The Poetics of Disability (syllabus)

The Poetics of Disability

“We have not yet determined what a body can do.”—Baruch Spinoza

“My body is the problem.”—Amber DiPietra

                       

Course Description The 17^th Century Dutch Philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, wrote that “we have not yet determined what a body can do,” thus foreshadowing many of the problems of modern scientific and medical discourse. I would like to take his comment in an affirmative sense, in the spirit of the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari whom often quoted this very phrase—that specific bodies contain capacities unbeknownst to us which may advance our knowledge about the world, but that they may also challenge definitions of “the human” which have worked against a more inclusive and just society. In the first weeks of this course we will consider how modernist aesthetics are forged through thinking about disability. Particularly important will be Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of “enstrangement,” which he recognizes in his essay “Art as Device” as a defining effect of poetic language, and Martin Heidegger’s idea of “conspicuousness,” which facilitates knowledge of a thing’s essence. To what extent may these texts allow us to explore disability as an aesthetic problematic echoing modernist preoccupations with a discourse of the senses, formal innovation, difficulty, estrangement, and constraint? Do the tropes of alienation and sensual derangement so fundamental to modernist aesthetic practices anticipate a generative principal embodied by certain disabilities? To what extent, perhaps most importantly, do the bodies of specific modernist practitioners necessitate innovation as a result of their embodiment? Following this we will encounter a series of texts that may help us to problematize “ableism”—any thinking or practice that essentializes human capability, often in the service of the oppression of a particular group—and explore how discourse about disability undergirds our most fundamental social, political, ethical, and aesthetic practices. From these theoretical premises, we will move to a robust discourse from the past 60 years regarding poetics and disability, and encompassing a range of practices, communities, and cultures. Beauty is a Verb, a recently published anthology edited by Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black, and Michael Northern, will help us to historicize how discourse of and about disability has evolved, from early practitioners such as Larry Eigner and Josephine Miles, to contemporary poets identified as disabled, including Bartlett, Jordan Scott, David Wolach, Denise Leto, Amber DiPietra, and others. To what extent does disability radicalize poetry as a field, especially claims for innovation traditionally made by an “avant-garde” and its critical proponents? To what extent, as well, may a poetics of disability help us to interrogate the ableist unconscious of modernity?

Required Texts

Beauty is a Verb 

Hannah Weiner’s Open House 

Jennifer Bartlett’s Autobiography/Anti-autobiography 

Amber DiPietra’s and Denise Leto’s Waveform 

Jordan Scott’s Blert 

Highly Recommended:

Michael Davidson’s Concerto for the Left Hand 

Alison Kafer’s Feminist Queer Crip 

Petra Kuppers’ The Scar of Visibility 

Tobin Siebers’ Disability Theory 

Signing the Body Poetic 

The Disability Studies Reader (4^th Edition) 

Schedule

Week 1

Readings: Selections from Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time and Victor Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose (PDF)

Week 2

Readings: Selections from Tobin Siebers’ Disability Theory and Michael Davidson’s Concerto for the Left Hand (PDF)

Week 3

Readings: Selections from Robert Kocik’s Supple Science: “Overcoming Fitness” and “Enwreathing Developmental Difficulty and the Feldenkrais Method” (PDF)

Week 4

Readings: Selections from Madeline Gins’ Helen Keller or Arakawa (PDF)

Week 5

Readings: Beauty is a Verb pages 15-85

Week 6

Readings: Beauty is a Verb pages 89-164

Week 7

Readings: Jennifer Bartlett’s Autobiography/Anti-autobiography and Larry Eigner selections (PDF and online TBA)

Week 8

Readings: Aaron Williamson’s Hearing Things (PDF) and Signing the Body Poetic selections (PDF)

Week 9

Readings: Hannah Weiner’s Open House

Week 10

Readings: Beauty is a Verb pages 257-365

Week 11

Readings: Selections from Eleni Stecopoulos’ Armies of Compassion and David Wolach’s Hospitalogy (PDFs)

Week 12

Readings: Jordan Scott’s Blert & Amber DiPietra’s and Denise Leto’s Waveform

Week 13

Readings: Introduction to Alison Kafer’s Feminist Queer Crip

Week 14

--Presentations of final work.

______

Further Readings

Duriel Harris’ Amnesiac

Sheila Black’s “Six Poets With Disabilities”

Jillian Weise

Lisa Robertson’s “On Form”

Catherine Pendergrast’s “Unexceptional Schizophernic”

Pattie McCarthy’s nulls

Peter Reading’s C

Carrie Sandahl’s “Queering the Crip or Crippling the Queer?”

Amelia Baggs’ In My Language

Liv Mammone

Markie Burnhope

Kit Schluter’s “Bamboo Spine Notebook”

Yosefa Raz’s “Reading Pain in the Book of Job” (collected in The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics, Hermeneutics; ed. Batnitzky and Pardes)

Denton Welch’s A Voice Through a Cloud

James Schuyler’s “The Payne Whitney Poems”

Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill”

John Donne’s “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions”

Stephanie Gray’s Heart Stoner Bingo

Adrienne Rich’s Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

Hillary Gravendyk’s Harm

James R. Guthrie’s Emily Dickinson’s Vision: Illness and Identity in Her Poetry

David Brazil Feature at ON PDF Archive series

ON Contemporary Practice just posted two new essays by Stephen Novotny and C.J. Martin, both on David Brazil.

The Club

Like in the club

I must imagine

All the people

Waving their arms

In the air

But without arms

Without even an idea

Of what the body is

Introduction for Robert Kocik, 1/21/2015, at the Poetry Project

When I despair of calling myself a poet, and of the state of contemporary poetry at large and within the communities with whom I feel the clearest sense of affinity, I often look to Robert Kocik’s work as a kind of balm, if not an antidote, for what ails me. To quote some of his own language—his work makes our cases “acute,” rather than “chronic,” intensifying the conditions of a dis-eased collective body, treating the patient with the help of a prosodic pharmacy. Where much poetry stops short at rhetorical pyrotechnics and immanent critique, his own seeks to transform the very character of our bodies and spirits through prosodic expression.

The artist Andrea Fraser once famously declared that something is art if she declares it such. In a similar spirit, Ben Kinmont and other contemporary artists have wondered what happens when the artist “becomes something else,” which is to say, assumes a different occupation or mode of living. Like Fraser and Kinmont, Robert seeks poetic practice in an expanded field that may make visible if not somewhat ridiculous the various thresholds of poetic discourse traditionally defined in terms of lyrical persona, page poetry, and inherited models of performance. More radically, he identifies the thresholds where poetry passes into science, architecture, medicine, and choreography, redefining the role of the poet through practical activity.

Given the ambitious if not impossible scope of Robert’s lifework, it is not surprising that he gives poetry readings so infrequently and has published so sparingly. This makes witnessing him perform his work solo all the more astonishing. Where the intentions of the prosody, which would attempt to influence our genetic expression and overturn the foundations of our legal and political conduct, become instantly felt through his use of phonemics, incantation, and amulets. Much like watching Daria Fain dance her own choreography, with Robert’s rare reading appearances it is as if hearing his prosody, a communalized property of myself and his many other collaborators, return to its point of origin—uncannily appropriate.

It is common knowledge that the human brain, except in cases of psychic phenomena and extreme experience, harnesses only a small portion of its total potential. Similarly, as Robert points out, the range of poetic expression is severely circumscribed by the vast majority of poetic practices that would not seek a more expansive exploration of prosody, the prosodic encompassing a totality of potential within and without embodiment, on and off the page, in silence and in articulation. I hope you will hear the sound of that potential tonight with me. 

Songs

Are we one

Or do we believe

In the state

When I sing

With you pressed

To my chest

Striving for protection

Spirit and image

Before we were separate

The world ended 

My world began

In infancy

You named me

Not I you

Fuck the cops

And the state

I love you

Singing all the songs 

I didn't know I knew

Charnel Ground (II)

Anna Halprin says that before she became sick with cancer she ”lived to make art,” but when her cancer went into remission she “made art to live”

My father had to have imaging done on his prostate today, to make a 3D model for upcoming surgery; my mom’s school system is being gutted again, as it has been routinely since I was in elementary school

These austerity plans ‘bring the war home’, evidence of how we don’t choose to live, how we have chosen death over life

Thinking of the opening shot of Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, I wonder what it would be like if everyone cared for just one thing every day

A tree, a little plot of land—one can imagine this on a considerably larger scale

Home care for one’s parents is becoming more common in our current economic climate

Conversely, in increasing numbers adult children have been moving back in with their parents

Halprin diagnosed her cancer through imaging, drawing; she exorcized it through dance

Can the poem also diagnose?

The only thing bourgeois about dying is that we presume our life to be more important than anyone else’s, more worthy of mourning

(Hard not to feel that way obviously with friends, lovers, family)

There is nothing “banal” about suicide, Cassandra writes me

When I met with Bruce years ago he told me about how he cared for Philip Whalen in hospice, and how Whalen had a dream about “Clorox,” which he interpreted as the old Taoist “uncarved block,” returning him to a state of being before experience, all his bad feelings cleansed

Against myths of autonomy, patients of history, the world could be our hospital

Wanting everyone to die right so we can all live right

Replacing the pronouns isn’t the only problem

It is a symptom, like discourse fails to encounter

Like it can't understand how we feel our consent

Write like you are in hospice—imminently cared for.

—composed spring 2012-present, for my parents

Shifter Magazine's Dictionary of the Possible (Discussion at New School)

Occult

Discussion Leaders: Mimi Winick & Thom Donovan
Saturday, Nov 1, 4-6 pm
The Bark Room at the New School
2 West 13th Street, Room M101

Recommended Reading:
Fred Moten “Black Mo’nin'” pg. 59, from Loss edited by David Eng
Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster
Gauri Viswanathan, “Spectrality’s Secret Sharers: Occultism as (Post) Colonial Affect,” in Beyond the Black Atlantic: Relocating Modernization and Technology. Ed. Walter Goebel

Brandon Shimoda's "For Beth Murray"

April 15, 2009*

There is a kind of empathy that so fully transcends both genuine intimacy and imaginative projection that it conjoins the empathic individual to the person or thing or animal under attention with such infusing force that that individual becomes a kind of embracing, breathable liquid. We are, in fact—as individuals, as people—a kind of liquid, an embodied, bone-and-flesh kind of liquid—and yet we are not exactly meant to invent ourselves into the revelation of that fact, anymore than we are meant to be gathered together in this room without our clothes on—shorn of hair and teeth, bled of eye, disarmed, drawn and eviscerated. There is a kind of empathic individual, that by nature of pure, embodied listening and response, makes of herself a pulsing, prismatic community, and by pure, embodied listening and response, transfigures herself into a wilderness—a state alternating between clarified loneliness and voluminous possibility, however the two might be synonymous.

Life is unbearable for its dimension. We measure it both brief and interminable. Yet dimension—or in this sense, duration—is not the province or concern of genuine empathy, nor is it the province or concern of genuine poetry. An island, for example, is singular for the fact that it neither begins nor ends. It is—that is, it is happening; it happens—it receives and lets go. And yet, an island is also not singular at all, for every thing being exactly an island—a body, the inverse of a body, a wilderness, the razing of that wilderness, surrounded by water, and water.

*composed by Brandon Shimoda, on the occasion of his Spare Room series reading with Murray in Portland, OR, 2009. Also check-out Shimoda's page for Murray's The Island.

Impassed

The withered breast

With eyes of love

Do we look at gifts

Of death the eyes

Of a God whose

Gaze freezes red shift

In our veins until

The corpse of a sac

Wriggling calls out

Its new name having

Passed that thresh-

hold impassed

Aren’t we embodying it

To meet this way

In a grave summarizing time

As such crouched because

No one is free

From pain so sing

With me a song

Whose words are chronic

Weaning the lover back

From the gradual black

Red shift frozen before

Life began death began

To take away my love from me

Singing in a cadence

Of the unthinkable.

--for Beth Murray, composed spring 2012