Book Review: Tell Them It Was Mozart (Angeline Schellenberg)Reviewed by Michael NorthenAs far back as Jerry Lewis telethons, mothers have been writing poems about their disabled children. It took until the turn of the millennium, however, for the emergence writers like Barbara Crooker and Rebecca Faust to show that being the mother of a child with a disability could result in poetry that not only put their lives on public display by resulted in high quality poetry. They did so in such ground-breaking books as Ordinary Life and Dark Card. The success of Crooker, Foust and others in the last decade has raised the bar considerably for new poets writing in this genre, but It also poses a challenge. No longer is it simply sufficient to overturn stereotypes by writing poetry with integrity. Emerging poets are also expected to make a creative contribution to the field of disability poetry. What can they offer that has not already been done, at least, not in the same way? One recent book that tries to answer this call is Angeline Schellenberg's Tell Them It Was Mozart. Schellenberg is the mother of two children on the autism spectrum and, though that subject in itself would be enough to interest many readers, Schellenberg takes the challenge much further. The scaffolding of the entire book is an erasure poem based upon Emily Pearl Kingsley's poem "Welcome to Holland." It's a poem that Schellenberg notes is often sent by friends to parents of a child diagnosed with a disability. Erasure poetry has been piloted in the field of disability poetry by Laurie Clements Lambeth and others but, to my knowledge, its use has been restricted to the ingenious composition of individual poems from medical text and other documents. Schellenberg's is the first using it to frame the sections of a book. The book appears to be divided into three sections: "Rhythmically, in the Dark," "it's Not What They Say" and "For Good." These do provide a sort of chronological sequence. The first part moves fromthe author's childhood with two Fragile X-affected brothers, through the birth of her two children and the discovery of autism. Nevertheless there are clusters of poems apread across all sections that provide the woof and variable texture to the book's content. One cluster, the "diminutive professor" poems focus on the poet's son: He says nothing, just walks off the path around the pond, squats in the mud and starts to dig. But at the same time, attending his kindergarten class: In your backpack, a Crayola diagram of a leaf's cell structure – it's your day for sharing. Last week, it was the digestive system. You returned, amazed at how many kids weren't aware of their villi. In the collection, Schellenberg experiments with many different forms, but the "diminutive professor " poems are always rendered as prose stanzas, adding a unity of form that complements the subject matter. A second constellation of poems – the largest in the book – cluster around her daughter, "the imaginative child." As might be expected from the subject, these poems vary widely in style. Representative are the opening lines of "The Imaginative Child Breaks a Leg": Phone rings, teacher says Schellenberg also has fun with the titles, one of my favorites is "The Imaginative Child Contemplates a Drug Bust." Other strands that move through the book are "Echolalia," "Autism for Dummies," "Support Group," and "Cycle-ology," each tackling some aspect of the life of parents of children with autism and each with its own internal logic. "Autism for Dummies," for example, are a poems constructed from book titles about autism. It is a technique that is difficult to resolve into an evenly flowing poem. It requires the reader to fill in or connect gaps, much as a person who is trying to make sense of a situation in an atypical way might have to do. It also mirrors the way in which children with autism are often said to be unable to see past the surface or literal interpretation to what might be behind a gesture or string of words. The "Support Group" poems provide another interesting cluster. Varied in structure and tone, they seem to evolve from one phase to another throughout the book. Yet, throughout them runs a sense of religious – if initially unwished for – community. "Support Group 1" is framed as a litany, an unconscious plea for some kind of salvation whose last line is "We don't make eye contact." The two middle poems, both prose, convey a gathering sense of motion, one of which begins with the frantic invocation, "oh my God oh my God oh my God." The last of the poems, "Support Group 4" resolves in the final words: This Eucharist of While Schellenberg works hard at finding innovative means of expression, she also has not abandoned the assault on the medical establishment and its views towards autism that writers like Crooker and Foust helped launch. Particularly interesting is the strand of conversation around "refrigerator moms." In Dark Card, Faust unloaded an emotional invective against psychologists with the opening lines of her poem "Refrigerator Mom": They called them cold and withholding Schellenberg's approach in "I Am a Refrigerator Mom" is much different. Commandeering quotes from Leo Kanner ("just happening to defrost enough to produce a child") and Bruno Bettleheim, she arranges these in logical formation and answers each charge with a statement of her own. Depending upon one's circumstances when reading the poems, readers may favor one response over the other, but the important point is that Schellenberg keeps the dialogue going. As with any writer to takes risks, Schellenberg has some poems that are less successful than others. Taken as a whole, though, Tell Them It Was Mozart is an impressive achievement. Not only will it appeal to parents of children with autism – or any other disability for that matter – but I'd go so far as saying that it should be mandatory reading for any poets writing about the landscape of parenting children with disabilities. Schellenberg is scouting new territory in the genre and writers who want to be a part of the conversation need to take a serious look at what she has already accomplished. Title: Tell Them It Was Mozart
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