Beauty Is a Verb

by Jennifer Bartlett

  I’d like to reference a poem of Miles from her final collection, Coming to Terms. Prior to this collection, Miles’ work engaged the quotidian details of life in such poems as “Market Report on Cotton Gray Goods” and “Apartment” and “Shade.” She seems like the granddaughter of Wordsworth by including fragments from everyday speech in her poems. In Coming to Terms, Miles presents her disability along with her usual touchstones of everyday life.

  Before

  Earlier, what I remember: a small

  Flame of arthritis in the midst of fields

  In the Euclidian Sunday mustard fields

  And the mud fields of the potted palm,

  In Jackie’s airy room,

  And at the fire station

  All the brass

  And all of us

  Feeding the gulls.

  A fresh salt breeze and foam

  Around a plaster leg.

  Away from the chloroform intern, joy

  Of the long journey when I ran

  Free of the plaster, and got back

  Down those long hills, spent out.

  Where had I been, oh tell me.

  And where

  Under those vast sunny

  Apricot trees in the front yard?

  Go tell Aunt Rhodie the old gray goose is dead.

  What I like about this poem is its frank interrogation of Miles’ childhood experience of disability: frank in its beginning, “what I remember” and interrogative in that line, “Where had I been, oh tell me.”

  V. LOUISE GLÜCK

  For comparison’s sake, I’d like to take a look at a poem by Louise Glück who uses similar subject material. Unlike Miles, however, Glück is not disabled. She puts on a disabled persona. The poem is from her 1969 collection Firstborn. Here is how Kirkus describes the subject material of Firstborn: “She [Glück] deals in wastelands...the lost lives of cripples...the hopeless and loveless.”

  The Cripple in the Subway

  For awhile I thought I had gotten

  Used to it (the leg) and hardly heard

  That down-hard, down-hard

  Upon wood, cement, etc. of the iron

  Trappings and I’d tell myself the memories

  Would also disappear, ticking

  jump-ropes and the bike, the bike

  That flew beneath my sister, froze

  Light, bent back its

  Stinging in a flash of red chrome brighter

  Than my brace or brighter

  Than the morning whirling past this pit

  Flamed with rush horror and their thin

  Boots flashing on and on, all that easy kidskin.

  While I’m not going to linger on these two poems and the different ways they address disability, I’d like to note the different ways the poets use the word “tell.” Miles writes, “Where had I been, oh tell me,” engaging with the reader, while at the same time not completely disclosing; and without a question mark, the line reads as if Miles expects no answer. Glück writes, “I’d tell myself the memories / would also disappear” in a self-reflexive tone, turned in rather than out. Her imagination of this disabled experience is much more explicit and objectifying.

  VI. AUTHENTIC AND INAUTHENTIC REPRESENTATIONS OF DISABILITY

  I wonder what we think of these two poems? Certainly Glück isn’t alone in personifying disability (Bidart’s Book of the Body gives us plenty of examples as well). Why do able poets write from this perspective? Before I began seeking poems written from a disabled perspective, I found plenty of poems written on the subject of disability, and in persona, from an able perspective. I can hardly pick up a journal or collection of poetry without coming across blindness or deafness or madness as metaphor. I used to count the number of “phantom limbs” that cropped up in poems; the phantom limb is typically a metaphor for the loss of a loved one. This has always struck me as funny because my phantom limb is ticklish rather than painful.

  When I had a colleague read this essay, she commented that one of her writing teachers actually used the term “phantom limb” as a way to describe the writing process. It was the same writing teacher who was African American and protested the use, any use, of the word “dark” as a negative.

  In an essay titled “Feminist Disability Studies,” Rosemarie Garland-Thomson notes the “major aim of all of my work in both literary and feminist studies is to show that the always overdetermined metaphoric uses of disability efface and distort the lived experience of people with disabilities, evacuating the political significance of our lives and mitigating the influence of disability culture.”

  VII. THE FUTURE

  More and more people are self-identifying as disabled. With the explosion of the blog, disabled people have a new medium in which to exchange ideas and act towards social change. Temple University’s blog touts itself as “cool stuff in the world of geography, disability studies, and educational leadership.” I find this tagline particularly intriguing for three reasons—1) disability has only recently been considered “cool,” 2) the use of “geography” advances the disabled as a mobile and far-spread group and 3) the mention of “leadership” acknowledges the disabled in a role of power rather than victimhood. I’d like to see more studies, within the field of poetry, that consider the long history of disability and literature. But first, I’d like for us all to know the poets with disabilities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Until we know who we are—who wants to be included and who does not—how can we further integrate disability studies in the field of poetry?

  The Amputee’s Guide to Sex

  I. REMOVAL OF PROSTHETIC

  Wait for partner to exit room, or initiate their exit by requesting a favor. For example, “Could you check the front door? I can’t remember if I locked it.” Wait for shadows to stand still, then quick, under the covers, remove the prosthetic. Let it slip beneath the bed, under clothes, behind a door.

  II. FOREPLAY

  To create an uninhibited environment for your partner, track their hands like game pieces on a board. For leg amputees, keep arms on upper body. For arm amputees, keep arms on lower body. Engage with like limbs. Keep halflimbs out of reach. Your goal is to achieve a false harmony with their body.

  III. SEX

  Mobility is key. If they see the half-limb then they become inhibited, nervous. They think: “Will it hurt like this? Would she tell me if it did?” Mobility shows confidence. Think for two people. Know where your limbs are at all times; know where your partner’s limbs are at all times.

  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 stepped into a peep show in New Orleans.

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

  Is it all right 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.

  The Devotee

  This man, short, balding, in his forties,

  approached me at a reading & asked if

  I would sign his book. His hands shook.

  I thought he had some kind of condition.

  Three days later, he sent this email:

  “I was at your reading in Louisville.

  I loved the way you limped to the stage.

  Do you know you’re beautiful? Do you

  feel beautiful during sex? What’s it like?

  I bought your book, which is about,

  you know, this topic. I deserve a reply.”

  I looked out the window for the birds

&n
bsp; & the deer other poets are always seeing.

  I want to be another poet, I thought.

  I want to be any other poet but me.

  The Body in Pain

  For a long while I was with you & faithful

  as I was to the black hair dye on aisle eight,

  as good at covering-up.

  For a long while I gave you to the stage

  in exchange for Aunt March in Little Women,

  Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie.

  It felt entirely like an act, but wasn’t.

  The curved back of the spinster, the clunky leg.

  I read the lines like hell I read them loud

  and clear I read them well.

  •

  This is the spine )

  A closing parenthetical.

  What did my body mean to say as an aside?

  •

  All states of being have referential content:

  ashamed of

  belief in

  devotion to

  gratitude for

  hunger for

  longing for

  love for

  relief from

  pity for

  struggle for

  thirst for

  tired of

  except pain.

  A friend calls, her brother shot himself

  in Tennessee. She says,

  I need to talk to you

  because you & he

  both are were

  disabled.

  •

  Now it is Saturday night & I am writing

  another letter to Lucy Grealy, who I will never meet.

  Dear Lucy,

  You do not know me. It feels wrong

  for me to know about the heroin, the bags

  of mail you kept, the bolt in your face.

  For what it is worth, I have a bolt in my hip,

  a hook along my spine. I don’t want to talk

  about any of this. Tell me: what was your last

  good thing? Can we stay there?

  •

  The boy, nineteen, in his car driving through

  Tennessee, left a note taped to the rearview mirror:

  I am always in pain.

  •

  Elaine Scarry writes that pain is simultaneously

  a thing that cannot be confirmed & cannot be denied.

  In me, a shooting like a flash like a planet like a fire.

  In you, a question mark.

  The boy & I both with a bird in our lungs.

  Ribs press in, constrict. The medical

  dictionary describes it as crab-like ribs.

  Even they resort to figurative language.

  The boy’s sister on the phone asks,

  Are you also in pain? How does it feel?

  She means to say, Tell me why this happened.

  •

  For a long while I was with you & faithful.

  I did not mind, you shooting, you itching

  as if you did not know we lost that foot.

  Someone would have played lover to her brother

  & meant it. This happens all the time:

  When mine said, I am getting used to

  your body, it sent me batty, bawling, bastard,

  how could he love this husk? Then I flipped

  that switch. I no more notice the twitch

  of a lover’s eye because it is my lover & his eye.

  •

  Descartes was always partial to cross-eyed women,

  because the object of his first love had such a defect.

  This doesn’t explain

  the boy the gun the car the drive the mountains

  the woman the drug the skin the face the floor

  •

  Dear Lucy,

  I am angry with you. Which was it?

  Did you abdicate to beauty or pain?

  Say pain. It is easier for me to understand.

  Kathi Wolfe

  HELEN KELLER: OBSESSION AND MUSE

  Growing up with low vision, I wanted nothing to do with Helen Keller. Keller, I knew from The Miracle Worker and public service ads on TV, was an “inspiration”—a saint. I was an ordinary kid, who never did her math homework, never cleaned her room and didn’t, even if I could have, want to be saintly. There was no way that I would ever want to or be able to hang out with Helen. She was Wally and the gang; I was the Beaver.

  The Miracle Worker, the Academy Award-winning film, glued “inspirational” images of Helen Keller and her story into the public consciousness. Based on William Gibson’s play of the same name, The Miracle Worker is Hollywood’s version of how twenty-one-year-old Annie Sullivan, herself visually impaired, taught the meaning of language to seven-year-old Helen Keller, who became deaf and blind at age eighteen months. The film ends with the iconic image of Keller, her hand under the water pump, saying “Wa! Wa!”

  The other image of Helen Keller that is widely known is that of Keller as a saintly, (presumably) sexless, elderly women, urging people to help blind people in public service ads. I remember seeing these ads when I was a child. Keller (who lived from 1880 to 1968) appeared quite old then.

  Because I didn’t want to be lumped in with the “inspirational” icon, the tantrum throwing child or the saintly, sexless elderly woman, I kept my distance from Helen Keller.

  Not that this was easy. For as Kim E. Nielsen notes in The Radical Lives of Helen Keller, Keller is the most famous person with a disability in history, and how people perceive Keller impacts how they perceive all people with disabilities. I had my own experiences with that. Once when I was a teenager, my grandmother came into my bedroom. “No one will marry you,” she told me, “but you can be another Helen Keller.”

  Years later, I was at a gay bar in New York. “I love Helen Keller!” a woman exclaimed to me, “but what are you doing in a place like this?” The implication of her question was that Helen Keller did many good works, but that people like Helen, like me, wouldn’t or shouldn’t be looking for romance or sex.

  I became interested—then obsessed with Keller—when I was a graduate student at Yale. Looking at books in the library, someone pointed out a book to me called Helen Keller: Her Socialist Years. That got my attention.

  I learned that Keller graduated from Radcliffe College in 1904, at a time when few women—or that many men—let alone disabled women went to college. Keller, I discovered, was an early feminist, an author and vaudeville star. While she did not have a drinking problem, she enjoyed a drink (especially scotch).

  In 1916, Keller and Peter Fagan planned to get married; but Keller’s family nixed their plans. Keller loved dogs, Japan, hot dogs, and at age seventy-four, danced with Martha Graham and her dance troupe. Keller was one of the earliest supporters of the NAACP and, without pity or condescension, she comforted wounded soldiers after World War II. She read and wrote in Braille, knew several languages (English, French, Greek, German—among others) and communicated by finger spelling or reading lips.

  Over the years, like many others (especially, blind and visually impaired women), I’ve had a “love-hate” relationship with Helen Keller. Frequently, I’ve tried to run away from Keller’s all too encompassing presence. For a considerable time, I resisted focusing my work as a poet on this disability icon, whose saintly Miracle Worker aura is still so entwined with our cultural stereotyping of people with disabilities. As a poet whose sensibility is steeped in disability culture, I wished to create new characters unsullied by “inspiration” or ableism. Yet Keller, like a dog scratching at the door to be let out, kept pulling me toward her. Whether I liked it or not, she insisted on becoming my muse. “Let my spirit live! Give me an inner life in your poems!” She insisted, “You know I was a complex, three-dimensional person, not a one-dimensional saint! Build an ars poetica from that.” Gradually, I stopped resisting and listened.

  4 poems from HELEN TAKES THE STAGE:

  THE HELEN KELLER POEMS

  On the Subway

  A man
with breath like sour milk

  spits into my ear with the aim

  of a pool shark sinking

  the ball in the corner pocket.

  A baby crawls into my lap,

  wrinkles the dress

  I’d picked as if I were a diva

  debuting at the Met.

  I’m stuck to my seat

  a stamp on an envelope.

  Ash perfumes the air

  of this underground fashion show.

  Yet here there is more breathing room

  than in all of Central Park,

  I’m richer than J. P. Morgan

  with his hoard of gold.

  Here, I’m not on a pedestal,

  just a dame on the Broadway Local.

  Ashes: Rome, 1946

  Soot bombards my hair.

  Soldiers, blinded in battle,

  tell rough-edged jokes to hide

  their tears. If only I could

  conjure spells. I caress their faces.

  My hands smolder. The Braille

  dots smell like acrid socks.

  Your home in Connecticut

  is gone. It went up in smoke,

  everything lost except