Like many people with disability, I am always slightly amazed to realize I have suffered more from other people’s perceptions of my condition than I have from my own real “disabilities.” I do not remember ever staying up all night wringing my hands because I would never run a four or even a ten-minute mile. On the other hand, I have spent many useless hours agonizing over how people might react if they ever saw me in a miniskirt. As a poet, what influence this has had on me is both hard and easy to track. I tend to write in a kind of supercharged rush—images of violence and/or horror laid up right against images of beauty and/or tenderness, as if the two were part of the same continuum, as if the two could be forced together, blurred into one another, or represented contradictions that must find a way to co-exist because they could not be resolved. I do believe this comes from the experience of living with disability—or living with a disability in a world that circles around ideals of “normal.” A world in which I am always the piece that doesn’t fit and also a body that speaks or argues loudly—even against my will—about the problems with such normalizing structures. Furthermore, these are structures I have certainly internalized in my own attitudes about my disability. I believe my disability matters because I know it matters to other people. At the same time, I tend to believe—imaginatively?—that viewed in perspective it is just one fact about me, and not always a particularly important one.
I love the confessional because it allows such contradictions, such instability to be front and center. It allows feeling and extremes of feeling within an ideological context, but one which is inherently unstable, one in which the message is never entirely anchored. As Cate Marvin notes:
The confessional project may be of particular interest to women because it allows them to misbehave on the page, to reconstruct their identities, to display the power of their intelligence through language, to speak their minds without being silenced or interrupted...and to, ironically, say what they really mean. In confessional poetry, there are no rules...(p.46) .
By “no rules” Marvin suggests that the confessional, by offering the ability to occupy multiple intimate, apparently “true” positions vis-à-vis the charged “issue at stake” also offers the possibility of an imaginative transcendence. In the case of feminist poetry, confessionalism offers a means of escape from the polarities of a discourse of femininity that limits or encodes the female speaker. The confessional often achieves this through ruthless and even extravagant staging of a charged emotional moment. The most striking example is perhaps Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” which compares her experience of an absent or repressive father to the Holocaust—a comparison that is clearly hyperbolic, offensive and meant to be so, but also, compellingly in the poem, “imaginatively true” for the speaker herself. The poem is a kind of psychic theater, but one which in its staging casts new light on “the world as it is,” suggesting the necessity of a reconfiguration of female power and how it functions (or doesn’t) within a patriarchal system. The radical, even unhinged, claims the poem makes thus become an affirmation of the imaginative and real power of the speaker—who speaks with almost Promethean fervor out of a desire to re-vision or recreate herself.
The parallels with disability poetry are obvious. Often the dilemma for the disabled poet is how to say what you truly mean in a context in which disability is either silenced and denied, or conversely, given such overwhelming importance that the human being becomes subsumed by his or her condition. Lennard Davis points out that the target of the poetics of disability must perhaps ultimately be the structures of “normal” in which the disabled speaker is conceived and constructed as a perennial other—and usually a lesser (Davis: p.3). This, for me, is the project the confessional most animates. When Marvin states that the confessional at its best or strongest “is defined by its artifice,” by “its ruthless desire to convince us its untruths are true,” she suggests how the confessional often uses “artifice” and “untruth” to allow a marginalized speaker to radically reconfigure his or her position. By allowing its speaker the dangerous freedom to be, or appear, extravagantly personal while making a wider critique of social artifice, social untruth and social control, confessionalism often becomes, as Marvin puts it, “a true expedition into the imagination” with the potential for tracking multiple modes of our liberation.
Playing Dead
Begin by imagining
a failure of will,
the boundaries of the body erased
like lines on a chalkboard.
You might picture the usual things:
night sky, waveless sea,
the greeny depths
which plummet to pure dark
or something as small
as a single square inch
of soil, packed with rotted
leaf, root scrap, cracked
shell, the molted wing
of a specked moth, a handful
of sand, a handful of dust;
it all comes to much the same.
It is the absence of conscious
motion that takes getting used to,
no sound but the slow
settling, the ripening of decay:
burst liquid, gelid light.
The old story of how stars
are born of frozen dust
and radiance
from this house of bone.
What You Mourn
The year they straightened my legs,
the young doctor said, meaning to be kind,
Now you will walk straight
on your wedding day, but what he could not
imagine is how even on my wedding day
I would arch back and wonder
about that body I had before I was changed,
how I would have nested in it,
made it my home, how I repeated his words
when I wished to stir up my native anger
feel like the exile I believed
I was, imprisoned in a foreign body
like a person imprisoned in a foreign land
forced to speak a strange tongue
heavy in the mouth, a mouth full of stones.
Crippled they called us when I was young
later the word was disabled and then differently abled,
but those were all names given by outsiders,
none of whom could imagine
that the crooked body they spoke of,
the body, which made walking difficult
and running practically impossible,
except as a kind of dance, a sideways looping
like someone about to fall
headlong down and hug the earth, that body
they tried so hard to fix, straighten was simply mine,
and I loved it as you love your own country,
the familiar lay of the land, the unkempt trees,
the smell of mowed grass, down to the nameless
flowers at your feet—clover, asphodel,
and the blue flies that buzz over them.
Reconstruction
I think of the trees there first:
how large and tender
they seemed, breathing green
above the brick colonials,
the loneliness of other people’s windows,
glittering under the sulfurous
street lamps, past midnight
when the pills stopped
working, and I could feel
my bones knitting themselves
into a new shape.
The rings of trees accreted
slowly, one by one,
spread ripples from a dropped
stone, the healed bones hardening
a different white on the x-rays,
not even a ghost of the form
they had been.
The codeine was blue, shaped
like a small bullet.
My mother did not believe in such simple
relief of pain. She had stayed
awake even when we were born,
Where had I gone wrong?
All summer they brought me trays
of food, bowls of plums
shimmering with water, cooked
spinach, a limp sea of green,
said, “Eat,” but I was wary,
remembered the myths I had learned:
If you take a single seed
you will stay down here forever.
I swallowed the pills furtively,
felt myself plunge, a girl
down a well, my own voice calling
back at me from the curved walls.
I was remade, and I fell,
searching my old self
in the trees above our house,
their age passing through me,
their green hearts blooming in me.
All I wanted was to remember everything,
the way a child asks questions
to resurrect the moment of origin,
the expression of a face
before it is born.
Objects Waiting to Be Dangerous
Do I get tired of the stories
I know or the ways
I have of telling them?
Today the sun shines
with that piercing autumn clarity.
Silk trees fray along the roads,
pink and white threads
darkening to burnt sugar.
And on the river banks
swallows gather in great numbers,
filling the branches of the dry cottonwoods.
They will fly south to the sea,
trace the hip of the land
over plains and mountains
to Venezuela or beyond.
Driving down the old Highway 66
at noon, I hear them chatter
through a hedge of mesquite.
How they ache to leave and how this season
fills me with pestilent longing—fretful,
tiresome so I jerk the wheel too sharply,
raise dust devils in the road,
imagine crumpling metal,
some kind of annihilation,
meanwhile all this life in hands,
so easy to waste, so hard to taste each bite.
Rilke said the beauty which is next to terror
is the trace of God
in the world, but I can’t find it,
and so I drive and watch
the swallows lift from the branches,
flutter over the water in little clouds
that rise and fall like waves,
a feeling rising in me
so shapeless and yet so sharp,
I can’t keep my mind in one place,
but dart around, hunting,
pecking like a women who can’t find the key
to her house but is sure it’s right in front of her,
right under her nose, so close that
all she needs to do is put out her hand
and she will touch it.
Raymond Luczak
LISTENING SIDEWAYS TO THE BEAT OF A POEM
With the gift of deafness, you learn to listen better than anyone. It has nothing to do with sound, and yet when you pay close attention to everything but sound, it does.
•
Although I began writing poetry at the age of eleven, meter wasn’t on my radar. I started out writing limericks, a five-line form that required the counting of syllables and accommodating of end rhymes. A word was just a building block, its resulting line a room, and the poem a tiny house all by itself on a prairie. I built many houses that way. It was fun and easy. Not much thought required, really.
That was how I saw my life in Ironwood, Michigan. A former mining town, Iron-wood barely had 5,000 residents. We were all familiar strangers.
•
Once my hearing loss was diagnosed when I was two and half years old, I was instantly outfitted with a bulky hearing aid. Sign language was forbidden. I learned to speak. I didn’t realize until years later how much I wanted to sing instead.
At the age of thirteen, I discovered the Bee Gees singing harmony against a pulsating disco beat on a jukebox in a bar. That changed everything.
Suddenly limericks looked tired, repetitious.
I examined lyrics of the latest Top 40 songs on the radio, and imagined myself something of a songwriter: I wrote lyrics to imaginary music. Disco music was a godsend because its beat rarely varied. It enabled me to follow the beat and gradually solve the mysteries of melody, chorus and emotion. I would be glorious on the dance floor like John Travolta prancing about in Saturday Night Fever, and everyone would be my friend.
Unwanted and misunderstood as the only deaf student in the entire Ironwood Catholic school system, I sought refuge in the loom of words where I spun tapestries, an ever-tightening cocoon against the taunts and laughs of those hearing boys in my classroom.
I saw how they talked about music. I read Rolling Stone, Creem and other music-related magazines so I could be ready to partake in conversations about the latest hits. I borrowed library books on the history of pop music. I sought out used vinyl albums and barely scratched 45s at the local thrift store and garage sales. I always came home to listen to DJ Casey Kasem announce the latest Number One hit of the American Top 40 on the radio every Sunday afternoon. One day I would be accepted as one of these hearing boys.
That never happened, but at least I had assembled a killer record collection.
•
Not long after I heard the Bee Gees for the first time, I had sex with an older man in a public restroom. I was fourteen. I was the instigator. There was something about his eyes that told me he was lonely too. Even though I didn’t understand the protocols for anonymous encounters between men at the time, my instincts took over. One of the many things that had confused me, because it made me feel different from the others, became clear as day. I didn’t know there was a name for it, but I knew it had to be a secret like so many others I’d kept inside. Lonely people have the most secrets of them all. Being unwanted is the ultimate mark of shame.
•
I stopped writing poetry for a long spell. I wrote plays in which I starred as the most popular friend of them all, and everyone else in my life were only players. I never showed them to anyone.
I never wrote about my deafness, the single defining moment of my life. It just didn’t exist. I didn’t have the proper vocabulary to help explain those things in my ears.
•
In May 1980, I caught sight of an older man finger spelling with a girl while he was sitting on a bench outside Hulstrom’s, a candy and convenience store on the edge of downtown Ironwood. Once I saw his expressive face, I understood.
I didn’t have to decode his face in the same way I always had to with hearing people. He was an open book, which didn’t require lipreading.
I sought out the manual alphabet in a book and learned it in secret.
As a lonely boy, I found the intoxicating desire to learn signs the most important secret of all. I loved how these magnificent handshapes could disappear into the gloves of my skin.
No one would know how proficient I’d become with finger spelling words without thinking.
I knew I was deaf, but I didn’t own the word. I merely had “a hearing problem.”
I was terrified at first, but I forced myself to meet “Gramps” Morrison. He lit up when he saw my earmolds. He gently showed me the right way to hold up my hand when I finger spelled.
This, I thought, was how things should be done: a deaf person showing another how to live a life.
•
I told my parents I needed to learn sign language.
They were not happy.
My speech therapist arranged for me to meet with a hearing woman who knew sign language. She brought over a thick binder of mimeographed signs. It was clear from her lesson plan that summer that I would learn a chapter per session. I ended up learning half the book in our first session. I couldn’t get eno
ugh.
She was agog.
I asked her to try different signs so I could read them.
She was stunned that I didn’t have a problem following her signs.
Excited, I biked to town and looked for Gramps. I began signing.
He looked confusedly at me.
I felt hurt. What had I been doing wrong? My teacher said I was good with my signs, wasn’t I?
I didn’t realize that the signs I’d learned had come from Signing Exact English (SEE), a bastardized version of American Sign Language (ASL), that was created as a system—not a language!—designed to teach deaf kids English. I didn’t know then the pitfalls of learning signs from a hearing person who didn’t know anything about Deaf culture.
•
By then, I began expanding my listening preferences. I wasn’t interested in Chic and Donna Summer anymore. I wanted something edgier, like Blondie’s classic album Eat to the Beat, and musically diverse, like Paul McCartney’s Tug of War. I continued to create handmade books of poetry, which I never showed anyone.
Then I was given a chance to change my life. I didn’t have to go to Ironwood Catholic High School anymore. Houghton, a university town two hours away, had a deaf program for high school students. I wouldn’t be the only one deaf, and they used a combination of SEE and speech for communication. My long and lonely wait was over.
Beauty Is a Verb Page 18