Michael NorthenDISABILITY POETRY IN 2008: A SOIL SAMPLE (PART 2)*Some essays seem to have a mind of their own. For the December 2008 issue of Wordgathering, I intended to write an essay that would look back over the two years at the poetry Wordgathering had published in its two years of existence to get some sense of where the genre of disability poetry was heading. Having worked with the annual Inglis House Poetry contest for sixth years and written my doctoral dissertation in disabilities literature, I thought that I had a pretty good idea of how the resulting essay would go – I was wrong. The major surprise for me was that in terms of frequency of contribution, the development of a sustained body of work, and the framing of questions that disability literature needs to address, the field – at least as represented in our soil sample – was dominated by women writers. As a result, in the first essay I concentrated on examining the poetry of women and left both the work of the men and the discussion of the development of disability literature theory to another essay. It is now time to turn back to that discussion of the men's work. Like the varied nature of disability itself, the male writers contributing to Wordgathering comprised a very diverse crew. To being with, three of the writers were African and one Indian. Their priorities and perspectives were frequently quite different from their American counterparts. They emphasized not only the social construction of disability, but the way in which one’s place in society frequently was the cause of and inseparable from disability itself. In his poetry of rural Indian women, Basanta Kar, describes how the conditions of poverty are manifest in physical disability: skins have played truant, I was always afraid Knowing I have not been Sylvester links his own experiences to the beliefs of the African Christian churches to which he has been exposed that deafness is somehow either a punishment or trial from God, that he is somehow a symbol. The poet rejects this symbolic status and in doing this effectively aligns himself with many American writers who come out of the disabilities movement. Unlike poets Sheila Black, Ona Gritz, or Kathi Wolfe, however, whose underlying feminist orientation aligns them in the exploration of certain common issues, the male poets need to be taken on almost a case by case basis. Keeping to Jim Ferris notion of embodiment as central to disability poetry, it makes sense to begin with those writers who most keenly feel differentiated by their disabilities. One of those most consistently forthright about the influence of his body on his life is poet and playwright Paul Kahn: Body, gruff husband, Because he focuses on the body, and his own physicality, it is not surprising that much of Kahn’s poetry is concerned with the role of sex, and Kahn explores sex from a number of different perspectives. In what is perhaps his best know poem, “Katharine’s Room”, he says, In Katharine’s room I like undressing He is able to conclude: Katharine’s hands, sliding down my body, blur categories. For Kahn the imperfections in his body are at once a reminder of his mortality and that which impels him to art. While on the one hand he says that perhaps sex is all I’ll ever know of bliss-- Hold these words in your mouth Like Kahn, Neil Marcus' poetry is grounded in his body and, because his disability includes difficulty in speaking, even more than Kahn he conects the body to communication.The body itself is a form of communication and poetry. Marcus’ book Cripple Poetics: A Love Story , written with poet Petra Kuppers, not only highlights the importance of sexuality for the poet, but is a spring board for the creation of a disability poetics: How can I speak of cripple and not mention the wind. So while the entropy of the body is what pushes Kahn to create something more lasting through art, it is the joy in the variations of bodies themselves that causes Marcus to look for more expansive means of expression. Like Marcus, Dan Simpson looks at his way of perceiving and communicating with the world as a perspective to give the reader that he or she may not otherwise experience. "Acts of Faith" lists daily situations as in receiving change, or picking up a book in which the poet, who like Homer is blind, has to simply trust that those around him are being truthful to him. But Simpson's point is that whether it is our senses, our beliefs or our emotions we all have to ultimately risk putting trust in something that we can not be sure of. While many of his poems do build upon his experiences as a blind man, others simply convey life as he experiences it. As with Marcus and Kahn, sexuality is a part of Simpson's poetry as is the concern with artist expression. Music and sound become a particular consideration, as demonstrated no only by poems like "Man Story" but in the fact that when he and his brother David published their first chapbook, they did it as an audio book and literally named it Audio Chapbook. Kahn, Marcus and Simpson speak for those who have lived as people with disabilities since birth, their experiences and the experiences their poems reflect are often quite different than those with acquired disabilities, such as multiple sclerosis. Interestingly, men with acquired disability tended to want to experess themselves in prose rather than poetry. One of the major exceptions is John Thomas Clark. Although much of Clark's work is grounded in Irish lore and culture, in poems like "Man Overboard" he also captures the the feeling of the man who realizes he is becoming disabled" In the beginning, you lose your balance, trip, Unsurprisingly, the emotional fallout of finding ones self with sudden disability is every bit as difficult to deal with as the physical. Anger and self-blame are just two common emotion. Poet Richard Boughton, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2007 puts it this way:
Am I not the man One intersting, though not unexpected difference between the poetry of men and women was that of poetry related to the caregiver role. While this role prompted entire chapbooks of poetry from women writers like Rebecca Foust, Therese Halscheid, and Patricia Wellingham-Jones, in men's poetry, caregiving barely surfaces. On the other hand, there is a scattershot of war amputee or injury poems among the men. These inlcude poems of bodily injury (Gary winter's "Wheelchair Blues"), psychological disability (Ron Cervero's "Psych") and rehabilitation (Ed Northen's "Wounded Warriors Skiing"). Nevertheless, there were no sustained efforts by writers to truly give voice to this arena of disability. There are, of course, some very talented poets with disabilities who, whiile putting out an impressive amount of work, rarely choose to address the issue of disability. Perhaps the chief representative of this group among those who have contributed to Wordgathering is South African poet and prize-winning playwright Kobus Moolman. Why some writers choose to view themselves as disability writers while others see themselves as writers with disabilities or simply as writers may be taken up in the final essay in this series, which will discuss the development of the a disabity aesthetic and the contributions of disablity poetry to literature. In ending, however, I will cite one of the rare poems in which Moolman does turn to disabiliy as a subject. It is an instance in which the power of the confluence of poetry and disability speaks for itself: I look at my hand and see the scars of fires and knives. I look at my hand and see the calluses of stones and sticks. I look at my hand and hear the slow bending of bone, the curling tongue of tissue and vein as the old words of my heart close upon themselves like a leaf, like the leaves of plants in dry lands desperate to preserve the little that remains in their veins. I hear my hand call out and I turn my back. I turn away from the sight of its large fingers curled around the hole in my back, its hard skin closing tightly like a scar over the site of so many scalpels, over the loss of so many shoes. The absence of feeling. Of so many feelings. *Readers interested in locating the work of individual writers cited in this essay can locate them in the Index of Authors on the home page.
|