Year: 2014

By Andrea Scarpino

 

My very first writing conference. I was a terrified graduate student attending session after session of writers whose work I had never read, who were smarter and better informed, who seemed to know all there was to know about publishing and craft and how to break a line. I was jostled in long hotel hallways as I tried to find the right conference rooms. I was jostled waiting for slow elevators, for bathroom stalls, for coffee. I remember feeling almost nothing but overwhelmed. 

 

And then, Maxine Kumin. A small, stuffy, crowded room packed with people, mostly women, and too few chairs. I sat on the floor with dozens of others—that horrible hotel carpeting. I remember she read from Inside the Halo and Beyond. I remember she looked impossibly old, even then, impossibly fragile, her body stiff from the surgeries and recovery she had endured. 

 

I sat in awe. 

 

When she finished, we all stood to applaud, and a line quickly formed in front of the table where she stood. Some people asked her to sign their books, but I hadn’t thought to bring any. Some people asked her smart-sounding poetry questions, but I couldn’t find anything smart to say. I felt completely empty. 

Finally, I reached the front of the line. She stood, impossibly small. And I started to cry. 

 

“Your work has meant so much to me,” I said, the only words that came. 

 

She smiled and said “Thank you.” And I walked away. 

 

My moment with Maxine Kumin and all I could do was cry. But isn’t that what the very best writers do to us? Take away our words. Take away our breath. 

 

When I texted a friend that Kumin had died, my phone’s autocorrect changed “Kumin” to “luminosity.” As in, “the intrinsic brightness of a celestial object.” As in, “bright or shining, especially in the dark.” 

 

An outrageously appropriate autocorrect—because that’s what Kumin’s work does for me, sheds light, reminds me to pay attention, stay present in this world, stay present with this world’s beauty, this world’s awfulness. Her work is daring and quiet, bold, full of light and loss. Her work says things I didn’t always know poetry was allowed to say. Her work makes me feel safe that such brilliance exists in the world. 

 

More poetry books are published every year than any one of us could read. But voices like Kumin’s? Like her contemporary, Adrienne Rich? Books that speak unspeakable truths? That dare? That are narrative and lyrical, mired in the personal and the political, that are brave and brave and brave? 

 

“How are you taking her death?” my friend texted back. 

 

“I somehow thought she would live forever,” I replied. 

 

“Yeah. I know what you mean.”

  

Sometimes we see things with a critical eye—an effect takes place—we see through the wrong end of a telescope and though everything’s small, things are clear. “That’s who you are,” you say. “Yes, that’s who you really are.” 

 

I had one of those revelatory experiences with dog number two. Vidal was under my feet in the Archbold Theater in Syracuse. We were in the front row. The stage was inches away and accordingly we were just five feet from Sam Waterston. Sam was appearing as James Tyrone in “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night” which meant he was playing the role of an unhappy man and as far as I could see he was doing a fine job it it when Vidal let out a groan. It was not a standard harumph—the sound a dog makes when turning itself. It was a note of misery—and loud enough to be heard throughout the theater. I leaned forward and whispered in his ear, stroked his face. Above me Waterston was lamenting Tyrone’s life—a life spent in the service of a single role—the life of a second rate actor. Tyrone was filled with regrets. Vidal groaned louder. It was a crude sound; an athletic noise. I rubbed his face with my foot. People stirred in their seats. I knew Sam Waterston couldn’t see the dog. He was working hard, emoting, as groans were rising around him. I slumped as low as I could manage. From above I heard: “It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death!” From below came another dog groan. a noise like a ship coming apart.  

 

From above I heard: ““Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, or whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you: ‘It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.”

 

“Oh God,” said the dog. “Oh God Oh God Oh Lord!” I leaned close to him. Whispered in his ear. I said: “C’mon boy, you can get through this. Its just Eugene O’Neil.” And we did survive though Vidal moaned like O’Neil’s fog horn and I wanted to stand up and shout out: “Its not me, Sam, its this dog! He’s doing some kind of martyr thing!” 

 

As soon as the lights came up I fled with my friends Dave and Adrianne and it was at their home the next morning I learned what ailed Vidal for as we stood in the grassy yard he excreted a long, black gym sock—a whole garment—and I could only surmise what agony he’d endured lying under a theater seat while O’Neil’s sad men talked on and on about their meaningless lives in fog. 

 

And I, a veteran guide dog handler knew I’d a different creature before me. Dog number one would only carry the socks. Vidal was a devouring kind. 

 

 

America is consecrating the war void. This is accomplished by kicking the old and inform and the very young straight to the ditch. We have a new farm bill! The Democrats assisted the GOP in cutting food stamps to the bone. There is no “back up method” to assure the poor will eat. The war void wins. And it wins when we no longer talk of human life, save to say its inconvenient. The war void wins. 

 

The war void isn’t really a void of course. It has flesh and blood. But its not yours or mine.  

 

“Cuts to the nation’s food stamp program hit 48 million Americans this week, including more than 9 million elderly and disabled people.”

 

See full story here.

 

Thinking of Verlaine

 

Its raining in my heart and I feel like crying

But I resist owing to a head cold 

and a general richness—

because this is sorrow

not some boyhood thing

and the rain sends me to you: 

“Il pleure dans mon coeur 

Comme il pleut sur la ville.” 

You see? It rains

where my neighbors thin windows  

were left ajar, and they can’t hear a thing. 

 

 

I love Auden for many reasons—most principally because he understood Caliban was the best interlocutor for Shakespeare. That’s wisdom. I prefer it to beauty, though, like Caliban, I won’t vote beauty off the island. 

 

Poems rise and fall with whispered confidences. If you sit beside that ocean for long you’ll lose affection for some voices. I’m nowhere as fond of Wallace Stevens as I was in my twenties. For you it will be someone else. The enduring voices are brave. Auden; Dickinson; Whitman; Langston Hughes; Rexroth; yes, Williams. Muriel Rukeyser. James Wright. Neruda. So many brave ones. 

 

By forty I found I didn’t like Stevens whose poetry seemed like a rococo picture frame but without figures of candor. The houses are haunted by nightgowns but I didn’t care anymore. But I like these lines by Robert Bly:

 

“Why is it our fault if we fall into desire?

The eel poking his head from his undersea cave

Entices the tiny soul falling out of Heaven.

So many invisible angels work to keep

Us from drowning; so many hands

reach Down to pull the swimmer from the water.

Even though the District Attorney keeps me

Well in mind, grace allows me sometimes

To slip into the Alhambra by night.”

 

Excerpt From: Robert Bly. “The Night Abraham Called to the Stars.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/T4QFv.l

 

  

You see, I don’t mind obscurity, but I need a heart as its conductor. 

 

“All societies are rational and irrational at the same time. They are perforce rational in their mechanisms, their cogs and wheels, their connecting systems, and even by the place they assign to the irrational. Yet all this presuposes codes or axioms which are not the products of chance, but which are not intrinsically rational either.”

(Deleuze, Gilles. “Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium” in Chaosophy. Ed.. Autonomedia/Semiotexte. Ed. Sylvere Lothringer. 1995.)

 

This is how it is with disability—the connecting systems of culture (which are concerned with the assignment of meaning) imagine physical difference can be assigned a rational position or location. The asylum and the disability resource center at You Name It University are alike because they separate physical difference from the body normal. For college faculty (many of whom have no authentic civil rights position beyond saying the word “diversity”) disability is a cut off category, because that’s what they’ve believed since elementary school. In this way they are perfectly rational. Power relations have taught them compulsory able-bodied-ness. But the problem for the advocate, the activist, the person with a disability (who presumes entrance to the academy or associated academic venues—conferences, lectures, etc.) is that his or her presence is assigned the status of irrationality. 

 

If you say you want accommodations—computer aided real time captioning; sign language interpreters, braille, accessible websites, ADA compliant restrooms—just to name the basics—you are assigned the status of irrationality. This dual status—rational segregation and the irrational claim for civil rights makes disability citizenship almost impossible to attain. 

 

Its a ragged self that survives. Its one that refuses to stop insisting on full inclusion and not mingy half granted and grudging accommodations. I’ve been saying things like this on this blog for 7 years but now I’m going a step further: I’m not excusing casual hand gestures from academics or conference organizers—the old “well we just forgot” moue of false sympathy—“So sorry friend. Yes, once again we don’t have accessible stuff. We’re good people. You should like us anyway.” I can no longer afford to forgive the easy assignment of physical difference to categories of complication or inconvenience. 

In this way I feel like James Baldwin. I’m not playing along anymore. I’ll call my culture what it is. As Baldwin said: “The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.”

 

Ah Baldwin. I need you today. He said: “The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.” I belong to a generation of writers and academics who came of age before the Americans with Disabilities Act. As a high school student, a college student, a graduate student I endured horrific commentaries from teachers and professors. The dominant trope in American education is speed. Every syllabus is a race. The blind guy with glasses thick as padlocks needed more time to read. He wasn’t supposed to be there. In graduate school at the U of Iowa a famous literature professor named Sherman Paul said I shouldn’t be in his class if I had trouble with my eyes. Against this kind of power-leverage the disabled should demonstrate an all forgiving, all understanding, good nature. 

 

Baldwin again: “No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.” But you see, my generation of “cripples” has paid a heavy price. I’ve paid many times over. This is why I’m not going to forgive inaccessible conferences, university events, programs, and the like. Its not 1978 anymore. 

 

Baldwin: “The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.” 

 

Well I know what the world was like when I came in. I ain’t leavin’ it the same. 

 

Here’s the deal. You get called “uppity” as Baldwin well knew. If you’re a cripple you’re a “malcontent” or you have a bad attitude. 

 

And one more Baldwin quote: “Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they’re better than other human beings.”

 

I think this is the problem with the overt or casual disregard for disability rights—both are ableism and both rely on pessimism.  

 

Yesterday I wrote on this blog about a conference in Washington which, perhaps innocently, failed to make its conference schedule accessible for the blind. My problem is I don’t think 1970’s style blamelessness is appropriate in 2014—its no longer acceptable to me to hear that accessibility obstacles (architectural, digital, attitudinal) are just an oversight. As Freud famously said: “there are no accidents”. I quoted from Deleuze yesterday: “We will never find the sense of something (of a human, a biological or even a physical phenomenon) if we do not know the force which appropriates the thing, which exploits it, which takes possession of it or is expressed in it.” (Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche et la philosophie. Disability is an appropriated thing, an exploited and possessed phenomenon. There are no accidents: we didn’t think about disability very much when organizing our conference. Its too hard. Doesn’t some other entity “handle this”? Some sub-rosa office of accommodation and hand holding? Isn’t that how it works at our university? Why should we have to see to it that our conference materials can be read by the blind? This is how the appropriating force takes possession of disability. Its a seamless process. 

 

What’s got my goat? My little tragedy goat? Well, for one thing, I’m haunted by old conversations. I’ve had unpleasant chats with people at the Associated Writing Programs, the hosts of the biggest academic creative writing conference in the US. Ten years ago I told (name withheld here) that their website was inaccessible. His answer was “we’ll get to that.” Translation: doesn’t some other entity handle this? He didn’t like talking with me. I have other academic friends who use wheelchairs, need sign language interpreting, need a personal attendant—all of whom have had problems with academic conferences—continue to have problems. My tragedy goat indeed. He’s a group goat. 

 

I’ve decided not to attend the “Split This Rock” poetry festival in DC. I’m now deciding whether to go to the AWP. I’m the organizer of a panel honoring the poet Sam Hamill. I will likely go because Sam is a culture hero of mine. But I will hold my nose. The AWP so dislikes “the disabled” that their website contains the following: 

 

 All rooms at the conference are wheelchair accessible. The first row of seating in meeting rooms is reserved for individuals with special needs. Special services, equipment, or accommodations should be requested in advance of the conference. Please submit your request to conference@awpwriter.org by midnight Eastern Time on Friday, December 20, 2013. Attendees who require special onsite assistance during the conference should request it from personnel at AWP’s Help Desk.

 

Isn’t that great? All rooms in the Hilton are accessible. I love the term “special needs”. Who the fuck wrote this? As for a two month advance notice for accommodations? Ridiculous, demeaning, and altogether appropriating. And BTW, if I can’t read the conference pdf how can I know what sessions I’d like to receive accessible materials for?

 

I’m a well known American poet, essayist, teacher, blogger, and yes, public advisor. I’ve worked with the Metropolitan Museum, MOMA, the Kennedy Center; the Mayor’s Office of the City of New York; the State Department. Its a long list. I teach in the Center on Human Policy, Law, and Disability Studies at Syracuse University. I’ve taught at Iowa where I had a full professorship in creative writing. And yet, and yet, I’m an outsider, because after all, the appropriation of disability reconsigns it to the Victorian basement, the “other”. 

 

Last week my undergraduate alma mater, Hobart and William Smith Colleges announced a visit to campus by a noted African disability rights advocate. They sent out an inaccessible pdf, and they’d scheduled the event in an inaccessible room. 

 

A friend wrote me on Facebook yesterday. She’s blind and a guide dog user like me. She’s also an academic. I like her. She told me that she has to go to meetings all the time with inaccessible materials and she just makes do and I ought to just make do. 

 

But the larger question—the one I’ve posed in a renga of rhetoric in the voice of conference organizers is the crucial one:    Doesn’t some other entity “handle this”? Some sub-rosa office of accommodation and hand holding? Isn’t that how it works at our university? Why should we have to see to it that our conference materials can be read by the blind?

 

People on Facebook or Twitter or in journals argue all the time about the efficacy of academic creative writing—either praising the study of literary work or damning the process. My own take is that creative writing culture is essentially without sincerity. Its a “me first” podium from which singular stories of abjection and resilience are emoted but without any awareness of class warfare. I remember at an AWP conference in Chicago, trying to get into a room with my guide dog and I tripped. I fell down. And a gaggle of poets actually walked over me. They wanted to get to the good seats. One of them was very famous. 

My wife who is a nuanced and thoughtful soul worries that bringing these issues to light will lead to my being labeled a malcontent. This is the risk. This is why Bill Peace calls his blog “Bad Cripple”  The creative writing community can label me if they like, though I have sufficient faith there are smart and independent minds aplenty—and moreover, some may even support better disability access at academic conferences and, if they teach, on their own campuses. 

 

I have decided today that I’m done with inaccessible events—conferences, academic symposia, public lectures, poetry festivals, arts jamborees—you name it—I’ve been to hundreds of gatherings that really don’t care if people with disabilities are at the table. 

The latest is “Split This Rock” a Washington poetry festival that’s designed to oppose our nation’s militarism, and our egregious and widely articulated assaults on human rights. Today I found that their conference materials are inaccessible for screen reading software. 

I wrote to someone well placed at STR who appropriately vows to fix the matter. But what bothers me isn’t the architecture of the problem—its the problem itself. No one asked. No one said: “Are we ADA compliant with our web site?” 

The conference, like so many I’ve been to, celebrates diversity. But its idea of diversity only extends to disability insofar as no one says: “don’t bother showing up.” Look at the website. There’s no information on disability or accessibility anywhere. 

I mean it. I’m done. I’m sick of tricked out diversity gurus talking about single issue politics and leaving out women with disabilities, children with disabilities, veterans with disabilities, the elderly with disabilities, and the poor with disabilities. 

We’re not sexy enough for diversity hipsters. Can you tell I’m angry? I’m really angry. And a passel of poets I know and like will go to Split This Rock and read their heartfelt anti-war, anti-racism, anti-misogyny poems and shrug about the cripples. 

How is this shrugging possible?

The engineering of normalcy is (was) (remains) real. From Frances Galton to Antonin Scalia the reflexive and reactionary assignment of physical and social value per bodies is the Lingua Franca of deterministic economies. No one has written more persuasively about that history than Lennard J. Davis. The economic construction of normalcy is indisputable. Once upon a time I took a group of disability studies students to London–not to look at the queen, but to see Charles Babbage’s model of “the difference engine” (has anything before or since been so perfectly named?) and then we toured the vestiges of Victorian asylums. Normalcy, the proper ‘mean’ was an economic necessity of industrial empire by 1830. The work of constructing it was astonishingly quick. The plasticity of social acquiescence was also quick: there are social lies and statistics and people will accept both once they’ve given themselves over to industrial economies. 

 

 

“We will never find the sense of something (of a human, a biological or even a physical phenomenon) if we do not know the force which appropriates the thing, which exploits it, which takes possession of it or is expressed in it.” (Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche et la philosophie. Presses universitaires de France Vendôme. 1962. Paperback, 233 pages, Language French, ASIN: B0014XAK6Q. Deleuze, Gilles and Hugh Tomlinson (Translator) and Michael Hardt (Forward). Nietzsche and Philosophy. Columbia University Press. June 1, 2006. Paperback, 256 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0231138776.)

When Dog-man thinks about the afterlife he becomes irascible. He’s more Mark Twain than Augustine. He thinks of Twain’s vision in  “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” where the good Captain discovers an insipid, bland Italianate city filled with angels who can’t play their harps. 

Its Sunday school all over again and Stormfield decides he’d rather go to Hell. Like Stormfield, DM isn’t sophisticated. And what about our dogs? He worries about the dogs. He wants an afterlife with them but then he’s forced to consider whether he wants to spend eternity with people. “You know, people,” he says to his dog, “the gold standard of Christianity.” His dog looks unconvinced. “Could he have,” he wonders, “a heaven with his favorite dogs and just a few people?” Then he feels shallow. He feels inadequate in the company of his dog who would welcome anyone. In this way his dog is more like Jesus. When he thinks of this he feels even more shallow. To cheer himself up he imagines an afterlife for dogs where they’re freed from all engagements with human stuff. They get to be dogs. They can see us and smell us but we’re in Hell. And Hell is mostly re-incarnation. This makes DM feel better. But not much. 

 

He loves his dogs so much. They’ve kept him from harm with a selflessness people simply don’t have, or they only have in extremis—in battles or blazing buildings. HIs guide dogs have been with him, in him, beside him, over him, hour by hour, and for years now. He can’t fully remember what it was like being without them.  

If I tell you I love you dear dog you’ll not theorize the matter. You know the difference between words and deeds. Feel it beneath your fur. And you have another advantage. You see what’s in my eyes. 

 

You forgive me my moonless absences, seeing how lonely a man can be. 

 

Then you put your head on my knee. 

 

“I’ve a chin for your theories,” you say.

 

Once on a trip to Mississippi you got fire ants on your paws. I lay down with you in the grass and swept them off though I was stung. And we walked to a fountain where we soaked your feet. And I sat down with you and cried for your lovingkindness. For you just wanted to walk me back to our hotel. 

 

 

If I tell you I love you dear dog you’ll say “I already know.”

 

**

 

Do you remember the time we went to the amusement park? I tried to coax you inside a huge, plastic “Jaws” shark’s head where we could be photographed standing behind the monster’s teeth. A gimmick. And you refused. I cajoled, called, tried my best to show you it was safe. But you wouldn’t do it. The photo shows you sitting outside the shark, looking disapprovingly at me for climbing inside the thing. I wrote below the photo: “Intelligent disobedience in action” and mailed it to Guiding Eyes. 

 

I tell you I love you dear dog and you say “I know, but you’ve got to improve your act, brother.” 

 

**

 

How many times dear dog have I been in meetings where your very presence beside me has kept me from despair? Amid faculty types, some of them so pathological they couldn’t achieve even a pyrrhic victory. Unctuous, but without the desire to ingratiate, the professors, all slick and smarmy cutting the heart out of a young scholar, denying her tenure. The academy which prides itself on being better than big business but is all too often just as greasy and soulless. Dear dog I’ve reached down to scratch your ears. Together we leave the meeting early, go outside, just go out. 

 

 

**

 

I raise a song for you dear dog. I mean, I really sing it. We danced around the house. George Carlin: “Those who dance are considered insane by those who cannot hear the music.” But we hear it! Man! In the kitchen we’re altogether elsewhere!