Laurie Clements Lambeth

MARKETING DISABILITY, AND THE INTEGRITY OF THE POET

[The following first appeared as a response to a listserv prompt that referenced a recent debate over Paul Guest's latest poetry collection and ultimately asked the question, what is the disabled poet's responsibility to the disability movement? While my answer to the question was already in me, it hadn't yet taken shape in writing. –LCL]

Paul Guest is most definitely a poet whose work presents a speaker with a disability who has subjectivity and who is tired of the common kinds of clichés that HarperCollins' poets peppered across his book jacket. When I was having trouble securing a copy from HarperCollins to review in Disability Studies Quarterly, I contacted Paul and he was very happy to not only order one from the publisher but also offered to send his final page proofs as a .pdf to me so I could get started reading right away, which was nice so I could also increase the text size. He was incredibly helpful, and when the review came out, he responded with tremendous appreciation. All this occurred in the context of disability studies. In that review I question the blurbs extensively:

To read Paul Guest's poetry is to expect the unexpected, to release oneself to dazzle, to performance, to the hurtle of his images, and the kind of strong emotional shifts that make one marvel at how the poem is able to contain such vast range. It is this quality, this synthesis of images, narratives, humor, and great pain, that calls into question any singular thread a reader might draw from My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge.
Take the first recommendation listed on the back of the book: "The invalid's rage . . . and the ridiculousness of it all inform Paul Guest's wonderful poems, flung one after another in the teeth of 'daily' life, each an act of defiance that affirms the terrible power of that life. " — John Ashberry. I have puzzled over this blurb for a long while now. What struck me immediately was the" invalid" part, to be sure. What lingered later was the rage. " The speakers of these poems rarely rage; yes, there are moments of frustration, anger, distress, but to present the central emotion as rage is to depart from the other facets of Guest's symphonic deluge. Five of the seven blurbs from major poets contextualize the book through Guest's paralysis, in some cases crafting an overcoming narrative that will indeed make a wide audience want to buy the book. And people should, because it's also fantastically energetic, frenetic, sonically resonant, and self-aware.

HarperCollins was trying to market a book, and they did so poorly, to the detriment not only of Paul but of people with disabilities. Facing a big book contract with a major publisher, maybe he made that gamble. I don't know, and it's not for me to say. It's seldom that we poets get such chances, especially at his age. I myself took issue privately with Maxine Kumin's use of the terms" rise above her MS" and "brave" in her blurb for my book (a blub which was otherwise so perceptive it taught me a couple of things about my own work and myself). But that poet herself is someone I've admired a long time, and she has had her share of disability in her long life (read Inside the Halo and Beyond). I let it go, grateful she liked the book enough to select it for a major prize.

Which brings me, I guess, to how I feel about my work being part of a disability movement, and what my responsibility is as a poet. Poets are trained early on to understand that the poem is not ours when it goes out into the world. It will be, if we are lucky, discussed by literary scholars and critics. It will be taught to students who may feel something from the poem, but not know why. And the poem's speaker, if the poem derives from the poet's experience, is merely a facet of the poet herself.

I feel that to say I am a disability poet limits the other things I write about, and the other goals of my work. And to limit in such a way is to diminish the disabled poet's place in the world: an observer of nature, a lover, a philosopher, a feminist, etc., insert what you will. I do write a lot about my disability, and I do think of it as an ethical act, because as I am writing I am moved by compassion, curiosity, ethics, love. And also language, sound, and form. My first allegiance is to my imagination, then to the poem, to making that poem the best it can be, and then to the genre and my audience, who hopefully include a lot of people with disabilities who actually read poetry. I am not a populist. But I hope that my work is used to further the cause. That cause is also one that links animals to humans, which some PWDs might take issue with--my amputee dog given the same subjectivity as a human--but this reflects my own sensibilities and my own imagination. And I'm happy when people approach me because they have MS, or know someone who does, or because the work moves them individually as they live with their disabilities.

I'm thinking now about a great line from Tim Dlugos' poem "D.O.A".: " Absolute fidelity/ to the truth of what I felt"--this is in reference to what brought him (the speaker) to a late point in his life with AIDS, but it's a fantastic proxy for the sensibilities, instincts, and flashes in our minds that bring us to the poem. That, and writing the poem to actually figure out why we were brought there. I think Michael Northen did a far more eloquent job than I have here in encapsulating my position on poetry's responsibility:

Interestingly, Lambeth, whose poetry makes such a contribution to disability literature, is very much of an individualist. She pretends to speak for no one but herself, she has no party platform. As such, she is able to concentrate on poetry as art because she is free of the compulsion to act as an advocate. The irony is that in foregoing the advocate role, Lambeth may actually reach a wider audience - those more interested in the medium than the message - and bring some understanding of the value of disability poetry to those who might balk at work actually labeled "disability literature" as just another culturally compulsory reading.

If the work is good, if it gets read by a wide audience (in the poetry world or beyond), if it succeeds in doing what you set out to do with it, then that testifies to the strength of the poet, and the strength of poets with disabilities. In the same way that I would not categorize Mark Doty as solely a writer and poet of GLBT rights, or the newly-deceased poet Lucille Clifton as solely a poet of African-American experience, I would hope to at some point be seen by readers as part of the disability movement, some refraction of it, but not at its center and not moved by what Paul Guest has referred to as a monolithic movement. Moved instead by absolute fidelity to the quirks and obsessions of my imagination.

Laurie Clement Lambeth lives in Houston with her husband and dog. She is the book review editor for Disability Studies Quarterly. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, The Iowa Review and elsewhere. The poems above are taken from Veil and Burn, her first collection of poetry. It was chosen for The National Poetry Series by Maxine Kumin and was reviewed in the June 2008 issue of Wordgathering.