I don’t know about you. You may not care a whit about poems. That’s okay. No matter what the poets say, it’s possible to live well without poetry. In my personal view, to the extent that such a thing is possible, I think the arts help us live good lives–a Platonic idea to be sure and one that I’ve never felt the need to give up. Poetry opens pathways to potentially new ways of knowing.
Unless it doesn’t.
A poet who I admire writes:
“You’ll be like a blind person watching a silent movie.”
(The poet in this case is Charles Simic.)
Alas for the able bodied poets, who cannot see disability outside of its outworn Victorian metaphors, a blind person can watch a silent movie. Blind people have friends who describe what’s going on. Blind people know all about Charlie Chaplin.
Ableist poetry is still all around us.
The human story is a grey complexity of fishing line and thumb tacks. But blindness is never abjection in the way Simic has used it. Don’t you believe it.
Here. I’m catching a fish from my neighbor’s soul.
Planet of the Blind 