Like the marks of children’s fingers on the glass, disability is at the window. Like those tiny, smudgy marks we don’t like this disability thing. No one likes it whether you’re inside looking out or outside looking in. No one likes it. Even those of us who seek to celebrate disability culture are invariably struggling with the relative disinterest of “abled” culture, whatever that is. If you have a disability and you love the arts you can often feel like the person inside who looks out the window. In this figure the “outside” people are looking in, where they see the disabled trapped in their little glass room of performance. This is a hard figurative position to escape. No one wants to be side-show entertainment. Or, by turns, from a position of political persistence and some authentic naughtiness, some of us relish the opportunity to be poetry cripples. If we’re “inside” the room and standing at the window we hold up a mirror and by turns, if we’re outside and looking in, well, we hold up a mirror. We want the “normates” to see themselves seeing us. And isn’t that what all artists want? The poetry cripples wilfully forget the glass room of disability performance, preferring performance that makes the toes curl inside the shoes and the hidden tongue goes exploring the rude teeth. I want that. I don’t want the casual “ooh” and “ah” of the mundane, academic poetry reading. The latter pretends to avant garde discomforts by playing at bodily or spiritual alienation of a hundred varieties, sex in the church pew, the poem as fetish, language as antithetical, anti-bourgeois rubber pants; one sees it all the time, but alas that shit ain’t got what the poetry cripples have: we’ll make you wish you had a naughty, ungovernable tongue; rubber limbs; darkened eyes; ears like feathers; miles of nerve endings that spell electricity in seven languages yet to be deciphered and for which the Rosetta stone is still aborning. The poetry cripples will feed your customary hats to their underworld animals.
Who can do what I’m talking about? Lots of great artists–many of whom are not as widely known as they should be.
As we enter the holidays we are presented with Tiny Tim the most famous Victorian figure of disability. I like to think of Tim “today” and far from begrudging him his “cure” (for Dickens presents us with the philanthropy of a reformed Scrooge and the restored health of a crippled boy) I’d like to imagine Tiny Tim as a man who retains a mindfulness about disfigurement, understanding it as a terrible irrelevance, nay, even a drain on human intelligence. I like to think of Tiny Tim as becoming a kind of Noam Chomsky of the body. But I’ll leave that idea for another day. Meantime I’m thinking of the arts and of their glorious infidelity to old ideas. Here are some places to go:
Jim Ferris: “The Hospital Poems”:
http://www.mainstreetrag.com/JFerris.html
See what Petra Kuppers has to say about Jim Ferris at:
http://www.valpo.edu/vpr/kuppersreviewferris.html
Read more about Petra Kuppers at:
http://www.valpo.edu/vpr/kuppersreviewferris.html
http://www.disstudies.org/about/board/bio/Petra_Kuppers
Visit Neil Marcus and Petra Kuppers’ remarkable book of poems Cripple Poetics at:
http://www.wordgathering.com/issue6/excerpts/excerpt.html
Read about Neil Marcus and Dan Wilkins and Laura Hershey and many other poets at:
http://walkingisoverrated.com/2009/01/22/disabled-country-poem-by-neil-marcus/
http://www.disabledandproud.com/prideart.htm
Visit the excellent blog “Disability is an Art” at:
http://disabilityisanart.blogspot.com/2005/07/inspiration-short-biography-of-neil.html
Learn about the Inglis House poetry contest at:
Visit Axis Dance at:
Visit Dancing Wheels at:
http://www.gggreg.com/dancingwheels.htm
Learn about Deaf American Poetry:
http://gupress.gallaudet.edu/bookpage/DAPbookpage.html
You want Tiny Tim? I’ll give you mothafuckin’ Tiny!
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 