Disability Poetry – Andy Jackson

Southerly Journal: four more excursions into poetry & bodies

Last month, I was the guest blogger for Southerly Journal. For those of you who missed it, I made various attempts at hacking through the dense undergrowth around poetry, form, embodiment and otherness (as is my wont). I won’t reproduce the posts here, but here are some teasers and the links… Thanks to Tessa Lunney and David Brooks at Southerly for their support and kind words.

1. Normal Land: Poetry, Disability and Solidarity (by way of Ian Dury and Quippings)

The more I immersed myself in poetry – reading it, writing it, performing it – the more I began to feel that poetry derived its power from the bodily experience of solidarity. The Macquarie Dictionary defines solidarity as “union or fellowship arising from common responsibilities and interests” or “community of interests, feelings, purposes”.⁷ Solidarity is complex, especially because what is “common” is not always obvious. Solidarity can be latent, persisting underneath our social reality, in our biology and chemistry and physical interdependence. Something needs to unearth and activate it, some experience or event which prompts us to recognise that our lives are inextricably connected.

2. Poetic Tourism & Deforming Form: India, Ghazals & Otherness

I’ve suggested elsewhere that we encounter poems as physical objects, textual bodies which have their own particular shape and energy, as a result of the subjectivity embedded in them¹⁴. Each poem is a mix of order and chaos, of expectation and surprise. On the page, and as sound, poems are instances of particularity, where precise detail catches our attention and where form refers back to cultural norms. And, in my experience, the ghazal is a particularly heightened example of this. There is a “normal” ghazal, just as we have a certain image of a “normal body”, and it is in the ways in which we depart from this norm that intrigue and frisson occurs. Of course, relatively normal bodies and formal ghazals, too, have their own undeniable, disruptive energies.

3. Poetic Epigenetics: Bodily memory, silence & community

What my body is and what it isn’t seems like a pretty straightforward distinction. But perhaps “my body” as a phrase isn’t quite right – it assumes certainty and singularity, yet if we look closer, in spite of the continuity and stability we feel in our bodies, we might detect numerous possibilities, even multiplicity.

Certainly, when I look back at what I’ve written over the years, I can see the inflections and energies of other poets and writers. They course through my body and writing as disturbance and affirmation. And I can’t imagine who I am without recalling them. Think of this as poetic epigenetics.

4. “Becoming-Marfan”: Poetry, Genetics & (Auto)Biography

Becoming proliferates in the soil of the complex instability of each body. The writer mines the multiplicity of their body in order that their writing becomes truly creative and viscerally connective. The writing implies not just one writer and one reader, but many others. Deleuze asserts, “[h]ealth as literature, as writing, consists in inventing a people that is missing”.¹⁵ Reading this kind of writing involves a kind of recognition, a sense that the reader’s own intuitions and bodily stirrings have been acknowledged, and even encouraged. The lone reader, sensing other hypothetical readers, suspects the existence of a community she might belong to, or come to belong to. In fact, she creates it by affectively engaging with the text and her own multiplicity.

free-verse bodies

I might not put up many posts this year. Not because I’m not thinking and writing, but because I am! I’ve enrolled in a postgraduate diploma (effectively an Honours year) in creative writing at the University of Melbourne – dipping my toes into a short thesis. Mine is tentatively titled “Free-Verse Bodies”. I’m exploring how bodies that are visibly different or disabled express themselves in poetry. In my research proposal, I wrote:

The essay considers poetry to be both deeply subjective and communal; it uses voice, rhythm and silence to communicate and to carry affect. This view of poetry is then combined with the insights of disability theorists to argue that the expression of bodily difference in poetry is a potent tool for breaking down the assumed rigid boundaries separating the self from the other, while respecting the particularity of bodies.

Of course, I’m interested in your thoughts, and I might well post now and then, to let you all know how I’m going, but forgive me if I’m a little quiet… except for the tapping of keys…

the return of the sensuous body of language

Last year, the Italian activist-theorist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi published a book that pitted poetry against global financial capital. Is this kind of ‘David and Goliath’ matching audacious and magnificently prophetic, or purely ridiculous, laughable?

Two writers and friends, continents apart, had separately recommended “The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance” to me. I came to it with high hopes, but cautiously. We know too well the damage currently being done in the name of abstracted “profit”. The instrumentalist thought behind capital (and the mechanisms that operate without human consideration or judgement) has plunged us collectively into a frightening cycle of exploitation and alienation. And in this hyperconnected world, crisis can too easily become crises, escalating into bankruptcy, poverty, pollution, depression (in every sense). Against that, poems?!

Now, if you’re like me, you’ve been to more than a few poetry readings that have you agreeing with Charles Bukowski’s assessment – “poetry readings have to be some of the saddest / damned things ever”. Especially where there is a kind of “presentation failure”, where the poet is clearly lethargically unconvinced that there is any life in the words they are speaking, or so overconfident that they read an entire manuscript of mediocre verse on the open mic, or inhabiting a false voice, borrowed from YouTube footage of slams or the static-pocked monotone of TS Eliot reading “The Wasteland”.

Apart from performance, there is the question of reaching the public. Most books of poetry sell in the hundreds rather than the thousands (though I’d be interested in seeing some statistics on this, especially international). And poetry’s appearance in the broader, mainstream culture is extremely rare – its appearance is either patronisingly token or uncanny, a kind of cultural undead (“you mean, people still write poems?!”).

This appears to be the reality. A cacophany of consumerist coercion, against an almost-inaudible and tired whispering in the heart that reaches out towards others. But it is not so much “the reality” as “a reality”. Other possibilities are here. And I suspect that it is the tiredness and quietness of where poetry comes from that is so important.

One of the most powerful aspects of “The Uprising” is Berardi’s valorisation of fatigue and limits over infinite growth, of co-operation and solidarity over appropriation and competition, and insolvency over unceasing debt. And according to him, it is the force of poetry that re-energises and reinforces these human values, to remind us of our interconnectedness.

Not only this, but poetry’s power lies in its untranslatability, its openness to interpretation, its multiplicity.

Poetry is the language of nonexchangeability, the return of the infinite hermeneutics, and the return of the sensuous body of language. I’m talking about poetry here as an excess of language, a hidden resource which enables us to shift from one paradigm to another.

Oddly, Berardi’s sole example is Rainer Maria Rilke, whose lyrical elegies were written around a century ago. How does contemporary poetry counter the apparent fait accompli of the financial paradigm? He also doesn’t explain how poetry returns “the sensuous body of language” to us. Does he mean to imply that it is only really poetry if it has this kind of power? Or, since there are so many different types of poetry, are there many different ways that poetry has impact? Are there many different “sensuous bodies”?

“The Uprising” only devotes its final chapter to how poetry might counter the dominant mode. As such, it reads like an incomplete sentence. Which is perhaps entirely appropriate. Other theorists may wish to fill in the conceptual gaps. At the moment, I won’t even attempt to do so. What’s important to me is knowing that poets will continue with their marginal art, their offerings, their words of potential.

In July, while at Naropa University, I was in a workshop with M NourbeSe Philip. Later in the week, days after the shocking acquital of George Zimmerman for the shooting of unarmed African-American teenager Trayvon Martin, NourbeSe was scheduled to give a poetry reading. She decided to take an approach that rejected the usual “reading”, and instead fused ritual, protest, sound poetry and remembering. We were asked to wear white and bring candles. She read an extract from her book “Zong”, which was the name of a slave ship from which dozens of African-American men and women were thrown overboard for insurance money. The syllables and phonemes sounded out, fitfully and gradually. “Wa- Waaat- Www-“. Until the final full word was articulated – with all its connotations of life and drowning – “Water”. And the water in our bodies trembled in recognition of others’ suffering. There was no understanding or closure, just an open future we had to move into, knowing the past in our bodies, if only a little more.

In September, I was in Ireland, just weeks after the death of Seamus Heaney. A commemorative reading in Clifden saw around twenty other poets and musicians read his poems, to a packed auditorium, Irish lives for whom Heaney embodied something of their collective yearning, resilience and thoughtfulness. The atmosphere certainly had an undertone of grief for the space left behind by such an admired and accomplished voice, but it was also a time of celebration, humour and sheer human warmth. He had written, “I rhyme / to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.” And we came together to make sure that those parts of us that Heaney had set echoing would continue to chime, to reverberate throughout a nation (and a world) struggling under financial and environmental crisis.

I’m reminded also of “Quippings“, a regular event at Hares and Hyenas Bookshop in Fitzroy, run by a loose collective of writers and performers with various disabilities. At times shocking, at others hilarious, then sexually explicit, then philosophically subtle and revelatory, and often deeply moving, the night fearlessly and relentlessly overturns the stereotyped figure of the pitiful or heroic “crip”, replacing these “objects” with defiant and proud “subjects”. And as always, the audience, by co-habiting the space, is implicated. Our world is overturned with humour, insight and warmth, and we are left less certain about disability, and more aware of humanness.

William Carlos Williams wrote “Look at / what passes for the new. / You will not find it there but in / despised poems. / It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there”. There are seeds of transformation waiting quietly in innumerable books, journals, websites and venues. And there are the unwritten poems, perhaps within your reach right now.

poetry and flesh

Sometimes you may not want to know the poet behind the poem (let’s not go into that right now), but sometimes it’s unavoidable. When I say “poem”, I think of a page – white A4, bound into a book, or some kind of virtual scroll. Unavoidable and instant association. And while I know there is a poet behind the page, culturally the page appears as some kind of mask. The implied contract between reader and writer is to focus on the writing, and that the writing will involve a self or selves that both reader and writer readily identify with – but who is neither of them. Reality is a metaphor.

I’ve been thinking about the relationship between the body of the poet and the body of the reader. A close friend loaned me their copy of “Beauty is a Verb: the New Poetry of Disability”. This anthology of poems and essays, edited by Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black and Michael Northen, is a brilliantly provocative (though US-centric) introduction to the advancing maturity of the “disability poetry” community. It’s thrilling and confounding. Because bodies are foregrounded, because the real world is not a metaphor, but unavoidably seeps through the page onto the fingers of the reader. And, as we all know, skin is porous.

I want to quote two poems. The first is by Jillian Weise, and also appears in her book “The Amputee’s Guide to Sex”.

The Old Questions

When I asked you to turn off the lights,

you said, Will you show me your leg first?

I heard Rachmaninov through the wall,

a couple making love without prerequisites.

Do you sleep with it on? I forgot

there would be this conversation.

Do you bathe with it on?

I need to rehearse answers to these questions.

Will you take it off in front of me?

I once steeped into a peepshow in New Orleans.

Over the door, signs read: Hands off our girls.

Is it alright if I touch it?

I am thinking of a hot bath, a book.

The couple on the other side of the wall laughs.

She has found the backs of his knees.

What I love about this poem is its revelations and its withholdings, how it turns the usual mix of discomfort and furtive empathy that sex usually conjures into a productive and open encounter with another person. I was going to write “encounter with the other”, but this poem proves such a phrase abstract and almost absurd. We are reminded that sexuality is an encounter between particular bodies, bodies that desire, but also can’t escape their history, politics and positions. It begins with a moment of iconic intimacy, but its trajectory is interrupted – by the “old questions”. She is pulled back into self-consciousness, memory and the allure of easier sensualities (a hot bath, a book). The reader is taken, too, from this scene of intimacy into a peep-show, from the private to the (male) public, where broader questions of spectacle, exploitation, entitlement and ownership are opened. And it is also no coincidence (I think) that Rachmaninov is the composer who seeps through the walls – a man who suffered depression and (arguably) Marfan Syndrome. Bodies and their unerasable traces.

Weise is revelatory here. She takes risks. But while the poem ushers us into her private, bodily space, it also pushes us back out into the world, into ourselves and our own positions. It re-presents us with the complicated, beautiful weight of our bodies. Interestingly, “The Old Questions” is also an intensely visual poem that absorbs and refracts the gaze.

John Lee Clark’s poem “Deaf Blind: Three Squared Cinquain” engages with the visual and otherness in another way, both witty, mundane and sublime.

Deaf Blind: Three Squared Cinquain

BARBARA WALTERS IS IN AWE

of a deaf- blind man

who cooks without burning himself!

Helen Keller is to blame.

Can’t I pick my nose

without it being a miracle?

AM I A NOBODY, TOO?

I am sorry to disappoint,

but I am. But nobody

would let me be one,

not even when I catch

a bus stinking of Nobodies.

ONE AFTERNOON, I FOUND MYSELF

walking with my cane dragging

behind me but still knowing

the way. There was nothing

to see. Everything saw me

first and stayed in place.

Again, one of the things I love about this poem is that Clark has placed himself firmly in the center of the frame (and I do mean this visual metaphor deliberately), but uses this turn the reader’s gaze back on the broader society – on stereotype and othering – and finally on our own subjective sensory worlds. Not only do we find ourselves in a bus “stinking” of Nobodies, but we’re also drawn empathically into the experience of negotiating city streets as a blind person. Knowing most of his readers will not have had this experience (and that some certainly will), Clark writes with a lightness and vividness that brings the poem close to a sense of epiphany, while never allowing his experience to be anything but everyday. His embodied life cannot be appropriated, but it can be appreciated. Like Weise, Clark uses honesty, movement (both poetic and physical) and discomfort to open up some vital questions. The answers, like our bodies, our lives, are always ultimately outside the poem.

I said earlier, I’d been thinking about the relationship between the body of the writer and of the reader. But it’s broader than that – I’ve been thinking about how different art forms affect us differently, how bodily presence is sometimes viscerally communicated, while at other times the body is theoretical, abstract, conjured but not felt. Recently, I visited ACCA to see “We are all flesh”, an exhibition of sculptures by Berlinde De Bruyckere. In the cavernous main room, two huge bodies hang suspended from industrial structures – they are horses and yet not horses, corpse-like yet somehow they have the weight and presence of life. In another room, a museum cabinet displays branches and blankets. In another, a lump on the floor becomes as you approach it a human figure, curled in on itself, as if wanting to escape a world of grief or terror. Sticks, bones, flesh, intenstines, hair, history, colonialism, war, animality and humanity. What sounds on paper grotesque is in presence beautiful and sympathetic (while always remaining viscerally and philosophically challenging).

It’s not a cop-out on my part to say that it’s hard to communicate the power of these sculptures, but it’s at the heart of what I’m trying to get at here. After going to the exhibition, my partner and I looked up more images of her work online. In a short span of time, I found myself fatigued – the sense of empathy I had in the gallery had evacuated, leaving me with a sense of discomfort in the spectacle/spectacular, the freakish otherness of these bodies.

We have a visual culture, no doubt. But there is a huge difference between the digital screen and the breathing body, between the reproduction and the original. In the presence of a something or someone, you are in a relationship.

What’s that got to do with poetry? I’m still unsure. But I have an instinct that moves me towards readings – where poets take to the stage or microphone or just stand up and project their poems to an audience. I don’t want to play that off against the page, like some contest. I just know that when a poem is lifted off the page by a voice, pushed across the space between people, landing on bodies with skin, organs, hearts, histories and desires, the poem is changed and our relationships to each other are re-vital-ised. Anyway, I have spent enough time now with this computer, thinking, typing, erasing, rewriting. Maybe I’ll see you out there.