Barbara CrookerBEAUTY IS A VERB—THE NEW POETICS OF DISABILITYLet me begin by saying that I am not a disabled poet, but rather, an able-bodied writer who is the mother of a child (now 26) who has autism. So my experience of this disability and my depiction of it in poetry is through this particular filter or lens. Because I'd been writing for ten years before he was born, I can see a clear division in my work before and after autism, but I find it difficult to define exactly what that is, because my work has (and would have) grown and changed. In this talk, I'll be quoting from some of my poems, and I've run off copies of the poems in their entirety if anyone wants to see them. I'm not an academic; my particular practice of poetry has developed via the twin schools of reading and experience. I rely heavily on ear and intuition, and believe that poetry comes from writing, not theory. But I also know that my son and his different abilities (not his dis-abilities) have shaped my work in ways that are both varied and mysterious. Some of them are: how the notion of metaphor works as a way of grasping the world; how, as a mother, I have been forced to see beyond the conventional paradigms of good/bad, normal/abnormal; how abled writers need to be sensitive about what is exploitive versus the need to own one's own experience; how things that are seen as negatives by therapists and educators, such as obsessive behavior, can be viewed as writing tools; and how autism can be seen as a different way of visioning. Speech and language pathology books point out that a characteristic of autistic speech is that it tends to be metaphoric, almost as a shortcut—why go for the simile if you can reach for the metaphor? (Advice I give my writing students.) My work is usually image-driven; in this poem I wanted to do something with snow falling on a winter night and was thinking about that while I was making dinner. What led me into the poem was the connection pointed out by my son, with his intuitive grasp of metaphor: . . . . we hold the rind of the cheese, Here is how the poem ends: When the family gathers together, I think of this as a positive poem. But once, when I read it in a reading, I was attacked afterwards by another writer, also the mother of a child with this disability. She believed that there was nothing positive about autism, that it tore her family apart (I will say that statistically, she's right; something over 85% of marriages fail when there is a sick or disabled child), scarred her other children; everything she said was steeped in bitterness. But I think we need to own our own experiences; i.e., that what was broken in her family was something that made my family stronger. I don't want to dismiss the difficulties; none of this has been easy. But I can also say along with Rilke, "There is much beauty here." ("Letters to a Young Poet") One of the things that having a child with a severe disability like this has meant is a reinvention of family dynamics. This was brought home when our oldest had to write her college essay on the theme, "write about a hardship in your life and how you dealt with it." She was having difficulty getting started, telling me that she had nothing to write about. I said, "Look, you have two choices here. You can write about the day you broke a fingernail, or you can write about your brother." She shook her head, saying she thought that would be exploitive, and so, as we talked, I could tell her, no, that this was our life, and as long as she did it honestly, it was hers to write about. Because I use autobiographic material as the ore from which my poems are mined (my oldest daughter was stillborn, my youngest daughter had a traumatic brain injury), when I wrote in one poem, "the year before the accident, when the earth still seemed fixed," ("Star of Wonder") this was how it seemed to me. After David's autism kicked in (which I strongly believe was caused by vaccine damage), I could never again take the word "normal" for granted. This word, instead, changed from solid to liquid, became one of great fluidity. In one of my chapbooks, I interspersed poems about autism with poems about ordinary life experiences, such as learning to play a musical instrument, learning to drive a car, and called it Ordinary Life, irony intended, although I believe that all of our lives are both ordinary and extra-ordinary at the same time. To go back to my original metaphor, that disability is the lens through which my work can be seen, let's put that lens in a kaleidoscope (also the name of a great magazine on disability and the arts), and give it a turn, so we can see how something seen as negative, like stereotypic repetitive behavior or obsessing on a topic, can be flipped on its head. What's more obsessive, what's more repetitive than taking five poems, folding them in thirds, sending them out, waiting two months, getting them back, sending them out again? Obsessive behavior has served me well in this writing life, and I think you have to have it, whether over it's over imagery, line breaks, etc. Going back to metaphor, Kenneth Burke considers metaphor an attaining of "perspective through incongruity," and that "language develops by metaphorical extension, . . . borrowing words from the realm of the corporeal and applying them by analogy to the realm of the invisible and intangible; then, in the course of time, the original reference is forgotten, and only the metaphoric extension survives." Flipping this one over one more time, we have to keep reminding David to connect his thoughts ("Only connect," as E. M. Forester says), or else his language seems to be full of references from outer space. So we encourage the use of simile, so that he's understandable by "the rest of the world," another layer of irony. Burke also talks about how we keep stretching meaning to encompass experience, something a person with autism does without thinking, as a way to survive. Which is part of what I see as poetry's job, a means of survival, "a way of happening, a mouth." (Auden) And a different way of visioning, the way that a person with autism looks at the world with a different focus than we do. For example, my son has a fascination with grids, which I believe is his way to both organize and compartmentalize his experience. "He loves things that are perforated: / toilet paper, graham crackers, coupons / in magazines, loves the order of tiny holes, / the way boundaries are defined." ("The Grid") In his world, "geometry / is more beautiful than a human face." (same poem) His focus is inward, downward, "the world's smallest minutia" ("Simile"), which has helped my work take a longer, keener look at the small things I might have otherwise passed by, helped me "praise this mutilated world" (Adam Zagajewski). As Sister Wendy Beckett says, "Artists help us to see the glory of the world. They open our eyes to the beauty we so easily miss." And David has also taught me about re-visioning, about looking at old things in new ways. In one poem, as he struggles with fractions, he teaches me about reductiveness: "He doesn't see the need to reduce, / would just as soon let / 12/16 or 8/24 live in their binomial splendor / than pare them down / to austere quarters or thirds." ("The Lowest Common Denominator") I had been an adjunct for years and would often see on my evaluation forms, "Ms. Crooker could teach anybody anything," or statements to that effect. Now I had a child who I couldn't teach a single thing to, and so I had to learn just how to be with him. He has taught me much about stillness, about "being in the moment." At the end of this poem, the mother, who is a teacher, muses, "This is the only magic the mother can conjure, / she cannot help him talk or say his name. / But they can do this together, / blow bubbles on a breezy afternoon, / make a strand of hand-blown beads / to grace the throat of the lawn." ("Blowing Bubbles") And he has taught me about some things that I don't want to do in writing: "heroic overcoming disability" stories, "triumphing in the face of adversity" sagas, or poems that are pity-parties. I also don't want to assume his voice or appropriate his experience. I feel that my role as a writer is one more of bearing witness: "all I can do / is write it down, write it down." ("Echolalia and the Mockingbird") One of my writing friends, whose son was born at the same time mine was, once asked if David gave me any good lines (one of his son's lines became the title of a poem that later appeared in Poetry). At that point, David wasn't talking, period, let along giving me lines to use. But later on, he did, even if sometimes, they were/are slightly bizarre: "Goats, goats, goats. They always make me laugh." ("Our Lady of Rocamadour") And he's become the subject of many other poems, which makes him proud (as opposed to my older "neurotypical" daughter, who is embarrassed when she shows up in print). Having a child with a disability has radically changed all my notions of the word "normal," has expanded it and made it more elastic. In some ways, this is like Keats's negative capability, "the ability to rest in doubts and uncertainties without any irritable striving after fact or reason." Poems are capable of holding two opposing points of view and resting comfortably in the tension this creates. I can embody (in voice and narrative) this dualistic attitude towards experience without striving for resolution. In my ongoing role as parent and caregiver, by suspending judgment I can arrive at a complete or whole vision of life; I can admit to the pain, but not be consumed by it. I'm not sure I have a "poetics of disability," but I write where I live, which is in the house that disability has built. And autism has crafted the glass, the windows through which I look out on the world.
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