Collection

Disability Poetics

Poetry of Liberation

BY Jennifer Bartlett & Sheila Black

Black and grey ink drawing on paper
Maurice Moore. "Venus of Willendorf (Yeah, Baby, She's Got It) (feat. Sarah Baartman, Martha Wash, Izora Armstead)," Ink on Paper, 19in x 24in, 2021.

This collection, curated by Jennifer Bartlett and Sheila Black, explores disability in modern and contemporary poetry. In their introduction, they write,

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.

Introduction
Zoeglossia
Launched in 2017, Zoeglossia, a nonprofit in the model of Cave Canem, Kundiman, and Canto Mundo, seeks to provide support for poets with disabilities. Zoeglossia is the first such organization in the poetry landscape. The idea is to provide an intersectional community open to a wide range of disability poetics, encouraging conversation and support.
Predecessors: 1955-1995
In this section, we seek to reclaim poets who, without having the terminology of disability poetics, began exploring what a poetics of nonnormative and embodied voice might look like. This effort includes pioneers of projective verse, confessional poets, and poets who confronted the AIDS epidemic, laying the groundwork for considerations of a poetics of chronic illness and pain.
Pioneers: 1955-2015
"Pioneers" covers a wide time range and consists of pioneer poets, such as Josephine Miles, who included disability as an articulate influence in their poetics practices. The inclusion of these poets does not necessarily imply that all addressed the subject of disability directly; many, such as Larry Eigner, chose to express a disability poetics in their formal choices and ways of making a poem rather than through ideology or terminology.
The Emerging Field: 1980-present
The diverse styles and voices in this section reflect the progression of awareness and thinking about disability as they became included in an articulated poetics. Some poets choose to address the nonnormative body-mind experience directly through content; others address disability through process and practice influenced by a wide range of experiences.
Essays
This small sampler of critical pieces outlines some of the histories and current issues of disability poetics.