Planet of the Blind

“Creative Writing and Disability Studies: Liminal Epistemologies”

--“Life is a hospital where every patient is obsessed by the desire of changing beds.”
--Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen


1.

What can we learn from poetry about the body and the culture of bodies? Is what we see in a poem merely a figurative illustration of extrinsic historical or political truths or can a poem create a new and unforeseen nexus of identity and consciousness? As scholars concerned with the social construction of disability identity we know instinctively that the answer to the question is determined by our own rhetorical stance toward figuration. A poet is Aristotelian if she’s aiming to look beyond history for the subject of her poem. A poet is essentially Platonic if she is working in the service of verisimilitude. These categories aside we know that Ezra Pound was echoing Aristotle when he said that the poet is “the antennae of the race”. The Aristotelian imagination probes in the unknown space ahead and reports back to the great segmented worm of culture.The poet Richard Wilbur writes: “The mind is like some bat/ Beating about in caverns all alone/ Trying by a kind of senseless wit/ Not to conclude against a wall of stone.” Poetry is instinctive, far-seeing in its peculiar interiority, re-constructing the world that surrounds it. This vision of poetry holds that figurative language is exploratory, (neo)constructionist, progressive, lyrically alive.

2.

Again Baudelaire: “It always seems to me that I should be happy anywhere but where I am, and this question of moving is one that I am eternally discussing with my soul.” One can say that lyric poetry in general is concerned with moving as an operation that defies analysis. The soul is always the totem of irresolvable and competing desires. In poetry the soul is a synonym for the reliquary; it is a place. We position the furniture of our suffering in the soul’s room. But the lyric insists there is life outside the hospital--life beyond the ward. Notice that lyric poetry concerns itself with containment. One can add adjectives that work well with suppression: abject containment, unaware containment, irrational containment—disability studies scholars will recognize this impressionistic terrain as inherently akin to the historic figurative language of disability—the lyric concerns itself with the conditions of individual abjection and is always therefore a fit medium for exploring disability awareness. The modernist Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo wrote the following lyric in the 1930’s as Italy was descending into Fascism:

And Suddenly It’s Evening

Each of us is alone
At the center of the earth,
Pierced by a ray of sunlight,
And suddenly it’s evening.

I don’t know of any more beautiful cris de couer from the Age of Existentialism. My feeling is that lyric discord, rendered almost always in figurative darkness represents the creation of what the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung referred to as “individuation” a state where the conscious and unconscious modes of thought are brought into harmony. The condition of the mind in such poems is fearful, repressed, circumscribed, and lost. The lyric mindscape is blindness whether the poet behind the poem is literally blind or not. The lyric occasion does not represent blindness. It merely works from the epistemological and psychic locus of blindness. I do not mean figurative blindness but the very real step-by-step navigation of the unknown. The urgencies of perception are necessarily reckoned with care.


3.

Claiming disability (Simi Linton’s term) is to claim the lyric. In turn the lyric is the mode of poetry that best resists the falsifications of narrative imprinting. If people with disabilities have been exiled by history, by the architectures of cities and the policies of the state, then the lyric and ironic form of awareness is central to locating a more vital language. The exile that belongs to oneself,/the interior exile…(Richard Howard) We claim disability by lyric impulse. And by lyric impulse we rearrange the terms of awareness. The lyric mode is concerned with momentum rather than certainty. This is the gnomon of lyric consciousness: darkness can be navigated. The claiming of disability is the successful transition from static language into the language of momentum. But of particular importance in this instance is the brevity of the lyric impulse. The urgency of short forms reflects the self-awareness of blocked paths and closed systems of language. The lyric reinvents the psychic occasion of that human urgency much as a formal design in prosody will force a poet to achieve new effects in verse. Igor Stravinsky put it this way: “The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution. We are in a hurry. We must tell the truth about the catastrophe that is human consciousness. And like Emily Dickinson who feared the loss of her eyesight we will tell the truth but “tell it slant”—the lyric writer may not have a sufficiency of time.

4.

Poetry about the body looks beyond the constraints of physicality. The lyric is in this manner a metaphysical pursuit. William Blake’s sick rose is the mandala of consciousness:

O rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

The body is not our own. In lyric time the body is faced with the urgencies of the Elizabethan memento mori. This self-awareness we describe in terms of the body is equivalent to what disability advocates refer to as the condition of being “temporarily abled” but it’s useful to understand this condition as a crucial circumstance of imaginative and spiritual consciousness.
One thinks of T.S. Eliot’s narrator in “Gerontian”: “I an old man,/A dull head among windy spaces.” How should consciousness proceed in the company of the failing body? This has always been the lyric occasion. In her booklength poem an Atlas of the Difficult World Adrienne Rich writes:


I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your
hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.


5.

Lyric consciousness is “stripped” consciousness. The word is menacing because the world is invariably opposed to youth, sexual freedom, multi-racial identities, disabilities, the poor…
In Adrienne Rich’s poem momentum and the deciphering of language are equivalent. The lyric occasion demands a larger future because it is the epistemological equivalent of the alphabet—
a new alphabet, one acquired in transition or in pain. Emily Dickinson thinks of this epistemological circumstance as an equation:


I reason, earth is short,
And anguish absolute,
And many hurt;
But what of that?
I reason, we could die:
The best vitality
Cannot excel decay;
But what of that?
I reason that in heaven
Somehow, it will be even,
Some new equation given;
But what of that?


The lyric intelligence is Emersonian, ”transcendental” and concerned with instinctual knowing. Lyric poetry is not inherently opposed to materialism or the body—but neither is it concerned with the body as the figurative representative of spiritual or divine perfection. The broken body is as good as the one without blemish. But what of that? In this view the body is not a vehicle of transcendence. The lyric is akin to Emerson’s “other half” of man—the mind beyond the body’s confining narrative preoccupations with the establishment of a representational self.

6.

As it became a component of English departments the discipline of creative writing began to be understood as the teaching of craft. But the signature work of contemporary poetry has been concerned with the narrative constraints of identity politics and the languages of social enforcement. Poets as diverse as W.S. Merwin, Gregory Orr, Adrienne Rich, Olga Broumas, Primus St. John, Patricia Goedicke and hundreds of others have turned the lyric impulse toward the (re)visioning of social and intellectual freedom. It seems right that in “claiming disability” the work of poets should occupy more than passing interest to the emerging field of disability studies.
In turn the crucial question is “What can (re)visioning suggest in disability terms?”


7.

Walt Whitman is the progenitor of the “disability memoir.” His discovery of lyric prose, first as a hospice nurse, and then as a man experiencing paralysis represents the creation of a wholly conscious rendering of altered physicality in prose. Whitman begins his reminiscence in a wholly new mode. This is not the metaphorized body of the strapping, ideologically constructed man of robust, democratic labor:

Specimen Days

A HAPPY HOUR'S COMMAND
Down in the Woods, July 2d, 1882. -- If I do it at all I must delay no
longer. Incongruous and full of skips and jumps as is that huddle of
diary-jottings, war-memoranda of 1862-'65, Nature-notes of 1877-'81, with
Western and Canadian observations afterwards, all bundled up and tied by a big
string, the resolution and indeed mandate comes to me this day, this hour, --
(and what a day! what an hour just passing! the luxury of riant grass and
blowing breeze, with all the shows of sun and sky and perfect temperature, never
before so filling me body and soul) -- to go home, untie the bundle, reel out
diary-scraps and memoranda, just as they are, large or small, one after another,
into print-pages. (Whitman 689)


This is the lyric Whitman, the disabled poet working to shape and re-shape his memories as well as his present circumstances. He does so with fragments, jottings, things untied, things untidy, nature notes, bureaucratic memoranda… He is announcing his intention to create a “lyric collage” –and by announcing that this is for the printed page he is also announcing that this is a work of art, one created out of a new urgency.
Here is Whitman again, writing of his increasing paralysis and its effect on his ways of living:

Quit work at Washington, and moved to Camden, New Jersey -- where I have lived since, receiving many buffets and some precious caresses -- and now write these lines. Since then, (1874-'91) a long stretch of illness, or half-illness, with occasional lulls. During these latter, have revised and printed over all my books -- Bro't out "November Boughs" -- and at intervals leisurely and exploringly travel'd to the Prairie States, the Rocky Mountains, Canada, to New York, to my birthplace in Long Island, and to Boston. But physical disability and the war-paralysis above alluded to have settled upon me more and more, the last year or so. Am now (1891) domicil'd, and have been for some years, in this little old cottage and lot in Mickle Street, Camden, with a house-keeper and man nurse. Bodily I am completely disabled, but still write for publication. I keep generally buoyant spirits, write often as there comes any lull in physical sufferings, get in the sun and down to the river whenever I can, retain fair appetite, assimilation and digestion, sensibilities acute as ever, the strength and volition of my right arm good, eyesight dimming, but brain normal, and retain my heart's and soul's unmitigated faith not only in their own original literary plans, but in the essential bulk of American humanity east and west, north and south, city and country, through thick and thin, to the last. Nor must I forget, in conclusion, a special, prayerful, thankful God's blessing to my dear firm friends and personal helpers, men and women, home and foreign, old and young."


In lyric terms this prose is necessary to assure the poet’s survival. Gregory Orr’s useful polarities of lyric incitement come to mind: Whitman is experiencing “extremities of subjectivity” as well as the “outer circumstances [of] poverty, suffering, pain, illness, violence, or loss of a loved one.” As Orr points out: “This survival begins when we "translate" our crisis into language--where we give it symbolic expression as an unfolding drama of self and the forces that assail it” --see Orr's insightful book "Poetry of Survival" the most elegant analysis of crisis recast as fragmentary immanence.

SK



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Goodbye to Jarkko Laine

 

I learned yesterday while nosing around the internet that the Finnish poet Jarkko Laine passed away five years ago. I knew Jarkko only slightly, our paths having crossed when I was a Fulbright scholar in Helsinki during the early Reagan years. Once upon a time when Jarkko was visiting the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa I went with him to Moose Lake Minnesota to visit Robert Bly. Later Jarkko wrote a short essay about the trip for the Finnish magazine Parnasso. (He wrote touchingly of Bly’s affection for the poet David Ignatow, but left out the funniest thing for Bly told a cafe filled with hunting jacket clad Minnesotans that Jarkko was from Russia and was going to steal their blue jeans.)

Jarkko was an inventive and touching ironist--his poems tackled the runaway freight train of the sixties, all that cascading pop culture, but unlike the American “beats” he had a wonderfully Finnish sense--what you might call a homemade depth psychology. He could write lines like: withered leaves fly above the street, death’s butterflies, or, how sad!  Everything! And how cheap to say it out loud! 

Americans don’t think that way. I had planned long ago to translate Jarkko’s poetry into English as I admired his sang froid mitt tenderness. But my own blindness and daily struggle to live kept me from doing that. Then the years took the carriage.  

But I will miss him. He would appreciate this little Chinese translation by Kenneth Rexroth:

 

A Sorrow in the Harem

 

Withered flowers fill the courtyard.

Moss creeps into the great hall.

On both sides everything was said long ago.

The smell of perfume still lingers in the air.

 

Wang Chang Ling

 

 

SK 

 

Disability On Theory Road

--after Pentti Saarikoski

 

In the morning on Theory Road

Ableists and doctrineaire landscapers accosted me

Told me I was sily wanting to go places like everyone else

A little higher up under my apple tree a fawn and her twins nosed fallen fruit

Malice, dressed as a bureaucrat told me to give up

His forehead wavy, eyes quite specific, didn't much like the blind he said

I climbed the steps to the dance floor

Late summer clouds calling me

To dance with them but I lay down on my back

& listened as if my life depended 

Of or Pertaining to Neruda

In the garden of earthly delights

Where sumac and cinnamon ferns

Exhaled like birds or animals

Where odors of humus and granite

Seemed things one could live on

I saw myself

Walking for the long, mineral

Chain gang of the dead,

As if there among the trees

They had elected me to live

On their behalf, upright, lonely,

Oddly bruised,

But walking swiftly

The live one who carries inside him

The carved Russian dolls

Of all the dead.

I went alone in the late October night

Toward a copse where the last sun

Streamed through branches,

A caprice of twilight,

Walked with my head up,

Shoulders squared

Like any living person

without a proper country

& who in turn

Hears the live one

And the dead ones

In the poor drums of his shoes.

S.K.

Graffiti

Sometimes when I sit in a dull meeting

I think of my deathbed

But strangely enough

I do so without sentiment—

I was always sub-rosa

Like tea in a glass;

Whispered, savored alone;

That’s what it is, I think

To be graphein of body

A jigger’s worth of mind …

S.K.

Essay: Summer Solstice

In the old days at the edge of the Finnish woods my father’s father and in turn, his father

Raked the dry weeds and lit a bonfire but they went about their work so cautiously

One might think they were burdened by superstitions.

& yes they kept a spare coffin in the house, eating off of it, using it for a table.

“In these dark times,” they would say. “In these final days…”

& though my father’s father’s father was a Christian

Though he believed in the life everlasting

Hhe was afraid of willful nature.

& while praying they burned that unused coffin.

& the sun dipped to the dark horizon …

S.K.

The Confession

I wasn’t myself today and without forethought of any kind I walked into the tall grass and lay down. Add gold and acid & I’d have an engraving: Hermes Trismegistus dreaming; Carl Jung on holiday—who knows what to call it…"This isn’t me," I thought. "What kind of person lies in the uncut grass in America? Isn’t lying down a confessionof sorts?"

& I lay there sloped in the odors of vegetation unable to imagine my confession. What had I to confess? My foolishness perhaps but even the god inside me was tired of that story. Autumn & the crickets singing during the day. Autumn; crickets; the god inside me; tall grass; foolishness without conceit; a simple half hour while my country wages war & about that time I sensed that I have said all the prayers I have ever known.

S.K.

Walking Swiftly with Robert Bly

In those days I had these coke bottle glasses & I could see a pine cone or a Chinese fan

When I raised them straight to my nose & yet I walked as fast as a man can walk

& no surprise: the body was not afraid of zeroes or empty rooms;

It didn’t see the cloud that resembled a mountain

For when our footing is uncertain men and women see nothing at all.

We were walking beside a lake

& Robert said the shadows cast by the pines

Were like the silences of families

But we were moving quickly

In several darknesses—too many

For a human frame—please understand

The body is pure uncertainty

& its shadows are unobserved

Though we make all the world an algorythmn

Lining up the churches and jeweled caskets, the eyes of animals,

Occidental numbers,post mortems of the heart

The body enters the ocean without claim

Without thought— we have been poor always—

Walking swiftly we are the poorest things in nature.

You who love the bitter seeds in bread and poetry…

You who never believe in devils…

You who laugh at the felicities of Russian rhymes that stay in the ear for a lifetime…

No one calls us

But walking swiftly

The house stands among thorns.

"I will come again to this poorest of houses," the body says. "But not this morning."

S.K.

Angel Revised in Workshop

"I think her wings should come off," says a student, and so her wings come off. They fall like dirty bandages. "There’s something about the light in her eyes, it doesn’t seem earned," (the voice, impatient, feminine, too quick for "jaded".) Immediately her eyes, Byzantine almonds—they are wiped away, replaced by the eyes of a soldier. "All this self-awareness in the features, it makes me queasy," says a boy (who swears he has instincts—it’s in his nature to know when a face is two-faced…) "So what happens next?" (Another boy, the one with the serial killer trading cards) says (after a semester of silence): "I mean the afterlife, nothing happens, there’s no smell of blood or whiskey." He says it, and although no one knows what he means everyone agrees the halo has to go."Now she looks like one of Brancusi’s eggs," the last student says. "She’s perfect, featureless, and derivative."

S.K.

Eggs for Ted Berrigan

Who once in Iowa City

Told my friend Marvin

That taken

Together

As poets

They

Were

"Steak and eggs"

& then Ted

Sd

Marvin

Was "the steak"

Which was

Fair enough

I too

Want to be

An egg poet—

Once

In upstate

New York

I saw

The composer

Aaron Copeland

Eating

Steak and eggs

In a diner

& nowadays

Who

Would know

That old man

Eating alone

Just off

Route 20

& who drops

Ted’s poems

In bus stations?

I’m still

Leaving the eggs…

S.K.