This correspondence occurred during Fall 2013, and concerns the links between disability studies and poetics. Michael was living in Newcastle, England and Nicole in Vancouver, Canada. We make reference to an essay of Michael’s, “Cleavings,” which starts with Emily Dickinson’s poetry and deals with debates in Deaf culture over the phenomenon of “deaf gain,” and to an essay of Nicole’s, “stuck in the acentred gesture” (in Tracing the Lines: Reflections on Contemporary Poetics and Cultural Politics in Honour of Roy Miki),1 which considers the figural language of disability in a poem by Roy Miki.
Nicole Markotić: I wish for a poetry that leans and hinges on the notion of disability, on a poetics that evokes the varied embodied forms of body and poem. What, for example, does disability theory have to say about poetry that is not categorizable as “disability poetry”? I find it telling that the word “accessible” straddles the idea of physical bodies making their way through the world, as well as being a metaphor for how one should be able to read “difficult” poetry. You take on such possibilities when you discuss Emily Dickinson, invoking “cleave” as a contranym that works as a disability crux in her writing.
Michael Davidson: We share similar concerns, both with poetics and with disability issues. One issue that I see as problematic in many recent attempts to link the two fields is a too-easy equation of formal disruption and physical difference — as though strategies of dislocation, erasure, non sequitur and interruption are equivalent to physical and cognitive impairments. Thematic representations of disability notwithstanding, we do need some sort of account of how poetic form aligns with a politics of different embodiment. We’re trying to get at the problem of difficulty in contemporary poetry. Is it fair to use a disabling metaphor for the reading process? The cynic in me says, well, do all readers feel so “invited,” or do they turn away from such difficulty and seek more familiar ground?
In your essay on Roy Miki, you lean your reference on the incarnational metaphor. That may be the most salient (and ancient) connection between poetics and the body. We’ve spent so much time dealing with the aesthetic implications of this trope that we forget its concrete embodiment in Christ, a man disabled on the cross. “Bearing a cross” is a metaphor for the burden of living with the disability of being not God, a mortal — someone whose spirit is encased in a body. By developing that trope through Miki’s poetry you suggest all sorts of ways that poets link their “problem language” to the “problem body.” That is the true Logos.
NM: A recent Coca-Cola faux pas hinges on a version of “faithful” logos. Apparently, Coca-Cola was promoting its product in Canada using a bi-lingual marketing strategy, printing two randomly generated words (one in French, one in English) on the backs of bottle lids. Even though they “screened” each word to be “appropriate” (i.e., they made sure each language did not include “bad” words), a woman in Edmonton opened her Vitamin Water to read the words “You Retard” (“retard” means “late” in French). The words aren’t supposed to go together, but it somehow never occurred to anyone at Coke that English and French might work together, and in unusual ways. As a poet, I find such seemingly random word pairings intriguing. In Coke’s case, they reveal the underpinnings of corporate thinking: that poetry as commerce (i.e., as a marketing strategy rather than artistic endeavour) can be a “fun” way to sell a product. While the words are culturally and linguistically specific, the corporate machinery depends on an asocial context. As a result of the bad press, Coke immediately distanced itself from the very device it generated: issuing a public apology, and cancelling the entire marketing scheme. Partly because there may be future kerfuffles, but also because a very real experience disturbed a “poetic” game. The woman who received the “message” has a sister who is developmentally delayed.
MD: You’re so right that what for Coke is a marketing ploy is an insult to others. And yet what Coke is doing is exactly what conceptual poets are doing — taking randomly “found” linguistic materials and refusing to edit or impose restrictions on their odd connections. I wonder what would happen if Tan Lin or Kenneth Goldsmith or some Flarfist came up with a Google search that yielded “You Retard.” I guess they’d leave it in whatever text they were generating, using the same principle as Coke did to generate its produce. Worth pondering whether Conceptualism is a critique of consumerism or its most aesthetic product.
NM: Yes, it does seem that some conceptual poetry re-establishes the machinery of consumerism. I do think that Flarf and conceptual poets aim to reveal the underbelly (so to speak) of the capitalist system, so it seems ironic that the concept of “uncreative writing,” in a way, rejuvenates aesthetic focus by worshipping the process to the point of refusing editing, etc. And what, then, of the body in poetry? The measurable foot, the breath line, the unenjambable line breaks? The body in poetry gets to the crux of “accessible” poetry.
MD: “And what of the body [in conceptualism]”? By making everyday signage the raw material of new work, conceptualism may be attempting to reinstate the various frames that erase the body. At the same time there seems little interest among practitioners in embodiment unless it is framed through some communicational system. On the other hand, by emphasizing affect (“boring” “uncreative”) conceptualists may have tapped into the limits of what counts as significance in more mainstream verse. The other side of disinterest is empathy.
NM: On that note, in Oliver Sacks’s memoir, A Leg to Stand On, there’s a section — as he’s waiting in Norway to be transported to England for an operation — when a doctor dances into the room, performing ballet-like moves. He leaps onto the bedside table, then presses Sacks’s hands onto his own legs, to feel the scars on both thighs. “Me, too,” the doctor says to Sacks. “Skiing . . . See!” And he makes another “Nijinksi-like leap.”2 Sacks talks about how the vision of that embodied Norwegian surgeon inspired him as a patient because, “in his own person he stood for health, valor, humor.”3 The doctor’s empathy enacts a form of nurturing that goes beyond just speaking about getting better. What reassures Sacks so completely is the doctor’s demonstration of health and vitality, despite the performance being of a nature (i.e. dancing) that Sacks had never, before his accident, longed to emulate. So Sack’s notion of “perfect recovery” was not only to recover the mobility he’d just lost, but also to recover infinite possibilities of ideal agility; recovery, for Sacks, meant a return to that idealized space where all art and movement is possible, even when not necessarily sought-after.
In a way, concept-based poetry renders language directional. You also write, in “Cleavings,”4 about the need to “look both ways” to discover traffic you don’t hear, and I’m reminded of a story Susan Holbrook tells of taking the C-Train in Calgary, and reading the signs warning “Look Both Ways for Trains” as “Look Both Ways for Trans” when she was working on poetry and translation. I find the idea of bidirectional perception (if not tri-directional — relying on multiple senses to “belong” in this world) an invigorating one (and one that has crept into my own poetry), and one that fits your own idea of “cleaving” — the word or body going in many directions at once. Perhaps this is what Sacks was after more than merely achieving reassurance that he would regain a lost potential: the body not as static thing, but as motion, turmoil, protest.
I’m struck by what you write about Georgina Kleege’s book Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller.5 You say that Kleege describes how she hates Helen Keller (how people invoked Keller to set impossibly high “cheerful standards” for disabled people). I find Kleege’s frustration and fury thought-provoking, in that it addresses the clichéd image of Helen Keller as the “super-crip” who has a passive acceptance and ebullient character, and Kleege taps into the malevolence buried in such expectations. But I also find it comical that people do invoke Keller as a model of acquiescence, when her life was nothing of the sort. Not only do all tales about her childhood present her as wild and unruly; even after she gained the ability to use language, Keller was an incessant and vocal socialist, refusing to meekly reflect lady-like opinions. It seems to me that her temper as a child in many ways directly led to her adult activist temperament.
MD: I like what you say about Keller’s “incessant and vocal” socialism and her “refusing to meekly reflect lady-like opinions.” Since our focus is poetics, would you see that refusal as something that occurs in poetry as well — its refusal of normative forms of expression and communication? The Sacks memoir strikes me as another kind of interruption, this time of language itself, replaced by embodied acts that replace speech. I gather that’s what interests you about this incident — not its triumphalist conclusion (if he can recover to dance and leap, so can I) but the doctor’s use of his body to illustrate the fact. What you suggest by these examples is how disability intervenes in language, representation, and purposive action. The body “going in many directions at once.” That’s a fascinating formulation of the body loosed from its progress toward . . . health, improvement, reproduction, whatever. The image of the person with cerebral palsy comes to mind as a body going in “many directions at once” — or the person with a stutter, perhaps, or the autist repeating actions over and over again.
I gave a talk for the American Studies group yesterday in which I used, among other texts (M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!6 and Mark Nowak’s Shut Up! Shut Down!7), Amanda Baggs’s video In My Language.8 Afterwards, a member of the audience said he found Baggs’s video offensive since he has a daughter with severe cerebral palsy who cannot communicate at all whereas Baggs obviously has a very clear, sophisticated sense of language. I think he was offended by Baggs’s claim to speak in her “native tongue” of repeated gestures, while exposing in her “translation” a subtle understanding of English. I think that the person complaining was feeling that Baggs was indulging herself when there are other disabled people — such as his daughter — who have no such options. I was somewhat taken aback by this response since it implies that if a disabled person like Baggs is able to manipulate neurotypical attitudes toward language, this somehow diminishes the lives of those who lack that ability. I was using Baggs as an example of poetry in which the body is strategically disappeared so that it may be replaced by a digital and video interface, erasing and reconstructing the body on her own terms.
NM: Yes, poetry invites or allows for non-normative forms of expression. Lately, there’s been a lot of discussion on the web about “accessible poetry”; I’m thinking in particular of Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s essay “On Poetry and Accessibility.”9 And I’m trying to get a handle on how accessibility has become the metaphor for so-called “transparent” poetry, poetry that does not challenge norms of expression.
An oft-invoked example of accessibility is an office building with or without a wheelchair ramp. In contemporary North America, we want employees to get to work, we want to offer and sustain a civil right to work, and the ramp in question allows a productive employee to get on with that work. In this example, it seems to me that accessible means productive. But for me poetry can be the opposite of this kind of production model, in that poetry can throw a linguistic wrench into the assembly line. Poetry, in fabulous ways, disables production. This poetic idea of “access” insists on notions of inclusion and exclusion. So where might the poem — as literary prosthetic — transport readers, as it defamiliarizes (however welcome or user-friendly that defamiliarization)? I’m interested in that sense of fluctuation and change that envelops a sense of body and language, of body in language.
I’m trying to get to the body of the body. For example, I’m intrigued by the note that W. C. Williams adds at the end of “Book One” of Paterson: “In order apparently to bring the meter still more within the sphere of prose and common speech, Hipponax ended his iambics with a spondee or a trochee instead of an iambus, doing thus the utmost violence to the rhythmical structure.” Williams notes that these were called “choliambi,” a “lame or limping iambics” suited to “deformed morality.”10
Williams invokes the choliambus (an iambic verse in which the last foot is a spondee or trochee instead of an iamb) as a distortion, “deformed or mutilated verses” that he compares to “cripples” but also that invigorate the line, bringing unexpected energy into conventional style. As a poet, Williams is trying to get to the things in ideas. As a doctor, Williams also recognizes that ideas about normal and abnormal may attract ideas about morality, but the line — distorted, mutilated, snarling — must reinvent itself ceaselessly.
MD: Your invocation of Williams’s use of Symonds makes me wonder if his interest is provoked by the series of strokes that he incurred while writing Paterson. In fact his theoretical interests in metrics coincide with those strokes — as though he is trying to give form to lesions in speech and writing that modified his line and, perhaps, inspired his triadic stanza. I suppose Williams was always interested in the “variable foot,” but in light of his variable speech, the concept takes on new meaning.
And yes, I think that the social model of disability does address the social model of individuality and success in the U.S. Spending time in England as we exchange these posts makes me realize how ludicrous the negative U.S. attitude toward universal health care — and, indeed, welfare in general — appears to the rest of the world. The twin ideologies of self-reliance and ableism are definitely reinforced by the bottom line. As you say, poetry “disables production,” but it also — in its more innovative forms — disables self-reliance as well and calls for more collaborative forms of reading and writing.
1 Nicole Markotić, “‘stuck in the acentred gesture’: Disabling Roy Miki’s Poetry,” in Tracing the Lines: Reflections on Contemporary Poetics and Cultural Politics in Honour of Roy Miki, eds. Maia Joseph, Christine Kim, Larissa Lai, and Christopher Lee (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2012), 38–47.
2 Oliver Sacks, A Leg to Stand On (New York: Harper, 1984), 25.
3 Ibid.
4 Michael Davidson. “Cleavings: Critical Losses in the Politics of Gain” (unpublished manuscript).
5 Georgina Kleege, Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller (Washington: Gallaudet UP, 2006).
6 M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! as told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng (Toronto: Mercury Press, 2008).
7 Mark Nowak, Shut Up! Shut Down! (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004).
8 Amanda Baggs, “In My Language,” YouTube Video, Posted January 14, 2007, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc.
9 Joshua Marie Wilkinson, “On Poetry and Accessibility,” Evening Will Come 27 (March 2013).
10 William Carlos Williams, Paterson (New York: New Directions, 1946), 40.