Poetry, Disability, and Vigilance

Keynote delivered to writers and poets living with disabilities at the virtual 2021 Zoeglossia writing residency

February 19, 2021

My wife Tabitha and I visit a midwifery community center in Oklahoma. She is ten weeks pregnant. We find ourselves in a room with light green walls and portraits of young mothers smiling into the eyes of newborn babies. We sit on the sofa; I place the cushion on my lap instead of sitting on it, perhaps a sign that I was unwilling to get too comfortable, and yet we are filled with the excitement and anxiety of most expectant parents. I can smell my coffee breath trapped behind my mask; the windowless room has a thick air-conditioned heat and relies on the fluorescent light in a way that makes the room feel artificial, like an eye that doesn’t blink. It is a pandemic and the midwife in the room with us isn’t wearing a mask so Tabitha and I are already unnerved. When she leaves the room I happen to pick up a leaflet about hearing tests for newborn babies. A trigger warning about ableist language, but the leaflet explains how children born with “hearing loss” socially and academically lag behind their hearing peers; it goes on for two pages about language acquisition in the first seven years of a child’s life and the “challenges the child will face with hearing loss.” Nowhere in the literature does it mention deaf awareness, sign language, or the culturally Deaf. I’m not denying there are challenges but pathologizing a child’s deafness instead of society’s ableism is a cruel oversight. I don’t keep the pamphlet. I am too angry. I put it back and Tabitha and I leave the building.

That whole week I had been doing readings of my first children’s picture book, Can Bears Ski?, a story based on my own experience growing up hard of hearing with hearing parents who struggled to guide me through the hearing world. Part of the purpose of the story is to show deafness as an experience rather than a trauma.

I got a range of questions from deaf young readers; some engaged with the story, asking, “Why does the moon have a face?” and, “Can the bears sign?” and there were young readers looking at the other faces on the Zoom call and asking, “How many people here have cochlear implants?”; another question was, “Does anyone here have red hearing aids?” but a common question I received was, “What is good about being deaf?” There is an innocence to this question, but there’s also a self-consciousness, one that some would say ought to not exist for children so young but alas, from birth we’re lucky to be born in a room that isn’t ableist, let alone a world.

What does this mean to the poet? What is our role? How can we engage and challenge the norms of ableist practice? While browsing in the London Library, I came across the work of John Kitto, a profoundly deaf poet and English Bible scholar born in England. In 1845 Kitto published The Lost Senses: Deafness and Blindness, a fascinating read. Kitto includes a selection of his own sonnets and offers commentary on their inferiority to Shakespeare. He blames his inferiority on his deafness, and in tight iambic pentameter mourns his deafness. As graceful as his writing is, it is still internalized ableism. I don’t mean to say this has no place in literature; it is real but it is something to notice and interrogate when and if it shows up in our own work and our own words if we are poets with disabilities. I’m not a scholar, if I were I’d have saved all my notes from the days I spent reading John Kitto. His poems certainly inspired me to develop my own deaf poetics, a lyricism that is at once personal and specific to my experience of deafness, but one that is also subjective and rich. My first full collection, The Perseverance, does this by leaning into the forms of repetition. Much of my experience in the hearing world is asking people to repeat themselves—this is defiance, this is also vigilance.

March 10, 2021

Being vigilant in our reading as poets may pay off in our writing as poets, so I want to talk briefly about the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez and how his work helped me make some decisions in my own writing. I’m a non-Spanish speaker, so the English-language translators I’ve relied on are Robert Bly, Mary G. Berg, and Dennis Maloney.

On January 16, 1916, Jiménez was in his early thirties, already an accomplished poet, prose writer, and children’s author. He was leaving on a train from Madrid to board a boat at the port in Cadiz, sailing on to New York where he was due to marry. He begins a poem in his diary,

How close now to my soul,
What still seems so very far
From my hands!

Jiménez was in love, a young poet in full visceral yearning mode, a poet influenced by the lyric intensity of Rilke and the French Symbolism of Rimbaud. On his sea-crossing journey, Jiménez would write some of the most revered poems in Spanish literature. Each of the poems would be dated between January 16 and October 3. Some of the poems read like a fragmented internal dialogue of a mystic drifting off to sleep. In Jiménez’s imagination, any boundary between land, sky, and sea melts away and we readers find ourselves in the world where color itself is a kind of destination, “... the train doesn’t go toward the sea,” ponders the speaker, in a short poem addressed “To Cadiz on the train, January 28th.” The line runs on, “it goes toward the green summer of gold and white.” Yellow and green dominate so much of Jiménez’s metaphysical imagery that the colors become synonymous with his name.

Just over a hundred years after Jiménez took his trip, married, and published the poems that became Diary of a Newlywed Poet, I find myself in my early thirties, having written a poetry collection and a children’s picture book. I’ve just finished a long journey by train to Heathrow where I catch my flight to JFK. I am in a long-distance relationship and am engaged and soon to marry in America. From JFK airport I take a cab to Ridgewood, Queens, and some lines for a poem come to me, which I draft in my notebook:

Give thanks, the wheel touching tarmac at  JFK,
Give thanks, the latches, handles, what we squeeze

into cabins, the wobbling wings, the arrivals,
departures, long line at the gates, the held nerve ... 

the give / of rain on the windows

Each line is a runway, the alliterated lines “touching tarmac” and “wobbling wings” create the energetic physical quality of taking off, and the enjambed run-on lines keep the reader guessing where the poem may land.

In the sky, I’m a nervous flyer, and on the ground I usually get stopped, searched, and questioned at airports, but on this particular trip I’ve gotten past the border swiftly (it may have had something to do with the fact that I am wearing a suit and tie like the one that Jiménez bears on the cover of the 1916 first edition of Diary of a Newlywed Poet).

I haven’t yet read Diary of a Newlywed Poet, I am a year away from finding Robert Bly’s translation of it in a secondhand bookshop, a year away from resonating with the lines, “I will leap over the sea/through the sky/I will go far, so very far/that my body won’t remember your body/or mine!”

The poem I drafted after landing in JFK is now the opening (untitled) poem of my new poetry book, All the Names Given (Tin House, 2021). I’d thought I’d finished writing All the Names Given when I learned of Jiménez, but once I’d felt inspired by Diary of a Newlywed Poet I rushed back to the manuscript to make tweaks with Jiménez as a literary touchstone or, better yet, a kind of poetic time traveling companion.

March 16, 2021

I am not I.
                       I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget.
— From “I Am Not I” by Juan Ramón Jiménez, tr. by Robert Bly

Today I was mentoring a young poet on Zoom who said she didn’t like contemporary poetry, she found it too “political” and “identity based”; in her words she much preferred the “more abstract and visceral poets of the nineteenth century,” and she reeled off a list of mostly straight middle-class white women poets (Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning). She liked that these poets had “quiet” and “private voices,” that they wrote in rhyme and strict metered lines, they were remnants of old times, legacy-managed and glorified (by no fault of their own) as pure poets. Somehow their work wasn’t “political” or “identity based.” I heard Ilya Kaminsky once say that this seems to be a phenomenon in America and the UK, the idea of “political poetry” as a stand-alone genre. Everywhere else in the world, says Kaminsky, what gets called political poetry is just poetry.

I do agree that with the visceral nature of some poetry the air and open-endedness can widen its relatability. Poetry is certainly worthwhile when we are able to pursue our own thoughts through it, despite the separate reaches of space and time (and identity) of the reader and the poet.

Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote his last book in 1958; it was a poetic autobiography called Time and Space. In it he writes that poetry comes to him “as an answer made up from the very essence of my question.”

Jiménez spent much of his life in political exile. His roaming opened up his earthly questions of citizenship and ethereal questions of mind, body, time, and space. In a poem titled “The Sea,” written on October 10, 1916, after months sailing the Atlantic heading to America, he wrote, “any moment the sea/can be almost human in order to hate me./It doesn’t know who I am.” The weather, the environment all have their own identities, “almost human.”

Now, as poets with disabilities, how do we respond to these identity questions; is there a school of thought that says we ought to hide these earthly elements of who we are in pursuit of the transcendental? The lyric so high that it leaves the body on earth altogether? What are our questions? How do we interrogate this in our own practice?

Of course, going back to the student, what she seems to be unconsciously expressing is a kind of toxic nostalgia for the good old days when the only poets worth knowing about just so happened to be abled-bodied, white, and middle class. I tried tactfully to point this out to the young poet, but I’m not always the best at managing my own neurosis and my tone can come across as defensive, which doesn’t help anything. So, my question is why was this poet so resistant to expanding her references and project? Is it white guilt? Is it white fear of becoming irrelevant after centuries of default status? Is it just the stubborn naivety of a young poet and nothing more?

I asked what she knew about contemporary women poets. I suggested Eavan Boland, Lucille Clifton, Adrienne Rich, and June Jordan as entry points; then, if she was looking for contemporary women poets that have achieved new kinds of lyrical language and ways of seeing, she ought to read Layli Long Soldier, Solmaz Sharif, and Anne Carson, but the young poet sounded doubtful. “These poets sound too political and that’s not what I’m trying to do,” she said. A version of this discussion exists in almost every academic space I’ve taught in (most of which are in the UK) and a lot of literature students are still being educated with this toxic nostalgia, this so-called unidentifiable whiteness. As populist as James Baldwin and Audre Lorde have become with progressive thinkers and activists, their arguments and perspectives don’t seem to be common practice in institutions despite each of these institutions releasing Black Lives Matter statements in the wake of George Floyd.

Of course, I recognize this poet has a specific interest in nineteenth-century women poets, but she must realize that her taste is political and identity based and that is OK, that is as human as the child I saw in my online reading last week looking through his screen and asking, “Does anyone here have red hearing aids?”

March 17, 2021

“Forgive me my deafness now for your name on others’ lips,” begins Deaf poet Meg Day’s lyrical and intimate poem “Elegy in Translation.” You’d be forgiven for wondering how this poem is an “elegy,” it doesn’t mention a literal death but hints at a symbolic death. Perhaps the speaker is lamenting the death of a former self, one that was ashamed of their deafness, as the speaker asks us again, later in the poem, “Forgive me/my deafness for my own sound, how I mistook it for a wound/you could heal.” I resonated with this idea of having your own sound. Have you ever been in a room when someone asked, “Can you hear that?” and heard nothing? Were you ever in those English classes where you’re taught how to write iambic pentameter? Taught it as if it is the sole measure of sound and poetic value? Did you almost weep when you read Kamau Brathwaite’s line “the hurricane does not roar in pentameters”? Did you resonate with that line so fiercely you slammed your fist on the table in the study area of the library, immediately being shushed by the librarian? There are many layers to one’s “own sound”; it hints at a need to nurture a poetic sensibility, a kind of personal music in the noisy world of language. Speaking of music, a memorable line of this poem goes, “So what/if Johnny Nash can see clearly now Lorraine is gone—I only wanted/to hear the sea.”

Mishearings are an obvious staple of deaf poetics, a way to honor one’s own sound. “Lorraine” is a corruption of “the rain” from the song; “I Can See Clearly Now,” even knowing that Meg Day is an American poet and happens to be listening to Johnny Nash’s version of the song tells us something significant (I’m more familiar with Jimmy Cliff’s cover of “I Can See Clearly Now”). This poem also engages with the physicality of sign language and perhaps this is one of the places where the idea of “translation” comes into the poem. The speaker uses some of the semantics that those familiar with the Deaf community will understand, for example, when the speaker says, “My hands are bloated//with the name signs of my kin.” In the Deaf world, friends have sign names that can only be assigned to you by someone else in the Deaf community. Despite this specificity it’s not something that alienates anyone because whether you are clued in to Deaf culture or not, the verb “bloated” is active enough in multiple ways with “name signs,” which works as both a concrete and an abstract noun. These kinds of linguistic gymnastics and poetic devices are woven throughout the poem, using slant and internal rhymes and alliteration—techniques hard to pull off meaningfully—and contrast with the image near the beginning, the “fluke of their tongues.” The poetic accomplishment here is far from fluke, it’s an intentional affirmation of one’s own sound, it’s a tongue-in-cheek lament, it’s skilled and measured, and written by a Deaf poet.

I’d like to contrast Meg Day’s “Elegy in Translation” with the eighteenth- century poet, botanist, and preacher, John Kitto, published in 1852:

Were all the beams that ever shone
    From all the starts of day and night
Collected in one single cone,
                      Unutterably bright;—
I’d give them for one glance of heaven
Which might but hint of sin forgiven.

Could all the voices and glad sounds
    Which have not fallen on my sense,
Be rendered up in one hour’s bounds—
                       A gift immense;—
I’d for one whisper to my heart
Give all the joy this might impart.

If the great deep now offered all
    The treasures in her bosom stored,
And at my feet I could no call
                      That mighty hoard;—
I’d spurn it utterly for some
Small treasure in the world to come.

If the sweet scents of every flower—
    Each one of which cheers more than wine—
One plant could from its petals pour,
                       And that were mine;—
I would give up that glorious prize
For one faint breath from Paradise.

Were all the pleasures I have known,
    “So few, so very far between,”
Into one great sensation thrown—
                      Not then all mean;—
I’d give it freely for one smile
From Him who died for me erewhile.
—From “Alternatives” by  John Kitto

Derek Walcott once said that he has “never separated the writing of poetry from prayer”; this poem may show readers how they can be one and the same. The line length and rhythm may put readers in the mind of “In the Bleak Midwinter” by Christina Rossetti, which was published as a poem before becoming popularized as a hymn. If a famous composer found Kitto’s poem, my hunch is it too would’ve been popularized as a hymn; instead it’s been lost to history, tucked into a book I would happen to find two centuries later in the miscellaneous section on the Deaf shelf of the London Library. I was moved by this poem when I first read it. I leaned back and smiled. It demands multiple readings (out loud) but initially the ecstatic images from the implied light of the stars, moon and sun, to heaven and the flowers bring this poem to brightness. There is a rhyme scheme (AB, AB, CC) which allows each stanza to circle the sound of its themes, which I like to think of as divinity, sound, nature, and disability. Reading this poem more deeply, it struck me on another level, that perhaps this is a queer poem about forbidden love shrouded in religious sentiment. It feels particularly erotic in the last stanza with the mention of pleasures, sensation, and giving for one smile “From Him.” Also thinking of how that joins with the end of the first stanza, “I’d give them for one glance of heaven/Which might but hint of sin forgiven.”

Here we have two poems that mention forgiveness. There is an intimacy in both poems as well as transcendence, and yet both poems take different approaches to similar ideas. There is a journey toward growth, self-affirmation, and acceptance; there is an earned power, centuries apart, to sing and strengthen how one may identify with the sound of oneself.

March 18, 2021

Let me circle back to Jiménez and his 1916 voyage in which he wrote Diary of a Newlywed Poet. The way I have described his poetry so far, it could be assumed to be high lyric, raceless, genderless, classless, amoral transcendentalism. Jiménez does in fact mention race and class in numerous poems. He notices fellow travelers on the ship in the prose poem “Ideal arrival” where all races, “Blacks, whites, Asians,” become “brothers in their happiness,” perhaps a naive or sarcastic observation? Or perhaps a kinship with marginalized people? In another poem, “New York Night,” Jiménez describes “the poor people who live here/Chinese, Irish, Jewish, Black/stirred into one wretched dream/all their nightmares of hunger.” My interpretation is that as a traveller, Jiménez has found some kind of equality. We are all at the mercy of the sea and the sky and yet Jiménez does have moments of Buddhist generosity, “I stepped one afternoon/into other rooms ... as much mine as the world.”

Sweeping lines like this can be received well from many kinds of readers when we see (elsewhere in Jiménez’s poems) that his sociological gaze is beyond himself, that he isn’t whitewashing the world around him, or denying ways of living outside of his own understanding, and that he does acknowledge the world while decentering himself. In “Time and Space,” he writes, “Nature looks at me like an alien thing, the flower, the flight, the bad smells, the mosquitoes ... infinite harmony, the whole melody of which I am only one note.”

Maybe I’m wrong and these are my biases. Jiménez may be using feminine or masculine language in ways that aren’t progressive. I might be glorifying his poetry because of how much of it aligns with my own ideals and experience. This isn’t a problem in and of itself, but I do think we ought to be aware of our biases, in case we end up perpetuating reductive ideas that end up shutting down discussion and exploration into our own experiences, as well as others.

I want to encourage wide and fearless reading and learning and I want to celebrate the poets that allow us a kind of “permanent arrival,” as Jiménez put it, at our own shores and beyond.

Writers, go forth. Have your adventures, ask your questions, and stay vigilant.