Nowhere is this deflection clearer than in the poem’s final line: “Reason, Reason is my middle name.” There are two pleasures here. One is the ridiculousness of the man’s claim, the send-up of a long tradition of appeals to so-called reason (and the funniness of the assertion, in crime-novel style, of the “middle name,” which simultaneously claims rationality as inherent and places it in a secondary position).19 This line, and the whole poem, wittily capture in redoubled form what F. Davis (1961: p.123) calls “the familiar signs of discomfort and stickiness [in encounters between disabled and nondisabled people]...the artificial levity, the compulsive loquaciousness.” The second pleasure is a lyric pleasure: the rhythmic repetition and italicizing of the word “Reason,” which mark the poem’s conclusion not with the effect of the overheard, but with the effect of writing and refrain—of poetry calling attention to itself.
I close by invoking these pleasures, mindful of Simi Linton’s (1998: p.112) forceful point that :
the capacity to engage in pleasurable activity—experiences sought for their own sake, for the stimulation and enjoyment they provide—is assumed to be out of reach of the disabled. This notion is fed by deterministic arguments that accord tremendous weight to disability, in effect saying that it eclipses pleasure, joy, and to an extent, creativity...The humanities and the arts can benefit from an analysis of who in society is believed to be entitled to pleasure and who is thought to have the capacity to provide pleasure.
Focusing on the pleasures of Miles’ poetry, I hope I have shown how those pleasures incorporate, and help us to grasp, “disability.” “Writers are needed,” Linton continues, “who can demonstrate that success in terms of disability is more than a personal triumph over physical adversity; it is a life that consciously reckons with the social forces that oppress and control.” In her own time and in her own way, Josephine Miles provided such a reckoning.
Josephine Miles
Doll
Though the willows bent down to shelter us where we played
House in the sandy acres, though our dolls,
Especially Lillian, weathered all the action,
I kept getting so much earlier home to rest
That medical consultation led to cast
From head to toe. It was a surprise to my parents
And so for me also, and I railed
Flat out in the back seat on the long trip home
In which three tires blew on our trusty Mitchell.
Home, in a slight roughhouse of my brothers,
It turned out Lillian had been knocked on the floor and broken
Across her face. Good, said my mother
In her John Deweyan constructive way,
Now you and Lillian can be mended together.
We made a special trip to the doll hospital
To pick her up. But, They can’t fix her after all, my father said,
You’ll just have to tend her with her broken cheek.
I was very willing. We opened the box, and she lay
In shards among tissue paper. Only her eyes
Set loose on a metal stick so they would open
And close, opened and closed, and I grew seasick.
A friend of the family sent me a kewpie doll.
Later Miss Babcox the sitter,
After many repetitious card games,
Said, We must talk about bad things.
Let me tell you
Some of the bad things I have known in my life.
She did not ask me mine, I could not have told her.
Among the bad things in my life, she said,
Have been many good people, good but without troubles;
Her various stories tended
To end with transmigrations of one sort or another,
Dishonest riches to honest poverty; kings and queens
To indians over an adequate space of time.
Take this cat coming along here, she said,
A glossy black cat whom she fed her wages in salmon,
He is a wise one, about to become a person.
Come to think of it, possibly Lillian
Is about to become a cat.
She will have different eyes then, I said.
Obviously. Slanted, and what is more,
Able to see in the dark.
Album
This is a hard life you are having
While you are young,
My father said,
As I scratched my casted knees with a paper knife.
By laws of compensation
Your old age should be grand.
Not grand, but of a terrible
Compensation, to perceive
Past the energy of survival
In its sadness
The hard life of the young.
Motive
A window in the shadowed room where I lay
Opened on a dark brick wall
And high beyond, the sooty block
Of buildings stood in rain.
Heat in bones under blankets burned
With aspirin. Keeping me warm,
What else? Grandfather shrugged.
Stepgrandmother reheated the hot milk.
Later she brought also a small box
Which turned out to be filled with six small bottles.
Of perfumes, assorted, six colors,
Oho! There is something to life!
Intensives
Loving intensives of Intensive Care
Bear down on your given name,
Margaret, attend, attend now
Margaret, they call you to live intensely
At the moment of your medication.
What if for a while they call you Frances?
Enjoy this intensive
Error, it frees you,
You can float in Frances,
Sip Frances liquids.
What I wait for is the intensive moment
When you flip, turn over, look around.
Well, hello, Dolly, back where
Hello, Dolly,
Where you belong.
Payment
The time sticks, the crazy anesthetic
Bloodless brain and open throat,
Wild weak angry coming home,
The ambulance orderly listing at each intersection
Fatal accidents he had seen there,
What parts severed, what held by a thread.
Under the sycamores, past my mother cracked by the gate,
My stretcher carried all the falling leaves,
Until I found my checkbook under me
And wrote the slipshod check.
Weak, wild, a saccharine
Taste in every food, and saccharine
In every voice I asked help of.
Slowly his help, the sharp egoist’s,
Slowly avoiding the favors of his colleagues,
Slowly turns to pillow, footsole, diet,
These smaller makeshifts in their saltier tones.
My barbed-wire heart
I turn on when I turn
Keeps count the compromises of his role, deepening
As skill concedes to sense.
THE DISABILITY POETICS MOVEMENT
Jim Ferris
KEEPING THE KNIVES SHARP
In November 2010 the Library of Congress announced that Lucia Perillo was to receive the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for her book Inseminating the Elephant. The prize is awarded “for the most distinguished book of poetry published in the preceding two years,” according to the news release.
“In her 30s,” the release reports, “Perillo was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She has written about her illness with humor and honesty ever since, but her poetry is not totally defined by it.”
Not totally defined by it. Not totally. Not...totally.
My hips are aching quite a bit this weekend...perhaps because of the impending storm front, the first great snowfall of the season...or perhaps just because I am alive with used hips. I love to ask
why, even though I suspect sometimes I may sound like a three-year-old. I am not always persuaded by the answers—especially the ones I provide—often not persuaded that there even are answers. If I were, I might ask why my left hip aches right now, even though it has no nerves, even though it is no longer bone and sinew but rather a machine, an elegant architecture of titanium and high-test plastic. Does it ache to remind me of the hip that was, to claim its rightful place as my hip?
Dame Evelyn Glennie is renowned as an amazing percussionist, the first full-time solo percussionist in classical music, all the more amazing because she has been profoundly deaf since the age of twelve. Glennie might be described as the epitome of the “overcoming overachiever”: she started losing her hearing at age eight, but with the help of her percussion teacher Ron Forbes she spent hours upon hours schooling herself to feel sound vibrations with other parts of her body. “I would stand with my hands against the classroom wall while Ron played notes on the timpani (timpani produce a lot of vibrations),” she wrote in “The Hearing Essay.” “Eventually I managed to distinguish the rough pitch of notes by associating where on my body I felt the sound with the sense of perfect pitch I had before losing my hearing. The low sounds I feel mainly in my legs and feet and high sounds might be particular places on my face, neck, and chest.”
Symmetry is a fundamental principle of human endeavor: we see it, and we seek it, all around us: in nature, in our bodies, but also in the things we humans make. In mathematics, chemistry, physics and biology; in engineering and technology; in art and architecture—symmetry is something that resonates in us, it is the order that we impose on a sometimes unruly universe, it is the predictability that we may at times burn to disrupt.
But what would it mean to have a different starting point, a different foundation, a different center...or to have no center? What would it mean to live in a world that understood asymmetry as a prime characteristic? To live in a world sensitized by a crip aesthetic?
“I see the body as a huge ear,” Glennie said. She has seemed rather put out at all the attention that her deafness has attracted. “Deafness does not mean that you can’t hear, only that there is something wrong with the ears. Even someone who is totally deaf can still hear/feel sounds.”
Hearing is still fundamental to Glennie’s musicianship. What she has developed is a way to hear differently, a way to experience and make sense of sound that privileges other parts of the body more than her ears.
Finding ways to do things differently is a hallmark of living with disability—and a hallmark of disability culture.
Bodies are not absolute. As an artist, as a disabled person, as one who believes in the possibility of social as well as personal change, I resist any attempts to make our bodies determinative, to keep disabled people in their places, to force our bodily facts to be destiny. Every body has limits, to be sure. But what we can accomplish within those limits must not be constrained by the limits in the thinking of the nondisabled people—and even the disabled people—around us.
But my disabled body surely informs my consciousness; I am not a disabled mind that happened to land on a disabled flower for a moment. Neuroscience shows not only that body and mind are inseparable but that bodily differences affect brain development and how brains work. For example, studies suggest that the brains of left-handed people work differently than those of righties—not that one is better or worse, but that different brain regions are used to accomplish the same tasks. Comparable differences appear between deaf and hearing people and between blind and sighted people. Disability changes things, not only social conditions but physical circumstances. If the working of the mind/brain is changed by differences in handedness, it is a reasonable extrapolation that the different embodiments that come with physical as well as mental disabilities will also change how the mind/brain works. And whether disability influences one’s being-in-the-world through nature, nurture, or, inevitably, both—disability does affect how one experiences and responds to the world we find ourselves in. And so it cannot help but have an impact on the artistic production of people so marked.
In “Disability Essay,” Dame Evelyn cautions against disabled people forming community, fearing that such community will reinforce a sense of separateness from the larger society. But she also expresses concern that “impaired communities” will lead disabled people to think of themselves as inferior to nondisabled people, to accept the stigma that is thrust upon them by the normalized world.
But for many disabled people, including poets, musicians and other artists, connection with other people with disabilities can be affirming, empowering and generative. The rugged individualist is a trope that is hard to sustain in contemporary life, harder still for disabled people. Disability culture, which values interdependence over the illusion of independence, privileges not a uniform perspective but the validity and value of a wide range of ways of moving through the world—and the varied perspectives those different experiences engender.
When I first wrote about what I called “crip poetry,” I was seeking not only to describe things I was seeing among a small number of poets, but also things I wanted to see, particularly a flowering of a poetry that did not make so big a deal of the differences called disability but did not take them for granted either. A poetry that grew out of disability culture, that didn’t have to be “about disability” all the time but didn’t shy away from it either, that was based in what I was beginning to understand as “crip poetics,” a poetics that valorizes the wide range of ways of being in and responding to the world, that claims space for alternative, non-normative experience, language, thought and feeling.
Are we there yet? Hardly. The larger world of American poetry pays little attention to disabled poets so far, with a few exceptions, not unlike how the larger world of American culture pays modest attention at best to contemporary poetry. And it is worth noting that the disabled poets who seem to get the most attention often write about their disability while asserting that disability does not define them—a rhetorical tack that fits squarely into the “overcoming overachiever” disability stereotype so reassuring to the nondisabled population. Disability identity and disability culture are seen to threaten well-established systems for understanding and valuation, so perhaps it is best just to stick with the same tired tropes and schemes.
There is rich irony here, dammit and thank God. Audience is essential to artistic expression. Audience completes the circuit. But if we pay too much attention to chasing audience, we will be scurrying this way and that, forever changing direction to chase the fickle and fleeting flicker of mainstream attention and approbation. Then we lose the value of the marginalized: the perspective to see what we see, perceive what we perceive, to bring language together with thought and feeling in order to make something that may never be highly valued in the hurly-burly of the sacred marketplace (apostasy!) but is important, challenging, real. If producing bestsellers were most important to us, we likely wouldn’t have chosen poetry as a literary genre, we likely wouldn’t have responded when poetry chose us.
“My job is all about listening,” Dame Evelyn Glennie told the TED Conference in February 2003. “My aim really is to teach the world to listen...It sounds quite simple but actually it’s quite a big, big job.”
So what is a future for crip poetry? I’m not sure what the present for it is, let alone a future. For me the idea of crip poetry provides a description, a way for me to think about some of what I seek to do, an invitation to community. Poetic community is always to a great extent imagined (to draw upon Benedict Anderson’s concept of the nation as imagined community): poets trace their connections, their influences, their ancestry, across time and space, across manifesto and school, across national and continental boundaries, even across language. Building a usable past is always a constructive process—like the famous M.C. Escher image of two hands drawing each other into existence, the past shapes us even as we find and construct the past. Who poets look to in past and pre
sent, who we seek to engage in conversation may be as telling as anything. I want to be in conversation, with Yeats and Hopkins, Shakespeare and Pope, Auden and Roethke, Larry Eigner and Vassar Miller, Jo Miles and Gwendolyn Brooks and so many others now gone. (Ask me tomorrow and the list might be entirely different.) But I also want to engage my fellow crips, my brother and sister poets, and our contemporaries in the larger culture and the larger world. Ambitious? You bet. Because I still think that poetry can change the world. Though those changes may seem impossibly small—a phrase here, a feeling there, an idea that may eventually find fertile ground—though they may be subtle, I’ve got some changes I’d like to see. I hope that’s one future for crip poetry.
Beauty Is a Verb Page 8
