Beauty Is a Verb

by Jennifer Bartlett

  where the two rivers form the Ohio, as if at first

  reluctant to be mixed. And where my father’s gone

  might just as well be called the delta. I see him now,

  in red-black light, a pen in his mouth, clipboard on his lap,

  asking his partner if “domestic” is spelled with a “ck”;

  the guy in the back puts his face against the cage

  and says, “no dickhead, P-I-G. You get that down?”

  Theodore Enslin, Poet of Maine

  Theodore Enslin, poet of Maine, I am closing my eyes to tune you in,

  to hear your tender buttons turning inside-out toward reflections

  on water, attention to stones. Yet, even though you’re using a microphone,

  your voice—when it follows softly on the consonantal endings—

  leaks through the trough of my hearing loss. It’s the same with Robert Creeley;

  you and he on the same frequency that looks like a valley on my chart.

  I close my eyes and try to listen with my heart to the Steinian insistence

  of your long gray beard, try to soften my long-damaged ears from inoperable

  shale to pale pink petals absorbing what sun this stringent coast permits.

  Sometimes, this way, I get whole phrases, only to pass through other phases

  where stone and skin and soul are blurred, and words fly off like startled birds, my eyes into a soundless sky.

  Denise Leto

  OULIPO1 AT THE LAUNDROMAT

  I hear the stutter as a sounding of uncertainty. What is silence or not

  quite silenced...a return is necessary, a way for women to go. Because

  we are in the stutter. We were expelled from the garden of mythology of

  the American frontier. The drama’s done. We are the Wilderness.

  We have come on to the stage stammering...

  —Susan Howe

  Into the simple pile of clothing, there must be a reach and a fold and a way to communicate that change is warranted. Many quarters are needed. Then the machine can qualify disruption and accomplishment. The clean smell in the room is now the symbol of a day during which the pretense of missing vowels and the context of exanimate movement quiets what would otherwise have become greater than the possible. The fragmented self in reality and in poetry can constitute, as Canadian poet Nicole Brossard frames, an “autobiography or the appearance of facts...” (p.29). This swampy division of poetic labor: there might be time to write. I can’t make myself heard. I can’t make myself. Heard. No story there.

  In the steam is the grout. What sticks in the conversation is the void that underlies the noise: the ambient environment constraint: the whirring machine constraint. The imbricated verbal effort creates the effortless problematic. It just happens because it is both involuntary and chance, neuro-form and function. The spoken is not always reception. The disequilibrium of voice, whether on or off the page, is both subject to random, shaping forces, and the subverting and embracing of chance and intentionality. To borrow the poetics of Oulipo in the quotidian: letters and words are strategically moved about resulting in poems of limitless fixity. What results is akin to the unexpected in verbal cadence and in the cacophonous surround of daily spaces.

  Speech through laryngeal dystonia is not within the speaker’s, my, control. Dysfluent communication is a kind of ventriloquy. Intended words are thrown to the listener; the listener catches something else or maybe nothing at all. My disability is the listener’s difference. When the world embraces only words that last the entire length of a vowel or consonant, division is exchanged.

  This is how it affects my work. The poetic line becomes a callisthenic beam of the spoken. Daily life is like a concussive engagement. A continuity of spoken thought is a transient luxury mostly in transcription. Even if it isn’t written well, it tricks me into praising its fluidity—its supposed “able-ness.”

  The desk spreads before me, monstrous and segmental. Writing abjures sitting. That kind of verbal relief = the extant physical pain. What I have causes pain. The experiment is structural, sonorous, a clamor and coronet of misdirection; it overwhelms past aesthetic strategies and is already undone as I begin. It is a confounded representation of the subject/object. Sharon L. Snyder explains, in “Infinities of Forms: Disability Figures in Artistic Traditions,” “...a disability source will often anchor explanations for artistic origins even as it will seem to explain away other motives” (p.174). The keyboard clicking or the pen on paper sounds to my ear how I imagine I sound in the world, roughly enjambed, like the lines schisming across my desk.

  Classification evades. Dystonia resides in my brain. It is difficult to describe except that when I try to say it, that’s what it is. Uttered sound as a changeling while plunking quarters for redress, multiplied by the performance of the naked word in a nude female body.

  The someone in this female body, this lesbian body, is often comforted when in no distress, or discomfited when under great duress. Here comes the gendered moment when help unneeded arrives—the way the male hero becomes a reverse swagger. For example, if her voice is “shaky” while she and her lover ask about a seat at the movies, order food or make an appointment, a desperate emotionality is assumed. This supposed emotionality becomes what is seen as articulated helplessness. Where the struggle to be heard or seen, for her a long engaged political act, is now also a disembodied acrimony. To be seen/unseen this way, to be perceived “meek,” is an affront but it is also identification. “What’s wrong with you?” Not by the self that is her self. But by subjects that are still in that story. The someone in this lesbian body picks up the bloodied words and wears them inside out.

  In the public sphere, her mouth is a pod encased in a coarsely internal argument. Sprouting linguistic approximations, an odd film forms. However, in this pearly disconnect there is a listening, a past, and a forward, a feminist conversation with the spoken and written word in relation to imposed, formal constraint that manifests in my work. There is a story there; it follows:

  The poets Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, in a talk entitled “Foulipo” subsequently published in the online journal Drunken Boat, address feminist embodiment via performance art via Oulipian procedures.2 The result of their creative collaboration became a sound and word artifact of presence and absence in body and language:

  Our writing ink was often saying I AM here-against. In the middle of a lineally it would pop up, I AM here-against. And yet it was, we had to admit, profoundly constrained when it said this. Or it was a mute lumpering, almost dumb, but dumbly asserting its presence all the same, here-against I AM, a lumpering of flesh-fly, I AM here-against. We were constrained and yet we did not expose our constricted or even really address it. We treated it as natural. We dramatized it in our poephagus. (np)

  Consider their following constrained line: “So we found ourselves stutteing though laye afte lay of what we felt defined us” (Spahr and Young np).3

  This woman in this body in this garden of quotidian mythology: riotously silent except when unlocked at the precise moment of convergence. I am on this untheoretical stage because of a blocked neuro-feedback loop. I can’t make myself heard in the Laundromat. That my embodiment of strained orality masks what might be a transformative poetic exercise is a welcome conundrum, so long as this daily performance is understood as having no artifice: so long as the “poephagus” can strip layers of cultural recognition, to be heard and seen within a feminist body politic of written and performed poetics.

  Plaza Series.1

  Her balcony, her terrace

  a chance language blankets

  the rarity, the tiptoe repetition.

  She is (or is not) able to travel

  within the neural destruction

  to a moment ago.

  She watches the round of monuments.

  A man passes by, many men pass by, many people with hats pass by.

  The lines repeat.

  She is traveling


  to a measure of the order that exists

  in the moment just ahead.

  Quite content in the anonymous center,

  the municipal surround.

  She reads (without) reading.

  Mimicry is a corridor.

  Multiple voids present themselves.

  Watching, she sees

  the same people every day,

  unconstrained in buttery blankness.

  She thinks tangled thoughts on a bench.

  Sad cranberries, pinking shears, coffee?

  The lines repeat her portrait of sound.

  The couple asks her to take a picture.

  She tries, memorizing

  what walks away.

  She is not a monument.

  Her fingers glitter with spit.

  Many pleasing birds fly by.

  She is traveling.

  The color of hats.

  They kick her out of celadon walls.

  She gathers past activities,

  the many, many women with cards.

  The Lost Word Association

  She had a hat full of v’s.

  She kept them well-hydrated and liked to pet

  their felt legs during the meetings.

  He tugged absently at the hole in his throat.

  The hole in his throat, where the signifier,

  expelled, riven sharp, shaves across the ear.

  She labored at the minutes,

  scribbling: erasure, erasure.

  How to report the jagged miscellanea?

  (he blew on the hot coffee,

  his lips remembering the shape of a “u”)

  they are cut up into lengths by the flexible tongue, the crafter of words, and molded

  in turn by the configuration of the lips

  She kept her empty voice box

  tidy; the door shut.

  That way, what wasn’t there became

  less apparent, leaning into more of itself

  From A to I to “Replica”

  26 Tries

  Lush skull. No reason. The unction of sponges.

  Reverse utter. Outside. Where it began.

  Vellum angel. Hyperlink. Nucleate drapery.

  At the barn. Time-lapse. Suspense in the species.

  Light cubed. Mortar. In translation.

  Dirt apprentice. Numeracy. No mention of fish or birds.

  Flour penumbra. Give. Table of ointments.

  Moss animate. Apologia. Seams.

  Suffer form. Trespass.

  Crane of Angles

  The earth crept, lurched upward, and took sudden hold of her shoulders. Plagued them stratospherically forward. The ground became her neck. Down the avenue the ringmaster. Though there were many tiny acrobats twisting the length of her legs making them whinny. Her proprioceptive tap dance drew spontaneous crowds, cagey looks. Flush with a string of lights beginning in the lowest quadrant of her brain, where it becomes the body. A toy helix in off beam hands careening the sidewalk. Everything that isn’t Daphne. Cycles in her rapidly blinking eyes. The torque of feet and to think this is what. Closer to the movement of planets.

  Jennifer Bartlett

  EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP

  Often, so-called disabled poets are faced with how to address, or whether to address, their minority status as part of their poetics. This question is applicable in terms of content, form and marketing (a term I use lightly, as poetry is rarely successfully marketed). Further, what responsibility does the poet have, if any at all, to question and/or resist stereotypes? For me, the question of ethics arises, all good intentions aside, in that poets with disabilities risk the danger of consciously or unconsciously manipulating their difference to promote work in a world where there are many poets, few readers, and even fewer poetry teaching jobs.

  Ethics and disability is something that has haunted my life. I want to be equal in the job market, but I want to have access to a seat on the subway too. I question certain “privileges” that come with slower movement: a half-fare subway card, teaching in classrooms near my office, and so on. Things I could do without, but make life easier. I always dwell on my own concept of “fairness.” Should I be taking advantage of things that I am capable of doing without?

  Poetry is something slightly more complicated than my half-fare subway fare. The marketing of my work as an identity poet has never been something with which I’m comfortable. It strikes me as disingenuous. (I’m not even comfortable with po-biz in general, and like to think of poetry as a vocation: a spiritual blessing and/or curse.)

  Do we need more poets with disabilities? A resounding yes! However, I want my work to be strong enough to exist on a level playing field. I want to be, like Larry Eigner, a good poet who happens to be disabled. This does not mean that I won’t even address disability in my poems. Nor does it mean that I will stop questioning the exclusion of people with disabilities. But, it means that I’ve given a lot of thought on how I want it to happen. I don’t believe art is merely to entertain. When I read a poem, I want to work, to feel, to be challenged, to learn something about language or something about life. If I want to be entertained, I would watch Law and Order. For me, entertainment is about checking out: poetry is about checking in. I think, perhaps naively, that poetry is meant to change the world.

  So, when I do address disability in my work, I want to present my vision of what it means to have cerebral palsy. I feel that, as a poet with a disability, I have an ethical responsibility to challenge the norm of how society perceives disability: that it has been the most difficult thing in my life [hardly]! That I would prefer to be able-bodied [not really]. That I do not love my body or am less than. Nor would I want reviewers to use the typical words that are markers for disability disempowerment: afflicted, invalid, diseased and so on. As a poet, I cannot always control who criticizes my work, but I can have some control over who publishes the poems and how they are presented. That may require decisions that others might deem sacrifices. But, most of all, my work needs to reflect the integrity of my struggle for civil rights, along with maintaining the integrity of the poems themselves, which always comes first. This is not to say that I have always followed my own ethics. Yes, I have noted that I have a disability on my NEA application, when submitting poems to mainstream journals, applying for jobs and so on. The irony is that it has rarely, if ever, helped.

  At first, I avoided writing about/mentioning disability at all. Throughout my twenties, denial was my attempt at finding equality. In my thirties, I changed. I wanted equality not in spite of who I was, but because of who I was. In short, I didn’t have to “pretend” that I wasn’t disabled anymore because I realized there is nothing wrong with my disability, only others’ perceptions of it.

  As I delve into my next project, which is directly about disability, I am back to the question of ethics. Typically, disability is viewed as a tragedy. In my experience, even many people with disabilities want to cling to the negative aspects of disability. My new work challenges those stereotypes and asks society to look at the misnomers they have applied to disability.

  This is not to dispel the real pain, physical and emotional, that derives from being disabled—although I would argue that most, if not all, of the abled people I know are in chronic physical and/or emotional pain of some form. People with disabilities do have any host of difficulties, but these difficulties are constantly exacerbated by a society that gears itself toward ableness—in architecture, the media, the job market, the housing market, and, yes, even academia. (How many first-year writing programs include disability as part of their multicultural curriculum?) I would argue that all of my “pain” surrounding disability has derived from prejudice. Still, for me, there is also a happiness in having cerebral palsy. Yes, my life has been really hard in terms of aversion. But, it has also created what David Byrne calls specialness and who doesn’t want that?

  5 poems from AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  to walk means to fall

  to thrust forward
>
  to fall and catch

  the seemingly random

  is its own system of gestures

  based on a series of neat errors

  falling and catching

  to thrust forward

  sometimes the body misses

  then collapses

  sometimes

  it shatters

  with this particular knowledge

  a movement spastic

  and unwieldy

  is its own lyric and

  the able-bodied are

  tone-deaf to this singing

  some

  falling

  is of its own grace

  some

  falling

  rather occurs

  out of laziness or distraction

  here, the entire frame is shaken

  these are the falls

  where I tell myself

  you shouldn’t have fallen

  I mean to inflict

  while the critic of the world watches

  o stupid, stupid world

  to be crippled means to have a window

  into the insanity of the able-bodied

  to be crippled means to

  see the world slowly and manically

  to translate

  to record