream writers tend to reflect the predominant view of disability as tragedy. We wanted to avoid this norm not because it isn’t valid, but because we are interested in investigating an alternative.
Beauty is a Verb is not, nor meant to be, a comprehensive collection. There are far too many wonderful American poets with disabilities, many of who are noted in Northen’s
essay, to create such a book of a reasonable size. Rather, we mean to provide a selection that explores a range of poetic sensibilities. The three editors come together from very different backgrounds: Black, a poet and academic, is a long-time New Mexican working within the vein of narrative poetics. Northen, in addition to being a poet, is founder and editor of the disability poetics journal Wordgathering and a scholar of disability poetics. My own work and considerations embody an experimental lyricism informed by so-called Language Poetry. We hope the range in poetry here will reflect our range in knowledge and aesthetic.
Individual sections reflect this aesthetic range. The division is a mix of chronological and stylistic order. The “Early Voices,” all of whom are deceased, are poets with disabilities writing in the mid to late twentieth century. These poets generally avoid having a narrative of disability as the forefront of their poetics. This, particularly in the case of Miles, was perhaps not only an aesthetic choice, but the result of writing in a time when disability was utterly shunned. Previous to the 1960s, the common attitude tended to be that in the rare case where a person with a disability was successful in any field that the disability was deemphasized as much as possible.
The second section—“The Disability Poetics Movement” or crip poetry—emphasizes embodiment, especially atypical embodiment and the alternative poetics generated from that perspective, which challenges stereotypes and insists on self-definition. Although these poets by no means want to be defined by their disability, they create a narrative that speaks to and celebrates identity, and politics are often the focus of their work. This section is not exclusively poets who align themselves with crip poetics. Jillian Weise, for example, strongly resists this label; yet her work also speaks to a celebratory narrative of the non-normative body.
The final two sections are more varied. Here are a number of poets who would be included in many different so-called schools if they aligned themselves at all. Many of these poets have not previously been explored through the lens of disability.
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