Over at James Wolcott’s blog one can read an assessment of Michael Hoffman’s review of the Robert Lowell-Elizabeth Bishop letters at Poetry magazine. Mr. Wolcott’s view, which echoes Mr. Hoffman’s is that Lowell was a clumsy, plodding reader of literature–a fact that’s according to Wolcott even reflected in the poet’s graniticand dull face. In turn Wolcott quotes at length from the respective letters of the two poets revealing that Bishop was more adventurous both in her reading and in her travels. By comparison Lowell appears more provincial to be sure. His quotidian reading is that of a well educated schoolboy at Choate .
Michael Hoffman writing in the January issue of Poetry compares Mr. Lowell to a houseplant when his reading habits and prose are considered alongside Bishop’s broader and livelier epistolary persona.
Both Wolcott and Hoffman fail to take any note of the fact that Mr. Lowell was profoundly, nay, severely disabled and in turn his lifelong struggle with mental illness kept him constatnly in a state of quasi-supervised and medicated agony.
Perhaps this is funny stuff, a privileged absentia of empathy rendered as aesthetic judgment. Any excuse for a skewering of a once relevant and widely read poet is apparently fair game in an era when erudite literary criticism is hard to find. Why not attack a disabled human being for the sheer easy decadence of the enterprise? Why its hardly work at all.
I like these two writers but I should say here without reservation that ableism is still widely practiced in literature departments and in the press. The idea that progressive thinkers might be more sensitive to disability is fictional–most of the progressive cast remains poorly exposed to disability or disability history as a matter of cultural and political concern.
My friend Lennard Davis who is one of the leading scholars in the area of Disability Studies has observed that the diversity minded folks in higher education are often opposed to including disability as a form of human diversity in academic culture. Lenny explains this peculiar circumstance in his book Bending Over Backwards, a collection of essays about disability and culture. Here’s a quote:
“Indeed, in multicultural curriculum discussions, disability is often struck off the list of required alterities because it is seen as degrading or watering down the integrity of identities. While most faculty would vote for a requirement that African American or Latino or Asian American novels should be read in the university, few would mandate the reading of novels about people with disabilities. A cursory glance at books on diversity and identity shows an almost total absence of disability issues. The extent to which people with disabilities are excluded from the progressive academic agenda is sobering, and the use of ableist language on the part of critics and scholars who routinely turn a “deaf ear” or find a point “lame” or a political act “crippling” is shocking to anyone who is even vaguely aware of the way language is implicated in discrimination and exclusion.”
This is just the point: both Wolcott and Hoffman deride Lowell for his symptoms and do so with a bonhomie that’s essentially inexcusable.
I like Poetry magazine. Why golly one of my poems is even included in their “best of” anthology that’s culled from their first 75years of publishing. But ableism is real, all too easy, and alas its just where Lenny Davis says it is: in our midst.
Steve Kuusisto
Professor of Literature
The University of Iowa
Planet of the Blind 