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It was early May and oak trees were filling with green smoke the way they do when, like me, you can scarcely see. The world was achingly provisional, discomfiting, as I was a graduate student whose needs for accommodation were poorly understood. I required help but in 1983 I couldn’t get it. The ADA was far away. I was being consistently traumatized by faculty who believed education was entirely about speed. One professor said: “If you need extra time to read you don’t belong in my class.” I wept. Outside my little TA office the trees stirred between blue and yellow. I was being told I didn’t belong in academe.

If my exceptionalist prof had been a solo act I’d have shaken him off. There was too much beauty all around me to become mired in ableist contempt. Besides I knew all about such people: hadn’t I attended public schools where teachers hadn’t wanted me in their classrooms? Hadn’t I been banished from school activities? Hadn’t I been instructed to go away over and over? Even at twenty five I knew the wisdom of the “good witch” in the Wizard of Oz who says to the mean witch: “Be gone, you have no power here!” I understood as all outsiders must that strangers or acquaintances cannot harm you without your permission. The trees were stunning. I wasn’t giving my permission, even though by year’s end I had three discriminatory professors on my hands. But you see, it’s harder to shake off oppression when it’s tacitly approved. With three dismissive English professors who were righteously opposed to working with my disability I went to the Dean. His Dean-ship said he’d look into the matter. He did. Called me into his office. Said; “the faculty think you’re just a malcontent.”

The trees of Iowa were absolutely heartbreaking in their loveliness. The paper birch, choke cherry, red elm hickory, they were vying for my attention. Alone and sad I pressed my face against the cool trunk of a hackberry tree. I was genuinely unwelcome in higher education. It was a revelation, really, as I’d been a gifted undergraduate, latin praises, high honors, no faculty complained about my need for extra time when reading variorum editions. What had happened? I wasn’t more or less blind Hadn’t gained or lost intelligence. What had transpired I saw while leaning against my tree—what had occurred, was nothing more than a matter of commercial space. I was presuming to enter “the profession” as my rebarbative and utterly ableist mentors like to call it. English, the study of, was a race. Though there was lots of talk about “close reading” no one believed in it. I was, in my halting need, the proof.

I took to walking alone late at night. It was hard to find solitude in a college town but I did it. I had a place by the railroad tracks that the local teens hadn’t discovered and I knew exactly when freight trains loaded with corn sweetener would or would not roll by. I had no suicide in me but I liked sitting in a ruined place. I knew it was necessary and proper to refine my life. Of course I’d retain a lawyer, for even pre-ADA there was the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. My goal would be to teach the Dean something essential about inclusion.

Disabled students in higher education should no longer have to face the kinds of obstacles I endured almost 35 years ago but they do. Just a cursory look at recent lawsuits filed against colleges by students provides all the evidence one needs to see how the “you’re a malcontent” aggression narrative still endures across the US.

Do I still press my face against cold night trees?

Yes.

 

 

My friend Bill Peace is leaving town. When a good pal pulls up stakes one asks (or at least one should) “what’s friendship about?” There are of course all kinds of friendships—some are as simple as college roommates enjoying the same music. Nothing wrong with this. Easy friendships are fine.

But Bill and I are disabled and we grew up long before the Americans with Disabilities Act. Bill calls us “pre-ADA cripples” and he’s right. Pre-ADA cripples share an intensity from having faced obstacles that aren’t routinely encountered today.

 

Bill Peace traveled New York in a wheelchair before curb cuts and accessible buses. Once in the late 1970’s or early ’80’s as he was crossing a street near Lincoln Center he discovered he couldn’t mount the far curb. A bus was bearing down on him. A stranger appeared and boosted him onto the sidewalk. Both men were deeply shaken. Bill said: “Hey, you wanna grab a beer?” His Good Samaritan agreed. In the pub Bill asked him what he did for a living. “I’m a dancer,” he said. “Are you any good?” Bill asked. The Samaritan was Mikhail Baryshnikov.

This is one of the many reasons I love Bill: he can tell an amusing story about himself. He was the only guy in Manhattan who didn’t know who Mikhail Baryshnikov was. But of course why should he have known? In those years Bill was fighting for his life—all disabled people were. If you believe the ADA is just a panacea remember as pre-ADA cripples do that going out used to be impossible. It isn’t easy now but back then forget it. Back then you needed Mikhail Baryshnikov and a boatload of luck.

Dr. Peace, for so I shall call him, earned his Ph.D. at Columbia where he was essentially the only cripple on campus. His advisor, Robert Murphy (who wrote the groundbreaking book The Body Silent) told him if he didn’t succeed in dramatic fashion no other disabled applicant would ever get into the university. If you’re a contemporary disabled college student you know a good deal about pressure—the disabled know they must be high achievers (“Super Crips”) but one can say in general the future of disability inclusion on college campuses doesn’t hang on your shoulders.

My friendship with Dr. Peace “kicked off” because of contrarianism. We met six years ago via the blogosphere when, unbeknownst to each other, we wrote simultaneously about Ashley X, a severely disabled infant rendered permanently tiny by surgery. We believed this procedure was unethical.  We weren’t alone. But as disabled writers who spoke forcefully for the human rights of a disabled child we endured criticism. Some of the comments we received were utterly appalling. We were trolled by eugenics types. Our friendship began with our agreement that crippled lives are worth living.

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One night about four years ago we went out to eat together in Mt. Kisco, New York, a rich suburban town north of New York. When we came out of the pub snow was falling. It was very dark. Sidewalks were on the verge of vanishing. Bill asked if I could push his chair. His traction wasn’t secure. I dropped my guide dog’s harness, held her long leash with one hand, and pushed Bill through the gathering snow, my yellow Labrador healing beside us. We thought about the drivers whisking by in their expensive SUVs. “What,” we wondered, “would they think, seeing us making our wobbly way through a storm?”

We continue to believe we have stories to write.

 

Many of the poets lie

Which is to say

They know poems

Cannot

Save you

Swans

Won’t

Save you

Blue skies, etc.

Yet in taverns

Classrooms

At conferences

Poof!

They become

Paracelsus

Sellers

Of medicine

“My poem will heal you!”

They cry—“Angels brush

My cheek,” they whisper,

“I know how

To make shit

Into gold.”

At grand occasions

They always look past you

To see if someone else

Can be convinced

& when they’ve had much to drink

They bitterly complain

No one reads poetry.

People in Finland are fairly decent

Though they’re deformed by Martin Luther

 

& warm hearted, but when asked

They do indeed know how

 

To shoot you in snow

—Unlike Americans

 

Or Russians

They feel bad about it

 

Killing you that is

You didn’t especially

 

Deserve to die

But standing around

 

Is always a mistake

Questionable

 

Strangers

Turn up

 

Rub off

On you

 

Devil’s thoughts

Etc.

 

& though

At the end

 

You went bad

On the outside

 

You looked great.

 

 

Sometimes

In corners

I spot

Them

Like

Strindberg

When

He

Was

Old

 

Oh

They’re

Dust motes

I say—

Foolish

Thinking

Dead

Trickster

Neighbors

Hang

Around

I’m listening to Beethoven’s String Quartet #12 in E Flat, Op. 127.

I’m not listening to my neighbors.

How good on a dark day

To hear the strings

Like silver in a poor man’s home

A green force in the guts of the living.

Quartet #12—

Afternoon

Before a trip

Darkness against my cheek.

I walked in slow circles

Around the cathedral

(Insert city)

Now you know

How it is

Calling the moon

Getting lost

Thinking

Of algebra

(Berlin)

Of jazz

(London)

Gypsy lace

(Turku)

 

What does it matter

Whether

Dying is hard

Or easy?

Remember—

Cobblers

Opened shops

Close

To their churches

& people set out

According

To the day

Two catbirds call in rain

Cup of coffee in hand

Dog pleased with himself

& books on a table

With accumulated

Natterings—Kierkegaard

Especially, all that desire

For a God

Of the mind

I think

There was no God

In his Danish shoes

No God

In the silver birches

& when he lit a fire

It was simply a fire

So much pressure

On the written word

Like a child’s game—

You know

The one where

Walking

Your footfalls must be perfect

Or someone dies

When able bodied writers want to imagine despair, which is to say more than customary unhappiness, they frequently use disability as a metaphor. “I am sad without hands,” wrote the poet James Tate who, having perfectly useful appendages thought handlessness would be both devastating and, gulp—quietly “edgy.” Who in his right mind would say he was only a little morose at such a prospect? Meanwhile his able bodied readers shuddered. They said, “Well, I’d be more than a little sad without my hands, but Tate, well he’s a poet, he knows a lot about suffering, so I guess he’d only be sad, for so debilitating is poetry itself, eh?”

The crux is this: able bodied poets and readers, by and large, see disfigurement as a mirroring and compounding metaphor, at once suggesting decay, death—being forgotten; or, a reflection of poetry’s fealty to abjection. (The American poet Robert Bly titled his graduate poetry thesis at the University of Iowa “Steps Toward Poverty and Death.”)

Most of the disabled poets I know are remarkably undead.

They’re not sad without fingers.

They don’t need to stand, walk, see, hear, or speak.

I refer you to an essay by D.J. Savarese in The Iowa Review. David James Savarese is a non-speaking poet (among many other things.) He’s a brand spanking new graduate of Oberlin College and he’s now stepped onto the stage of American literature. He writes:

When I took the ACT, I had to point independently at a multiple-choice answer bank, which had been blown up on a piece of paper and which had enough space between the a, b, c, and d that there could be no ambiguity about what I was selecting. My arm had to rise all on its own, and, like a rock climber without a climbing wall or cliff face, ascend the invisible air. It had to do this under conditions even more anxious than those of the ordinary test-taker. No one believed that a nonspeaking autist could really get into, let alone go to, college. 

My parents had negotiated extra time as an additional accommodation; I spent two-thirds of it running around the room screaming. I just couldn’t believe I had to act like a tree. My very future was at stake—everything I had worked for—and it seemed to sit like an owl on the highest limb. My mother was panicking outside, the thin pane of a classroom door between us. When I finally sat down, I had to race through the test. It felt like I was underwater—whereas the scribe had oxygen, I did not. The bubbles she filled in seemed to come from her mouth. 

 

Is the eye passive that refuses to make categories? Do you think of it as lounging on a divan of mere sensation? Do you think of it as needing a job? Are you like President Reagan, too quick to call it a “freeloader” or “welfare queen”? Scandent scandal, my eye unmakes the world; it offers, in Skinner’s phrase, a “disintegrating framework,” one in which possibility dazzles. Dazzles because it does not yet cohere. High above the ground, my eye smells the light, listens to the flute-playing clouds.

 

Scandent scandal! The comic ironies of imagination make us rise, high, eyes smelling light, eyes listening to clouds.

D.J. Savarese no more speaks for all the disabled or all autists than Joyce Carol Oates speaks for all women, the imagination is singular even though it proposes aspects of universality. Yet I dare say, yes, that Savarese informs his readers of a poetics are (ex-cathedra, informed by disability) not sanctioned by custom.

A crippled poetics has about it the full authority of neurodiversity. It’s fresh as those stars in Norway you saw one Summer and which no one else saw, stars blazing with immemorial loves, which you’ll never forget.

 

 

 

Beauty is twice beauty when we’re talking about John Keats. “The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing — to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.” I remember reading that for the first time and lifting, lifting inside, like a sea creature who becomes itself by rising.

I was in the hospital at the time. I was barely seventeen and I’d largely given up on life. My parents were alcoholics and by turns abusive and distant. I was legally blind and unable to keep up in school. Classmates were cruel. At a loss to imagine a robust method to end it all I starved myself. Anorexia was easy. Not eating was a discipline. By the time I hit 100 pounds I looked like John Lennon or Mick Jagger—thin by means of corruption, cool, pale, faintly menacing.

There was that damned Keats. “Make up one’s mind about nothing…” How does one explain the moral imperative of adolescent thought? It’s easy to describe its delinquency but not its aspirational qualities. I was sick. Incredibly ill. Strengthening one’s intellect seemed both superfluous and everything. Let the mind be a thoroughfare. Could I imagine another me?

I had some help from other poets. I read Rexroth and was surprised by this:

Yin and Yang

It is spring once more in the Coast Range

Warm, perfumed, under the Easter moon.

The flowers are back in their places.

The birds are back in their usual trees.

The winter stars set in the ocean.

The summer stars rise from the mountains.

The air is filled with atoms of quicksilver.

Resurrection envelops the earth.

Goemetrical, blazing, deathless,

Animals and men march through heaven,

Pacing their secret ceremony.

The Lion gives the moon to the Virgin.

She stands at the crossroads of heaven,

Holding the full moon in her right hand,

A glittering wheat ear in her left.

The climax of the rite of rebirth

Has ascended from the underworld

Is proclaimed in light from the zenith.

In the underworld the sun swims

Between the fish called Yes and No.

That a person could conceive of fish in the underworld and that the sun could swim fish like between yes and no—this, I saw, was what Keats meant. This was the everything principle that Keats and Rexroth brought to me while I lay in my sickbed and boy scouts raised and lowered the American flag beneath my window and the body, mine, so thin it was actually throbbing, a body which was about to fall away, reached out for the ancient dropped lifeline of ascendant blazing solar fish and atoms of quicksilver.

Make up one’s mind about nothing. It’s the most complex sentiment one can read.