Beauty Is a Verb

by Jennifer Bartlett

  POETICS/ “EXHIBITS” GRETCHEN E. HENDERSON

  1. Ferris, Jim. “The Enjambed Body: A Step Toward a Crippled Poetics.” The Georgia Review 58:2 (Summer 2004): pp.219-233.

  2. Siebers, Tobin. “Disability as Masquerade,” Literature and Medicine 23:1 (Spring 2004): p.8.

  3. Winternitz, Emanuel, ed. Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. p.119.

  4. Henderson, Gretchen. “The Many Faces of Bea.” The Kenyon Review 32:3 (Summer 2010): p.199.

  EXHIBIT H

  1. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “hand” and “breath.”

  2. Euripides. Medea, Hecuba, Hippolytus, The Trojan Women and The Bacchantes. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004. p.32.

  EXHIBIT U

  1. Sennett, Richard. Resistance: The Auditory Culture Reader. Eds. Michael Bull and Les Back. Oxford: Berg, 2003. pp.481-84.

  2. As Aristotle wrote in De Anima: “...the soul is like the hand; for the hand is the instrument of instruments.” Qtd. in Sherman, Claire Richter. Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000. p.7. “Miracle of form and function” refers to Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical studies of hands. Qtd. on p.105.

  3. Ibid., p.23.

  4. Wilson, Frank. The Hand. New York: Vintage, 1998. p.59.

  5. Davies, Robertson. What’s Bred in the Bone. New York: Penguin, 1986.

  6. Swift, Jonathan. “Directions to Servants.” The Works of Dr. Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick’s Dublin: Accurately Corrected by the Best Editions, with the Author’s Life and Character, Notes Historical, Critical and Explanatory, Tables of Contents and Indexes; More Complete Than Any Preceding Edition; in Eight Volumes. Edinburgh: G. Hamilton, 1757. p.363.

  7. Qtd. in Josipovici, Gabriel. Touch. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. p.137.

  8. Crooke, Helkiah. Mikrokosmographia. A Description of the Body of Man...Collected...Out of All the Best Authors of Anatomy. London: Cotes and Sparke, 1615. Qtd. in Sherman, Claire Richter. Writing on Hands, p.25.

  CONTRIBUTORS

  TOM ANDREWS (1961-2001) grew up in West Virginia and taught writing at Ohio University. His first full-length collection of poems, The Brother’s Country, was selected for the National Poetry series by Charles Wright. His second book, The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle, received the 1993 Iowa Poetry Prize. His collected poems, Random Symmetries, were published posthumously in 2002 by Orelin Press. Andrews was also the editor of a collection of essays on William Stafford: The Worth of Local Things. Andrews had hemophilia.

  JENNIFER BARTLETT was a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. Her collections include Derivative of the Moving Image (UNM Press 2007), Anti-Autobiography: A Chapbook Designed by Andrea Baker (Saint Elizabeth Street/Youth-in-Asia Press 2010) and (a) lullaby without any music (Chax 2011). Bartlett has had cerebral palsy since birth.

  SHEILA BLACK was the 2000 U.S. co-winner of the Frost-Pellicer Frontera Prize, given annually to one American and one Mexican poet living along the U.S./Mexico border. Her collections include Love/Iraq (CW Press 2009), House of Bone (CW Press 2007), and a chapbook, How to be a Maquiladora (Main Street Rag Publishers 2007). Black has X-Linked Hypophosphatemia (XLH), a failure to absorb phosphorus that results in symptoms that mimic nutritional rickets.

  JOHN LEE CLARK was born deaf to an all-deaf family and became blind in adolescence. Clark is author of the chapbook Suddenly Slow (Handtype Press 2008) and editor of Deaf American Poetry (Gallaudet University Press 2009). He is married to the deaf cartoonist, Adrean Clark, with whom he runs Clerc Scar, a small press for the signing community.

  NORMA COLE’S most recent books of poetry are Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988—2008 and Natural Light. A book of essays and talks, To Be at Music, just appeared from Omnidawn Press. Cole has received awards from the Gerbode Foundation, Gertrude Stein Awards, Fund for Poetry and Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She teaches at the University of San Francisco. In December 2002 she had a stroke, compromising her speech and her right side.

  MICHAEL DAVIDSON, Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, is author of five books of poetry. He has written extensively on disability issues, most recently, Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (University of Michigan, 2008). His forthcoming book, Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics, will be published in November 2011 by Wesleyan University Press.

  AMBER DIPIETRA is arthritically a living fossil. Originally from Tampa, Florida, she works in San Francisco as a disability advocate. Her newest project is Write To Connect—life-writing workshops for radical and everyday embodiments (www.writetoconnect.blogspot.com). Poems and prose pieces by DiPietra have appeared in Make, A Chicago Literary Magazine, Mirage Period (ical), Tarpaulin Sky, Mrs. Maybe, Monday Night and Try!

  KARA DORRIS is a doctoral candidate at the University of North Texas. Her chapbook, Elective Affinities was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2011. Dorris is the editor of Lingerpost, an online journal. Dorris was born with a genetic disorder which causes calcium to form benign tumors on the joints of the bones interfering with normal growth patterns.

  LARRY EIGNER (1927-1996), the author of over seventy-five books and broadsides, was born “palsied from hard birth” (as he phrased it) in Lynn, Massachusetts. With the exception of two teenage years in residence at the Massachusetts Hospital School in Canton, Massachusetts (and summer camp and later two brief airplane trips to St. Louis and San Francisco), Eigner spent his first fifty years at home in his parents’ house at 23 Bates Road, Swampscott, Massachusetts (two blocks from the Atlantic Ocean), where he was cared for by his mother, Bessie, and his father, Israel, and where he came to do his writing (on his 1940 Royal manual typewriter, with right index finger and thumb) in a space prepared for him on the glassed-in front porch (where he could observe and contemplate everything that was going on, within the range of his seeing and hearing and imagining), basically every day.

  JILL ALEXANDER ESSBAUM is the author of several collections of poetry including Harlot (No Tell Books, 2007) and Necropolis (NeoNuma Arts, 2008). She teaches in the University of California, Riverside, Palm Desert Low Residency M.F.A. program.

  ROBERT FAGAN (1935-2009) received his Ph.D. in English Literature from Columbia University. His poetry and fiction have been published in many literary journals. His publications include a collection of his poetry—Stepping Out (Red Moon Press, 2007)— from which the selections in this anthology were taken and several books of poetry, fiction and literary criticism. He contracted chronic Guillian-Barre syndrome as a young man.

  JIM FERRIS is author of Facts of Life and The Hospital Poems, which Edward Hirsch selected as winner of the Main Street Rag Book Award in 2004. His book Slouching Towards Guantanamo was published by Main Street Rag in 2011. Past president of the Society for Disability Studies, Ferris currently holds the Ability Center Endowed Chair in Disability Studies at the University of Toledo.

  KENNY FRIES is the author of The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory; Body, Remember: A Memoir and two books of poems: Anesthesia and Desert Walking. He is also the editor of Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out. Fries received a grant in innovative literature from Creative Capital for his new book Genkan: Entries into Japan. He teaches in the MFA creative writing program at Goddard College.

  LISA GILL is the author of five books of poetry. Her most recent collection, Caput Nili: How I Won the War And Lost My Taste for Oranges, recounts how Gill fought to get her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 2003. Gill is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the New Mexico Literary Arts Gratitude Award, an Achievement Award from the University of New Mexico, and the Red Shoes Award. She serves as artistic director for Local Poets Guild in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

  C. S. GISCOMBE’S poetry books are Prairie Style, Two Sections from Practical Geography, Giscome Road, Here, At Large and Po
stcards; his prose book—about Canada—is Into and Out of Dislocation. C. S. Giscombe was the 2010 recipient of the Stephen Henderson Award in poetry, given by the African-American Literature and Culture Society. He has worked as a taxi driver, a hospital orderly, a railroad brakeman and edits Epoch at Cornell University. He teaches poetry at the University of California, Berkeley.

  ONA GRITZ is a poet, columnist and the author of two children’s books. In 2007, she won the Inglis House poetry contest and the Late Blooms Poetry Postcard competition. Her poetry chapbook, Left Standing, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2005. Gritz’s essays have appeared recently in The Utne Reader, More and The Bellingham Review. Her monthly column on mothering and disability can be found online at www.literarymama.com. Gritz has cerebral palsy.

  GRETCHEN E. HENDERSON received the 2010 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Prize for her Galerie de Difformité, forthcoming from &NOW Books. Henderson recently was awarded a two-year Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at MIT and invites participation in the collaborative deformation of her Galerie de Difformité at difformite.wordpress.com. She has lived with dystonia for over a decade.

  LAURA HERSHEY (1962-2010) was a Colorado-based poet and writer, activist and mother with spinal muscular atrophy. Her poems recently appeared in Gertrude, Shakespeare’s Monkey Review, Trillium Literary Journal, and in the anthologies Fire in the Soul: 100 Poems for Human Rights and Their Buoyant Bodies Respond. She held an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Spark Before Dark, her most recent poetry chapbook, is published by Finishing Line Press. Her website is www.laurahershey.com.

  CYNTHIA HOGUE’S most recent collections are The Incognito Body (2006), which includes the title sequence about contracting rheumatoid arthritis that is excerpted in this anthology, Or Consequence (2010) and When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina, interview-poems and photographs (2010, with Rebecca Ross). In 2003, she joined the Department of English at Arizona State University as the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Currently, she is working on a collection of essays entitled Wayward Thinking: Notes on Poetry and Poetics.

  ANNE KAIER’S recent work appears in The Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Bellingham Review, Under the Sun, Philadelphia Poets, American Writing and other venues. Her chapbook, In Fire, was published in 2005. Holding a Ph.D. from Harvard University, she teaches literature and creative writing at Arcadia University and Rosemont College. She has lamellar ichthyosis, a rare skin disorder caused by a genetic mutation which causes her body to make too many skin cells that do not shed normally.

  PETRA KUPPERS is Artistic Director of the Olimpias Performance Research Series and Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. Her academic publications include The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art (2007), Community Performance: An Introduction (2007) and Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape (2011). A poetry/cross-genre book, Cripple Poetics: A Love Story, with Neil Marcus and Lisa Stickman, appeared with Homofactus Press in 2008. Kuppers is a wheelchair user, and lives with pain and fatigue.

  STEPHEN KUUSISTO is director of the Renee Crown Honors Program at Syracuse University. He is the author of the award-winning memoirs Planet of the Blind and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening. His first collection of poems, Only Bread, Only Light is available from Copper Canyon Press, which will soon publish a collection of political poems about disability, Letters to Borges.

  LAURIE CLEMENTS LAMBETH’S debut collection of poems, Veil and Burn, won the 2006 National Poetry Series. A poet who has lived with multiple sclerosis since she was a teenager, Lambeth holds Ph.D. and M.F.A. degrees from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, where she was awarded Michener and Barthelme fellowships. She is currently working on a memoir and her second collection of poems, Bright Pane. She teaches at the University of Houston and at Inprint Houston.

  ALEX LEMON is the author of Happy: A Memoir and three collections of poetry: Mosquito, Hallelujah Blackout and Fancy Beasts. His writing has appeared in Esquire, The Believer, The Huffington Post, Dallas Morning News and numerous other publications. A recipient of a 2005 literature fellowship from the NEA, he lives in Ft. Worth, Texas, where he teaches at Texas Christian University.

  DENISE LETO is a poet and senior editor at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work has appeared in Puerto del Sol; Wolf Magazine; Arts Council of England; Aufgabe; and Xantippe. She was guest editor for Sinister Wisdom, artist in residence at Djerassi, a reader/sound artist at “Breaking Ranks, Human Nature,” Headlands Center for the Arts, and a fellow for the University of Michigan’s Symposium, “Movement, Somatics and Writing.” A collaborative chapbook, Waveform, is forthcoming from Kenning Editions. She moves through the world with dystonia.

  RAYMOND LUCZAK is the author and editor of more than ten books, including Assembly Required: Notes from a Deaf Gay Life (RID Press). His four collections of poetry include St. Michael’s Fall (Deaf Life Press), This Way to the Acorns (Clerc Scar), Mute (A Midsummer Night’s Press) and Road Work Ahead (Sibling Rivalry Press). His novel Men with Their Hands (Queer Mojo) won first place in the Project: QueerLit 2006 Contest. A playwright and filmmaker, he lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His web site is www.raymondluczak.com.

  BERNADETTE MAYER was born in 1945 in Brooklyn, New York. She received her B.A. from the New School for Social Research in 1967. From 1972 to 1974, Mayer and conceptual artist Vito Acconci edited the journal O TO 9. With Lewis Warsh, she edited United Artists Press. She has taught writing workshops at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York City for many years and she served as the Poetry Project’s director during the 1980s.

  JOSEPHINE MILES (1911-1985) received her B.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley and went on to continue her academic career there, becoming a professor of English and the first woman to be tenured there. Miles’ poetry spanned over forty years from the publication of Lines at Intersection (1939) to Coming to Terms (1979). Her work was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In addition to poetry Miles was a scholar of grammar and rhetoric as well as working in the field of literary criticism. Miles lived with rheumatoid arthritis from the age of two.

  VASSAR MILLER (1924-1998) received B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Houston. Miller’s first book of poetry, Adam’s Footprint, appeared in 1956, and in 1961 she was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In 1985, Miller edited and published Despite This Flesh, the first anthology of poetry about disability, intended for use by teachers. Her work culminated in the publication of her collected poems If I Had Wheels Or Love (SMU Press 1991). The Vassar Miller Prize for poetry is awarded each year by the University of North Texas Press. Miller had cerebral palsy.

  RUSTY MORRISON’s After Urgency won the 2010 Tupelo Dorset Prize. the true keeps calm biding its story (Ahsahta 2008) won the 2008 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and The Ahsahta Press 2007 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, selected by Peter Gizzi; the 2007 Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, selected by Susan Howe; and the 2009 Northern California Book Award for Poetry. Her first poetry collection, Whethering, won the Colorado Prize for Poetry (Center for Literary Publishing 2004), selected by Forrest Gander. She is co-publisher of Omnidawn Publishing.

  MICHAEL NORTHEN is the facilitator of the Inglis House Poetry Workshop, editor of the annual Inglis House poetry contest chapbook series and editor of Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability and Poetry. An educator for over forty years, in addition to adults with physical disabilities, he has taught women who are on public assistance, prisoners, and rural and inner-city children. Much of the material in his essay in this anthology is taken from his doctoral dissertation, Disability Literature: Its Origin, Current State and Potential Application to School Curriculum.

  DANIELLE PAFUNDA is the author of Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies (Noemi Press), My Zorba (Bloof Books), Pretty Young Thing
(Soft Skull Press) and the forthcoming Manhater (Dusie Press Books). She is a member of the board of directors of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and an assistant professor of gender and women’s studies and English at the University of Wyoming.

  SUSAN SCHWEIK is professor of English and associate dean of arts and humanities at University of California at Berkeley. Her book The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public is out in paperback in 2011 from New York University Press.

  DANIEL SIMPSON currently provides technical support for the Library of Congress’ digital talking book download service for the blind and serves as access technology consultant to the Free Library of Philadelphia. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Cortland Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Atlanta Review, The Louisville Review and Margie, among others. His recently completed poetry manuscript is entitled Inside the Invisible. He has been blind since birth.

  HAL SIROWITZ is the author of four collections of poetry: Mother Said; My Therapist Said; Before, During and After; and Father Said (Soft Skull Press). A prose piece on living with Parkinson’s appeared in a 2010 issue of the Manhattan Review. He is in many anthologies, including Billy Collin’s Poetry 180, Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems and Poetry in Motion from Coast to Coast. Sirowitz is former poet laureate of Queens and is married to the writer Minter Krotzer.

  ELLEN MCGRATH SMITH teaches literature and writing at the University of Pittsburgh and in Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic program for women writers. Her critical work has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, American Book Review, and Pittsburgh Quarterly. Smith’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: Cerise, Weave, The Same, The Best of the Prose Poem, Southern Poetry Review, Pittsburgh Quarterly and others. Smith is also the reviews editor for Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics. She has dealt with neurological hearing impairment since childhood.