Beauty Is a Verb

by Jennifer Bartlett

  p.s. though I’m

  retiring, I’ll continue

  to disrupt full-time

  NOTES

  A SHORT HISTORY OF DISABILITY POETRY: Michael Northen

  1. The capitalization of “Deaf” here is used to indicate a cultural identification. Writers in this anthology like John Lee Clark and Raymond Luczak make a distinction between “deaf” and “Deaf.” Bascially, deaf (lower case d) refers to the physical impairment and describes a specific individual. Deaf (captial D) refers to Deaf culture and identity with other D/deaf people. When a poet like Luczak or Clark says, “I am deaf” he is referring to the physical fact of his inability to hear. When he says, “I am Deaf” he is identifying with a whole culture or, at the very least, with other D/deaf people. There are still many people who consider themselves deaf, but not Deaf, and may even deny the existence of a Deaf culture.

  MISSING LARRY: THE POETICS OF DISABILITY IN LARRY EIGNER: Michael Davidson

  1. George Hart has written an excellent article on Eigner as a nature poet, “Reading under the Sign of Nature” and Benjamin Friedlander has written a useful encyclopedia entry on him in the Gale Dictionary of Literary Biography series. The latter is the best introduction to Eigner’s life and work.

  2. Eigner’s reticence in foregrounding his cerebral palsy aligns him with another Berkeley poet, Josephine Miles, who lived with rheumatoid arthritis from an early age but who did not identify as disabled or with the disability rights movement. Susan Schweik has made the case that despite her reticence, Miles’ early work often anticipates “conditions for the emergence of a new contemporary social group—but only if that group is understood in both broad and complex terms” (p.489). If we understand “disability rights” in the contemporary, post-civil-rights sense, then Miles does not accept the label “disabled.” Schweik locates Miles’ acknowledgment of disability in a discursive resistance to the language of reason and rationality. See Schweik’s essay “The Voice of ‘Reason’” in this anthology.

  3. Benjamin Friedlander notes that in 1962 Eigner underwent cryosurgery to freeze part of his brain in order to control his spastic movements (p.121). The successful operation is described in a letter to Douglas Blazek:

  Sept. 62 cryosurgery, frostbite in the thalamus (awakened to see if i was numbed, test whether they had right spot, felt much like killing of a tooth nerve!), tamed (and numbed some) my wild left side, since when I can sit still without effort, and have more capacity for anger etc. Before, I had to be extrovert, or anyway hold the self off on a side, in this very concrete, perpetual sense. A puzzlement of the will. (qtd. in Friedlander: p.121)

  Friedlander notes that prior to the surgery, “Typing, of all activities, provided relief from the wildness, from the distraction of the flailing, and from the effort of holding the body still, or trying to” (p.121).

  4. The four-volume set of The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner edited by Bob Grenier and Curtis Faville honored his page size by printing all three volumes in an 8½” by 11” format and in a font that approximates his typewriter font. Congratulations to Stanford University Press and the editors for making this wise, yet costly, decision.

  5. In his letters, some of which have been published, Eigner tends to fill the page, writing even in the margins and blank spaces of the page:

  Well letters get crowded just from attempt to save time, i.e., cover less space, avoid putting another sheet in the typewriter for a few more words as I at least hope there will only be. There’ve always been so many things to do. For instance with only my right index finger to type with I never could write very fastto say what I want to when I think of it, before I forget it or how to say it; I sometimes say 2 things at about the same time, in two columns. It’ll be from not deciding or being unable to decide quickly anyway what to say first, or next. Or an after thought might as well be an insert, and thus go in the margin, especially when otherwise you’d need one or more extra words to refer to a topic again (areas: p.149).

  Here is a good instance of how a textual parataxis that one associates with the Pound/ Olson tradition can be read differently by a poet for whom the act of changing a sheet of paper or typing a few more words is a considerably more difficult task. The desire to render the phenomenological moment remains the same for Eigner and Olson, and certainly the look of the page is similar, but the physical circumstance of writing must be factored in as well.

  THE VOICE OF REASON: SUSAN SCHWEIK

  1. A note on what I mean by “disability.” For two very useful summaries of the history and politics of the definition of the term, see Johnstone 1998: pp.5–13 and Epstein 1995: pp.13–17. Epstein reprints and analyzes a 1993 U.S. National Institute of Health chart illustrating some crucial distinctions between the terms impairment, disability and handicap as they have been defined in the contemporary literature of physical health and rehabilitation. The watershed definition is that of the World Health Organization in 1980, with its three-part distinction between impairment (defined as “any loss or abnormality of psychological, physical, or anatomical structure or function”), disability (difficulty with tasks) and handicap (social disadvantage resulting from impairment or disability). Epstein compares this with the later revisions suggested by the U.S. National Advisory Board on Medical Rehabilitation Research in 1993, in which “functional limitation” takes the place of disability, and disability comes to describe what the WHO had called handicap: the range of social, cultural and environmental arrangements that stigmatize, isolate and oppress people whose bodies deviate from a supposed norm in form or function. This 1993 revision is in line with the use of the term disability in much of the work of contemporary disability activists and theorists, and in general I will follow its model. I proceed here with the sense, informed by much recent work in disability studies, that, as Thomson (1997: p.15) puts it, disability “is an overarching and in some ways artificial category...The physical impairments that render someone ‘disabled’ are almost never absolute or static.” Rather, they are “dynamic, contingent conditions.”

  2. The “social model of disability” was formulated in English by members of the Union of the Physically Impaired in the United Kingdom in the 1970s and then sharpened and refined across the next two decades by an international group of scholar-activists. The model is described succinctly by Paul K. Longmore and David Goldberger (2000: p.3). Disability is no longer to be seen, they write, as “the exclusive and inevitable consequence of physiological impairment,” or as “a series of objectively determinable, pathological clinical entities located in...bodies.” Rather, disability is to be understood as a process, “the result of a relationship between individuals with impairments and socially created barriers,” and as a role, “a culturally constructed identity, an elastic social category shaped and reshaped by public policy, societal arrangements, and cultural values.” Some important recent work in disability studies has found the basic binary distinction between (physiological) impairment and (socially constructed) disability far too blunt a tool. “The relatively pragmatic character of the classification,” Henri-Jacques Stiker wrote presciently in 1982, “conceals a deeper analysis, in sociological or anthropological terms, of the collective figuring of disability and of what the issues are in this domain” (Stiker 1999: p.204). Recent work that problematizes the distinction between supposedly objective, material “impairment” and the realm of the social includes Hughes and Paterson 1997 and Barnes, Mercer and Shakespeare 1999. Still, the initial sharp edge of the distinction between impairment and disability allowed for the creation of a powerfully productive “social model” in disability studies, one that can attend to how someone like Miles was “disabled” not by rheumatoid arthritis per se but by a society that sometimes denied her access to schooling, saw her as desexualized, tokenized her, infantilized her and medicalized her.

  3. On the “poetics of presence,” see Morris 1995. As a literary figure, Miles preserved her privacy, relying on what Timothy Morris (1995: p.105) calls “the
larger social institutions of reticence” to maintain a critical decorum that muted, if not entirely suppressed, allusion to her physical impairments. Morris is referring to Elizabeth Bishop’s identity as a closeted lesbian; critical queer theories of the closet resonate here for disability poetry as well. His argument reminds us that the best approach to “closet poetry” is not simply through recuperative reading (bringing Miles “out” as a “poet of disability”) or condemnatory reading (criticizing her for denial) but by reading the poems as “existing...in their own irrecoverable, but identifiable, historical moment” (Morris 1995: p.125)—a moment made no less irrecoverable for me by the fact that late in her life Miles and I were colleagues.

  4. A brief note here on what I mean by “I am nondisabled.” Of course, there is no firm binary divide between “disability” and “ability.” “The longer we become theoretically absorbed in the question of who is disabled and who is not,” writes Deborah Marks (1999: p.18), “the more an answer seems elusive.” In the late 1980s, some activists began to employ the tongue-in-cheek term “temporarily able-bodied” to describe someone like me and to challenge the security of the “able-bodied” position. I prefer the equally tongue-in-cheek term suggested by Marks (1999: p.18), “contingently able-bodied,” which implies the possibility, rather than the inevitability, of a shift in status and which also calls into question “the fantasy of ‘ability’ and the denial of the universality of impairment.” Eli Clare (1999: p.67) offers another suggestive term: “But if I call myself disabled in order to describe how the ableist world treats me as a person with cerebral palsy, then shouldn’t I call nondisabled people enabled? That word locates the condition of being nondisabled, not in the nondisabled body, but in the world’s reaction to that body. This is not a semantic game.”

  5. For discussions of the figure of FDR in the context of disability criticism, see Gallagher 1985 and Poore 2000. On the tropes of the cripple and the overcomer, see Longmore and Goldberger 2000. The critique of the narrative of individual “overcoming” is everywhere, and fundamental, in disability studies. For one forceful summary of this line of analysis, see Linton 1998: pp.17– 22.

  6. I take the concept of affability from Gerber 1993.

  7. The association of woman with machine, not as driver or freely mobile passenger, is atypical of how vehicles (and their “tenors”) work in Miles’ poetry overall. In her insightful review of Miles’ work, Nell Althizer (1994: p.144) notes:

  There may be more internal combustion machines in her poems than in those of male poets more commonly associated with auto mechanics... . We are on the road as we read and going somewhere with the poem as vehicle, and for detour directors the voices Miles creates as ragged with region as those we hear, rumbling from state to state, on the car radio. Much of Miles’ work might be said to explore, sometimes uncritically and sometimes critically, what Celeste Langan calls “the ideology of freedom as automobility”... In Miles’ first small gathering of poems in Trial Balances, for example, we find the famous exploration, in “On Inhabiting an Orange,” of how the most “erect and sure” world traveler “mak[es] down the roads of Earth” only “endless detour,” for “All our roads go nowhere” (Winslow 1935: pp.21-22). Against this critique of automobility we can place the remarkable figure, in “Portrait of the Artist,” of the self as paper blown into the street, at once deprived of agency, inadvertently moved, torn, already imprinted and read, and at the same time delighted in its state of rest, “stirring” in response, and ready—curious, nerved: “I have a body to be caught by the wind” (Winslow 1935: pp.22-23).

  8. On gender and disability, see “Feminist Theory, the Body, and the Disabled Figure” in Thomson 1997, Fine and Asch 1988, and Wendell 1996: pp.57–84.

  9. Robert McRuer’s work on how compulsory heterosexuality is intertwined with “compulsory able-bodiedness” is pertinent here and has influenced my thinking. See McRuer 2001 and McRuer n.d. The most interesting account of Miles and gender is developed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1982).

  10. For instance: a review in Choice in March 1984 comments that “despite the adversity in Miles’ own life, the poems are notable for their consistent focus on happiness rather than on disappointment” (cited in Liang 1986: p.304). The biographical blurb in the first edition of the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women also uses a “despite” clause: “Despite a lifelong struggle with rheumatoid arthritis...” (Gilbert and Gubar 1985: p.1759). There are two significant exceptions that I know of in the literary criticism on Miles: Sedgwick’s essay and Smith 1993—the one important piece that addresses Miles’ disability at some length in the context of a theory of aging.

  11. On the therapeutic theme, see Whyte and Ingstad 1995: p.4. The poem can also be read within the context of the mind/body split in lyric tradition.

  12. See Larney 1995: pp.32–34 for Miles’ account of her father’s “battle” for “compensation from his insurance companies.” I have as yet found no independent corroboration of Miles’ narrative. Whatever it had to do with the facts of what happened between her father and his insurers, her family story tells us much about the importance to the poet of making sense of her father’s death and his relation to a social category of disability.

  13. See, for instance, Miles’ (1983: p.216) Vietnam-era poem “Officers,” in which a campus police officer who smashes “his billy club down on the elbow of my student driver” stays his hand when he recognizes the disabled woman he ordinarily assists.

  14. Compare Sally Stein’s (1994: pp.58–59) argument about the connections between “the experience of illness, the effects of disability, and the making of the woman and the artist” in the case of Dorothea Lange, who said of herself, “I was physically disabled, and no one who hasn’t lived the life of a semi-cripple knows how much that means.” Stein offers an excellent model of the nonreductive, politicized study of the kind of incorporation I explore here. Her epigraph from the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty—“It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world...To understand these transubstantiations we must go back to the actual, working body—not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement”—links her work on Lange to the recent phenomenological turn in disability studies, exemplified by texts as varied as Georgina Kleege’s Sight Unseen (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), Gelya Frank’s Venus on Wheels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) and the work of Russell Shuttleworth.

  15. Compare recent work in disability theater in plays by Susan Nussbaum and Judith Wolffe, in which the relation between assistant and client is more fully explored. Several examples are described and quoted in Lewis 2000.

  16. Note, however, that Miles provisionally praised poets with axes to grind: “She believed that madmen move the world forward, even as they move poetry. ‘They have some axe to grind,’ she wrote, ‘and they are better at the grinding than at the poetry.’ But often too they have more to teach than ‘major’ poets, who ‘tend to use most fully the emphases already accepted and available to them in the poetry of their time’” (Miles 1985: p.10).

  17. David Gerber (1993: p.8) writes of the actor/veteran Harold Russell and others who commonly maintain “an affable public presentation of self that is, in effect, acting, the purpose of which is to put able-bodied people at ease during their first encounters. But this affability is not an end in itself. For it is accompanied by ‘display and avowal,’ a presentation of the body that openly challenges the ablebodied stranger to confront visible physical differences and move beyond them—or, failing that, to move away.”

  18. Carolyn Smith (1993: p.275) points to an early Miles poem, “Dec. 7, 1941,” written on the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which contrasts the “little wars” of civilians—including the fight of “crutch with stair”—with the wars of soldiers.

  19. The citations given in the Oxford English Dictionary for “——is my middle name
” all come from sources like Agatha Christie novels, as John Shoptaw has pointed out to me.

  OULIPO AT THE LAUNDROMAT: DENISE LETO

  1. Oulipo—the Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle or “Workshop for Potential Literature”—was co-founded in Paris in the early 1960s by mathematician and writer Raymond Queneau and Francois Le Lionnais. Oulipian writers impose constraints such as “slenderizing,” for example, removing the letter “r” or “N + 7,” in which a writer takes an existing poem, and substitutes each of the substantive nouns with a noun appearing seven nouns away in the dictionary.

  2. “Foulipo” (Feminist Oulipo), combined feminist body art and the formal procedures of Oulipo. Spahr and Young stripped nude three times during the performance of their text. Noulipo Conference, October 2005.

  3. As described by the poet and scholar Jennifer Scappettone: “The two cycles of oulipian procedures to which Spahr and Young’s reflections are subjected highlight both the materiality of the text itself and its reinflection by the body or machine rehearsing it. The two poets took turns speaking the ‘slenderized’ tracts, forced to sound foreign, maimed, or abject in the process; ‘slenderizing,’ also known as ‘asphyxiation’ or ‘lipossible,’ feeds semantically off of a reduction of flesh routinely tethered to the social injunctions of femininity. The ‘N + 7’ sections of the text were prerecorded and broadcast, disembodied, for contrast, as the two women blandly undressed and redressed themselves...The bodies-becoming naked that bear mute witness to these passages are not unwitting fonts of womanhood but act on the contrary as screens for social truth...Caroline Bergvall proposed that the women’s apparent speech impediment was corrected only when they were seen and not heard, stripped bare, as culture continues to demand them to be seen” (pp.182).