Lizz Schumer
IF BEAUTY IS A VERB, WHY AREN'T WE MOVING
On the interstices between perception and expression
Can one write poetry without writing about the body? In poetry, don't we return to physical-based metaphors again
and again, devices we can feel resonate in some part of ourselves, because we all have those parts, those
feelings?
Don't we?
Poetry is so often focused on making the personal more universal, and vice versa, but disability poetry or for
our purposes, poetry about or by the disabled body, has been seen as other, as different, as not universal and not
quite personal either, because we hadn't been seen that way. Not by anyone but ourselves and sometimes, not even
then. But the disability literature canon has also been ghettoized even by those professing to belong to it. Part
of that is self-defense; if we keep to ourselves, we can't be rejected. But we've all heard, or contributed to,
the grumblings; that our writing appears in Wordgathering or Bellevue or Breath & Shadow,
but not in Poetry, not in Ploughshares, not in Tin House. If 'Beauty is a Verb:' [The
New Poetry of Disability], as touts the title of a disability writing anthology edited by Shelia Black,
Jennifer Bartlett and Michael Northen, why aren't we going anywhere?
It comes down to a question of ownership. Editors have grappled with the question since publishing began: How
to categorize writing when often, authors bristle at the idea of pigeonholing. Suspense vs. Drama. Chick Lit vs.
Lit Fic Memoir vs. Fiction. What emerged as a categorizing term, intended to make finding the work easier for the
reader, has also restricted them to reading what they already know they like; themselves.
Recently, some literary journal editors have asked for more submissions from disabled writers, but it remains
to be seen whether they risk inclusion and for that matter, whether they even understand what they're asking for,
when we often don't know where we fit.
As a writer with a (mostly) invisible disability, I have the extreme luxury of "passing" as an average,
cis-gender white woman, provided no one expects me to run a marathon or dance the cha-cha. I can choose to
"out" myself, or not, depending on the publication, on the poem. Wordgathering gets poems
about kinesthesia, while Minerva Rising has trotted out stories about sex in a movie theater.
It feels problematic to shuttle between two worlds in two halves of myself, but also necessary. Since my illness
is only evident to me, I experience the same automatic exclusion at a panel of disabled writers as I do as a femme
cis-gender at a gay bar: Unless I hang a sign around my neck, people draw their own conclusions. Those people, too
often, include editors. So how do we break down those divides?
For starters, I turn to writers like Lisa Lutwyche, a cancer survivor and poet; Kenny Fries, a well-known
disabled writer, and Bhanu Kapil, a non-disabled poet whose work often deals with the body in its many forms.
In Lutwyche's poem "Unbidden Stones," she explores the origin of her cancer in a relationship with
an abusive man. The poem begins:
Listen, girl, you and I both know how it got there
Remember when you used to get that big, tight knot of fear in your chest?
How strong it was? Remember that hunted, haunted panic?
You were his quarry.
Trapped in those scolding, hypnotic eyes.
That feeling was so strong.
If you didn't scream it out, the energy of all that terror had to go somewhere.
If it went nowhere, it stayed inside. Right where you said you felt it.
Lutwyche's "Unbidden Stones," which appeared on "Second Saturday Poets" in 2009, is a
"mainstream" poem, although it deals with the body; the raw, naked and by the end of the poem, altered
body that we see so often in crip lit journals like this one. What makes it mainstream? It's written by a straight,
white woman about an experience – cancer – that has touched almost all of us, in one way or another.
Then take this stanza from Fries' "Full Moon, White Sands," a poem that first appeared in his book
Desert Walking: Poems (2000; The Avocado Press) and can also be found on The Good Men Project*:
what we perceive is formed
not only by reflection,
but together with our expectation.
Fries' work does not always deal with disability or the body. His work is often overtly sexual, sensual even,
but particularly in "Desert Walking," his lens is turned outward onto the natural world, the places he
experiences with and through his body, but not about it. In this particular work, the interstices between perception
and expectation are interesting from an invisible disability point of view. Society's expectations of people with
invisible disabilities are often normative, which can be damaging both perceptually and practically. In that sense,
it would seem our own responsibility to self-report, but the implication that responsibility lies solely with the
disabled person to articulate her needs is also dangerous.
People see me, and my work, the way they want to see us. I can almost always be read "straight,"
and that assumption is not necessarily allayed by my appearance at readings. I very rarely disclose my disability.
To do so would naturally affect the readers' expectations, but it would also open a conversation about disability
and poetry that isn't being had, on the mainstream stage. That said, I'm not sure that responsibility must be mine
to carry.
To straddle the worlds Fries and Lutwyche inhabit, there's Kapil. Her work transcends genres, boundaries and
even planets, often concerning the body as a form and a subject, both intensely personal and resonating on the most
universal levels. Take this excerpt from "Text to Complete a Text" from Incubation: A Space for
Monsters:
Now I am here, in the future of color. I'm sorry I do not have more to say about the period of submergence that
preceded my arrival. I am not interested in it. I do not recall it. I . . . It was only when my car stopped that
I realized what I had to do, on my own terms, with my own two legs: get going. Is that how you say it? Get up
and go. The destiny of my body as separate from my childhood: I came here to hitchhike. I came here to complete a
thing I began in another place.
Incubation: A Space for Monsters is particularly unique as a text, because it explores a woman-creature
born a cyborg. Kapil has been open about her own experience as an immigrant, a marginalized population, and so her
fluency in the alien world feels both authentic and articulate. This book seems to speak to both the crip lit and
mainstream poetry communities equally, to bridge a gap of sorts, if one exists between them. How much I think we
all wish we lived "in the future of color," sometimes. The destiny of the body Kapil notes, can be read
from both a non-disabled and disabled perspective, as separate from our childhoods, ie. as a body with a consciousness
that we can choose to express and read as we wish.
When I first began to explore my place within the disability writing community, about three years ago, I attended
the launch party for Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability in Chicago. I didn't know anyone else there,
and sat next to an ASL translation student. We chatted before it began, and she asked what I was studying. Her face
when I told her I wasn't, that I was there to hear my fellow poets, gave away what I feared: I stood out. When I
hosted a conference on disability in the arts at the Museum of disABILITY History last March, my friends and family
asked why I had chosen to explore that particular topic.
What I wanted to say to them, and what I think more of us need to say to the mainstream community, is that we
didn't get to choose to live the experience, but we can choose how we express it. We should not be quibbling over
who belongs where, but asserting our collective belonging wherever we want to go. "Nothing about us, without
us," after all.
I hope places like Poetry and Tin House and Ploughshares begin accepting more disability
writing, because I
think we need to be heard.** As a poet with an invisible disability, I also acknowledge that like it or not, my
position carries some responsibility to speak, if I want an audience to listen.
Lizz Schumer is an editor and writer living with fibromyalgia and MECFS, usually
in Buffalo,
N.Y. Her first book, Buffalo Steel came out in 2013 from Black Rose Writing. Her work has also
appeared in
Minerva Rising, Connotation Press, Manifest Station, Breath & Shadow, Salon and others. Schumer
is working on her next book, Biography of a Body and also works as editor in chief of a local newspaper,
writes a cocktail column for Buffalo.com and teaches creative writing. Schumer holds an MFA from Goddard College.
She recently founded and hosted the first "Out of the Shadows: Join the Conversation" panel symposium on
the place of disabled writers in the mainstream canon, held at the Museum of disABILITY History, which will
enjoy its second
installment next Spring. Schumer can be found online at lizzschumer.com, facebook.com/authorlizzschumer and @eschumer.
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