Disability Poetics

In his essay “Keeping the Knives Sharp,” published in our coedited 2011 anthology Beauty is a Verb, poet Jim Ferris asks “What would it mean to live in a world that understood asymmetry as a prime characteristic?” The guiding idea for this collection of poems and essays by disabled poets is reclamation.

Both of us editors are old enough to remember when disabilities were so taboo that the concept was utterly silenced in the arts and in the world at large. Many of the most vital movements of modern and contemporary American poetics are strongly inflected by disability. Poets who pre-date the disability and crip discourses of today were, in fact, predecessors to disability poetics. Some examples are Charles Olson, whose Projective Verse opened the landscape of poetry to include the poet’s individual breath; the influence of Robert Duncan’s myopia on his poetry; Adrienne Rich and Reginald Shepherd, who both thought about pain and chronic illness in their work; and, of course, the so-called confessional poets. We say so-called because their work is often a dramatization of the difficulty of speaking, especially on topics such as mental or physical difference. Confessional poets made it their business to speak about mental health, addiction, and other “taboo” subjects. We contend that they and the other poets and poetic movements we cite can all be understood as early attempts to codify or define a poetics of nonnormative mind and body.

Ferris and other contemporary poets working within the genre of disability poetics have taken on the identity of “crip poetics.” Not all poets—or disabled people—subscribe to this identity, yet it is a crucial term, and many choose to reclaim the word crip (taken from cripple) in the way that the LGBTQIA+ community reclaimed the word queer. One answer to Ferris’s question is that the intersectionality of disability with other identities is a major part of the “crip aesthetic.” Crip aesthetics is a field of lively debate with many different strands, but, for many, the term represents an aesthetic that has much in common with the notion of “Rasquachismo” in Chicano art as defined by scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto. Rasquachismo privileges an underdog perspective and prides itself as an art movement that finds new uses and arrangements for objects and practices that have historically been considered broken, undesirable, cheap, or useless. 

Similarly, a “crip aesthetic” seeks to unmake or overturn the historic stigma, erasure, and oppression of disabled people by valuing and privileging what is off-centered, liminal, derided, or unseen. A crip aesthetic centers what has been in the margins while charging those marginal spaces through repurposing, redirection, and a frankness in including and forging new art out of the pieces or traces or symbols, linguistic and otherwise, of the historical oppression of disabled people. The crip aesthetic prides itself on recycling and repurposing the objects and furniture of organized ableism, taking a lively, inventive approach to overturning aesthetic conventions, such as “classical beauty.” As such, a crip aesthetic and disability poetics open themselves to an exhilarating range of poets and poetries, from those who tackle the construction of disability overtly by making disability a visible subject to those who experiment and challenge in ways that inscribe the trace of their disability status on the formal structures of the poem.

These ideas were certainly on our minds when, inspired by remarks by legally blind poet Kathi Wolfe, we—Sheila Black and Jennifer Barlett, with Connie Voisine—began Zoeglossia. Kathi had observed that disabled poets had no supportive community in the ways other poets did. With an invented word formed out of the Greek words for life and word, we set out to form that community. The struggle all along has been to make an organization that is truly intersectional and does not reproduce the generally hierarchical structures of the very institutions that were in no small part built to keep us out. 

Disability poetry resonates for us because it is fundamentally a poetry of liberation. As the preface to Beauty is a Verb expressed in 2011, “the frangibility of the body, the intersection of body and machine (or body and technology), [and] the commodification of the body” are all topics disabled poets use to examine the idea of what being human and exploring the vast complexity of that humanity means. Although that preface and its sentiment are still accurate, we might now replace the word body in that quote with the word body-mind. Disability poetics speaks powerfully because it articulates the resistance of bodies and minds to the erasure, commodification, convenience, and disposability articulated all around us and that we struggle against. In this collection, we mean to resist.