Outsides: Disability Culture Nature Poetry
Petra Kuppers [1]
The essay reads a selection of nature poems by disability culture writers Mark O'Brien, Stephen Kuusisto, Floyd Skloot, and Jim Ferris, and traces how themes such as the nature sublime, interpenetration and access are modulated and transformed in disability aesthetics.
Introduction
Nature poetry, the genre linked to wide open spaces, does not feature very prominently in much of the disability culture poetry I know (notable exceptions are Kenny Fries’s second poetry collection, Desert Walking, 2000, Robert Mauro’s erotic poems, and Eli Clare’s work on changing bodies). In this essay, I will explore some of the shapes of disability culture nature poetry, knowing fully well that to use the words “disability culture” sets me on a romantic path, calls for an entity and a group identification that is more a horizon of desire than a lived reality for most disabled people. I will listen to how traditional nature poetry imagery becomes transfigured in the hands, mouths, and breath of crips, in particular Mark O’Brien, Stephen Kuusisto, Floyd Skloot, and Jim Ferris.
As a sub-theme, I am also touching on aspects of disability and masculinity, fully aware that I am treading on territory much larger than can be dealt with within the confines of the essay. Disabled women also write beautiful nature poems: Karen Fiser’s multivalent ocean rhythms and sounds of hope in her sited poems such as The Power to Survive, Adrienne Rich’s sensual myth-unmaking in Diving into the Wreck, a poem I, as a diver and swimmer, have always read as specific to the ocean experience, and Leilani Hall’s evocations of myths in the forest, where words act like ancient veils unwrapping an experience. In this essay, though, an awareness of (some) scripts of masculinity, their historic formations and their reinvention in disability culture will inform my writing, and my focus is on the modulation of the nature sublime.
It would be easy to stereotype the history of male-authored nature poetry, both classical and modernist, and I could link my writing here with earlier arguments by many powerful feminist critics debunking and reinventing the canon. Writers such as Janet McNew, Margaret Homans and others have pointed to themes and formal elements such as conquest, virgin female land, the meditation on boundaries, their transgression, and on maleness under duress in the male romantic tradition. But in the thoroughly alive world of contemporary poetry, poems of nature and sitedness abound, written by men, women, and people of other genders, and it becomes hard to find firm lines that divide gendered specificity. I will show through close readings of poems of sitedness and embedment how contemporary male poets find alignments with their environment that speak about complex relations to empowerment, and survival, as well as to the poetic histories of these themes. I read the poems towards an aesthetics of accommodation, an alignment of forces inside and out, a carving out of space. There is a reason why this is so interesting to me as I am writing about disability culture: the same language of overcoming used traditionally in relation to nature conquests also informs much writing about disability: conquest and vanquishing, lording over or being lorded over, climbing the mountain or perishing on its slopes–these often seem the main positions available to both dichotomized gender and disability readings. In these poems, these certainties fold out, and offer a wider open space.
Outsides
Embedment and its effect on our senses is crucial to the poetry of sitedness. I am writing much of this essay on a porch, looking up on a hot summer’s day in Ann Arbor. I can see the sky. But I know that not everyone can see that blueness of romantic world-view, that delimitation, the sublime color to lose a self in. A precariousness of seeing, walking and being in natural surroundings negates Wordsworthian delights, the free man who “wander’d lonely as a cloud.” Even though physical, economic, and attitudinal barriers persist and disable our world, many disabled people find rocks to scale, in order to see the mists, alone, opposite mountains. Many swim in oceans and lakes, and can come close to experiencing what Albert Camus’s hero finds in The Plague, grace in the Mediterranean Sea outside the city of Oran, at one with a wider motion, knowing strength in the struggle, and hope. But many others do not, cannot, be lonely in what we call ‘nature,’ and some of those experience a sadness that political protest and access technologies cannot begin to address and that cannot be adequately remedied with the provision of a ramp and Braille on explanatory plaques (although we welcome these).
To work outdoors, we have to re-imagine what access can mean. Themes of aesthetic access and an awareness of the relationship between language and the natural world govern much eco-criticism writing: in what way can we imagine the pleasures of the outdoors in non-hierarchical, non-violent, and non-exclusionary ways, honoring traditions and reinventing them at the same time? Before I look at poems and how overcoming and wrestling with awe is transformed in them, I want to spend some time turning away from the page, towards those spaces we call ‘natural.’ Even in an essay on literature, it is important to call attention to the embodied problems and opportunities that our different bodies and their intersection with parts of our shared world offer to us: those two imaginaries, the literary and the social, are closely linked. As a community artist, I often work with fellow disabled people in nature parks and forests, where we find ways of gaining access, encroaching upon a world of uneven terrain, shifting tree limbs that hinder chair access and worry unsure feet, with dappled light and unclear orientation, an unfamiliar soundscape where some of us can easily panic. We find our way in, slowly, gently, in communal effort and support, keeping each other safe. But the pleasure of losing oneself in the rhythm of strides, the pleasures of eyes or ears roaming seemingly unembodied, the unselfconscious expenditure of muscular energy that knows no pain: these are not experiences many of my friends and I easily know in these crip culture performances. We talk of those pleasures, talk of reading about them, dreaming of them, and we are aware of what we might be missing: the romantic draw is strong.
But we create our own rhythms, and rock ourselves into the world of nature, lose ourselves in a moment of sharing: hummed songs in the round, shared breath, leanings, rocks against wood, leaves falling gentle against skin, bodies braced against others gently lowering toes into waves, touch of bark against finger, cheek, from warm hand to cold snow and back again. We respectfully carry materials and textures from the borders of parking lots to community hall fireplaces, from the edges of National Park pathways to accessible clearings in forests. We gather on riverbanks, beaches and playgrounds, and make small sculptures of leaves, words, sand, drawings, gestures, rocks and earth. We let other people, the other visitors to these natural environments that are open to the public, witness our making, see a group of crips at work. People come up and talk to us, see the sculptures, dances, and poems that emerge. Kids, in particular, often infiltrate our group, seduced by the tactility and play. We welcome them politely for a time, as we realize we model an unusual form of inclusive world for them. At the end of our workshops we return what we have used to the wood, meadow or beach, and leave no traces but footprints, wheelprints, dots from crutches and sticks, vibrations in the air, our breath. And there can be joy in these improvised, collaborative performances out of doors, moments of connection with non-man-made textures, and a dissolve in the act of making. Taking time to be in a space can be the most precious access. In these long workshops with their slow pace, having become bold in our exploration, most of us find ourselves at some point alone in company, touching a tree trunk, staring out over a fast flowing river, or just feeling wind on our face. We find our own ways of touching the pleasures of nature, as crips proud of our sensibilities, we contend with sadnesses and moments of bliss. So do the poems in this essay, where nature experiences emerge in words and nothing but words.
Disability Culture Nature Poetry
That core experience of the nature sublime, the awe of being in the presence of something overwhelming, can be touched in many ways. Kant wrote of alternating repulsion and attraction, of the abyss, and Rilke, the poet who longs through and for the encompass in language, calls that terror beauty “das schrecklich Schöne”. Repulsion and attraction, the drawing abyss, the extremity of emotion: these visit in gentle forms in Mark O’Brien’s “Breathing”:
Grasping for straws is easier;
You can see the straws.
"This most excellent canopy, the air, look you,"
Presses down upon me
At fifteen pounds per square inch,
A dense, heavy, blue-glowing ocean,
Supporting the weight of condors
That swim its churning currents.
All I get is a thin stream of it,
A finger's width of the rope that ties me to life
As I labor like a stevedore to keep the connection.
Water wouldn't be so circumspect;
Water would crash in like a drunken sailor,
But air is prissy and genteel,
Teasing me with its nearness and pervading immensity.
The vast, circumambient atmosphere
Allows me but ninety cubic centimeters
Of its billions of gallons and miles of sky.
I inhale it anyway,
Knowing that it will hurt
In the weary ends of my crumpled paper bag lungs.
The poem frames itself within Hamlet’s words, a survey of the natural world that circles right back to “the quintessence of dust” (Ham. 2.2.305): the realm of the poem is the sky, air, range, and condor wings, but its circle is small, narrow, “crumpled paper bags.” “Grasping” is the first word: a reach, easily read as gasping against the poem’s title, “Breathing.” And “grasping for straws” sets up the first location: the origin of the adage refers to a drowning man, grasping at anything, like straws, to keep himself alive. That urgency has left the expression in modern English, where it is more likely to be associated with a reasoning gone out of order, in desperation–clutching at straws.
Straws are natural pipes, to draw liquids through, or to breathe while underwater. There are many actions here, from looking and seeing–physically disconnected–to the being in contact and relation that grasping and pressing imply. These pulls of near and far weave a dense shape of missed and desired connections into the fabric of the poem. That look, “look you,” and that quoted line is from one of Shakespeare’s most famous monologues, where Prince Hamlet, always outside himself, bemoans the world in ringing tones:
I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. (Ham. 2.2.294-300)
Hamlet gives a petulant blast that makes the world, natural and human, link back “to me,” supported by promontory, surrounded by canopy, overhung, roofed–a shrouded, circled being, a world turned into a shell–on which Hamlet turns his back, pronounces as polluted air, “a congregation of vapours.” And in O’Brien’s poem, many words echo Shakespearian tones, and make me think of it as a counterfoil to Hamlet’s annoyed and preposterous denial.
For O’Brien, there is a weight to air, matter, density, and color–blue. Air shades into water yet again, as it did in the grasping: “Supporting the weight of condors / That swim its churning currents.” The condors with their wingspan open out that canopy, that roof, and the currents speak of a world that is not merely organized around one individual’s gaze. There are other forces here, other streams and other inhabitants. O’Brien’s eyes see wider than Hamlet’s. This inhabitant of the land under the canopy is not showered in riches he can haughtily disdain. He has to work for a living, to “get a thin stream of it / a finger’s width of the rope that ties me to life.” The sounds thin out, as well, the mouth narrows, and that rope is experiential, available in the poem.
Labor’s own dignity, personified in the watery positions of stevedore and the sailor, clash with the “prissy and genteel,” and there’s a glee in that language, the “crash in like a drunken sailor.” There is a class consciousness in this dealing with elusive air, that Shakespearean loftiness (at least as exemplified by Hamlet’s sensitivity). And air is jealous, doling out small amounts of itself, the generosity of “circumambient” negated in the specificity of “ninety cubic centimetres.”
And out of all that struggle, labor, rope and grasping, that sense of thinness, meanness, allowance against unbounded flight of condors, emerge the last lines, a small link to vastness: “I inhale it anyway,” a minor claim laid, a tenuous connection. But the sense of loss, the only grudgingly allowed partaking in atmosphere and ocean is pervasive, physically painful: “Knowing that it will hurt / In the weary ends of my crumpled paper bag lungs.” That hurt, is it the loss of magnificence, the sublime, the unbounded? Or is it a physical hurt, a breathlessness, a sound of tight wheeze–or both combined, the sky and body merging, in that painful tightness Kant and Wordsworth feel contemplating the mountain’s majesty, or the ocean’s expanse? A last breath brings us from Hamlet’s man as “paragon of animals” (Ham. 2.2.304) to paper bags, mortal, crunching, utterly fragile.
In the sweep of the poem, histories of masculine conquest and their other side, defeat, both appear alongside weightlifting, measurements and the actor’s delight in the language of the stage: all sorts of fun with male-dominated imagery from different class perspectives make up this meditation on breathing. And in this delight of words, nature surrounds, but access is problematic, breath contained. Yet language can open up the flower of speech that encompasses the canopy, the air, allows the boundless sky to melt in a poem’s mouth, and the poem shudder at the contradiction.
Another poem by O’Brien gives a different flavor to this reading: “The Man in the Iron Lung.” I have plotted to withhold information here, to allow uninitiated O’Brien readers a glimpse of crip work that might just have short-circuited against the medical determination. O’Brien, a journalist and poet, fought for independent living for crips, and lived in an iron lung, a different kind of round canopy of metal stretching over his body. Would a newcomer to his work have read “Breathing” differently if I had put this information into the mix earlier? “The Man in the Iron Lung” riffs again on familiar material, not Hamlet, but Walt Whitman’s Body Electric, the famous celebration of self unbounded. In “The Man in the Iron Lung,” quite specifically mentioning O’Brien’s crip circumstances, a different kind of nature image finds its way into the circumference of a life (a dream snake, an escapee from the Garden of Eden, and hisses of Whitman’s embodiment, free, and strong):
I scream
The body electric,
This yellow, metal, pulsing cylinder
Whooshing all day, all night
In its repetitive dumb mechanical rhythm.
Rudely, it inserts itself in the map of my body,
Which my midnight mind,
Dream-drenched cartographer of terra incognita,
Draws upon the dark parchment of sleep.
I scream
In my body electric;
A dream snake bites my left leg.
Indignant, I shake the gods by their abrupt shoulders,
Demanding to know how such a vile slitherer
Could enter my serene metal shell.
The snake is punished with death,
The specialty of the gods.
Clamp-jawed still in my leg,
It must be removed;
The dream of the snake
Must be removed,
While I am restored
By Consciousness, that cruelest of gods,
In metal hard reluctance
To my limited, awkward, declase
Body electric,
As it whispers promises of health,
Whooshes beautiful lies of invulnerability,
Sighs sibilantly, seraphically, relentlessly:
It is me,
It is me.
But the sound painting of the poem does not allow for just an opposition of constrained physicality and unbounded health: those sounds, those sibilants, that whoosh is also the yellow pulsing cylinder, the snake’s belly: the Iron Lung becomes the snake that colonizes a body schema, a way of knowing one’s body. Gods, and Edens, and veins and clamps create a complex image of disturbed serenity, not one that allows for an easy parsing of spatial coordinates into metal and health. “It’s me”: the body, the man, the metal cylinder, the snake of knowledge–they remain, and scream a different kind of body electric.
The moment of release from self to otherness, the sublime and trembling dissolution of boundaries, is also very much at work in Stephen Kuusisto’s light-filled poems, which thrill me in their allusive qualities, a difficulty that allows me to play and connect, find lift and space.[2] This poem, “Only Bread, Only Light,” and the collection in which it is published, take their title from lines by Pablo Neruda:
No one perhaps could understand
who has not been as lost as I was,
nor as far from others as I felt,
a heap of coal in the night.
Then, only bread, only light. (qtd. in Kuusisto Epigraph)
Towards grace, a connection and the intertwining embrace of the senses as vital nourishment: these movements are alive in this poem. The “I” of this poem can link himself into a heritage of artists, and celebrate that sublimity: one’s self, as part of a wider round and dome. Kuusisto’s poems seem to speak of someone walking in Dantean delight, able to partake in visions, safe in a poet’s guidance (Virgil for Dante in the Inferno, and in “Only Bread, Only Light,” golden Blake):
At times the blind see light,
And that moment is the Sistine ceiling,
Grace among buildings–no one asks
For it, no one asks.
After all, this is solitude,
Daylight’s finger,
Blake’s angel
Parting willow leaves.
I should know better,
Get with the business
Of walking the lovely, satisfied,
Indifferent weather –
Bread baking
On Arthur Avenue
This first warm day of June.
I stand on the corner
For priceless seconds.
Now everything to me falls shadow. (Kuusisto 22)
An angel in the treetop, a city spreading out around the still point of the word, an enfolding into space: these are the soaring, roaring images that sing to me as I read these lines. The poem opens with a beautiful melody: “at times, the blind see light.” There is a gentleness to these light-hued sounds, in the lifting of the muscles of my mouth–not spelled out, not grounded in a specific body, but coasting in these vowel-sounds. And the Sistine Ceiling, that highly specific, art historical reference, the place of grace for so many in the Catholic world, makes for me the link between this poem and O’Brien’s–that canopy of Renaissance feeling, color, architecture, and sense of self as the center of a spinning world. That chapel speaks to me both of Michelangelo’s ceiling paintings that are reputed to have caused blindness in the making of its intricate patterns, and also of the arched wide spectacle that opens visions in the seeing for so many, architecture that pulls a body upwards.
And grace is given: “no one asks / For it, no one asks.” In the textual space between O’Brien’s “Breathing” and this poem, I can read this line as another moment of that romantic sublimity: there is no “asking,” no personal address, no labor, no reaching: just overwhelming sensation, unpersonal yet encompassing. For this is “solitude”: not loneliness, but a pooling into a self, another concentration under a dome, a vibration between space and body.
And yet, there is address entering into the balanced image: “daylight’s finger.” What a beautiful line of synesthesia: light and touch, on skin or surface, twining into the delight of a blindness that is not an absence of sensual world. Another artist claimed the numinous, the ethereal quality of a very grounded, real place, London, and the British countryside: William Blake, who saw visions, and encountered angels in a tree top as a child. So that’s what I hear when my mouth forms “Blake’s angel / Parting willow leaves”: the rush of wind over fens, a single tree with leaves gently rustling, and fingers, hands, arms, reaching out and down, and touching.
The poem’s “I” should know better–just like the young Blake was rebuked for his lying, his account of visions–and “business” enters in all its narrow-minded, busy connotation. But the city holds on to that spaciousness of a Sistine chapel, the Vatican’s holy see, the navel of a bygone world. But the business is “Of walking the lovely, satisfied, / Indifferent weather”: finding solitude in that circumambient air that is happy to support condors elsewhere. The smell of bread baking–a hint of sharing, of breaking bread, of a commodious neighborliness of humanity come to me as my eyes travel to an “I” standing at a city corner: different realms, different paths stretching out, tangible beneath feet on a curb. To connect or not, that is the question I bring to the last enigmatic line of this poem about being in space: “For priceless seconds. / Now everything to me falls shadow.” Is this a high point, priceless, timeless, from which the mundane act of choosing a path departs? I hear no sadness here, just a finality, a coming down, a completeness. A shadow is a connection between light and matter, ethereal and real: not a disjuncture, but a holding on to light, dispersed, traveled, touched. So am I wrong to wish to hear in these lines a connection to the sense of space and openness, daylight’s finger, the angel’s sound–a connection that binds the everyday to the numinous?
The dissolution of self against the world can take many forms, and can tell stories with different humors, different emotions. In Floyd Skloot’s grounded poems, time, place, and memory keep a poem at the cusp of change. The purview of one’s lands, master of all one surveys, king of the hill–these ways of being in space form another masculine convention, and shapeshift into a different register. Here is a poem from Skloot’s collection Approximately Paradise, entitled “The Geology of Home”:
We live on the limb of an overturned fold,
a shadow zone come late afternoon
when the crest is set ablaze. Just past
the hinge line wild blackberry thrives,
draping itself around a bed of stones.
Nothing is ever guaranteed here.
The compressed earth beneath our house
can heave and bend like a lamb at play
young enough to change in a flash.
This morning, in a windless moment,
I saw stillness gather itself and abandon
first the grass, then the blotched iris,
tulips, fennel, twin oaks, feathery cirrus
and finally the faint crook of a quarter moon. (63)
What snagged me in this poem is the overturned fold, a sense of precariousness and yet stillness, resting in close observation. There is an animality, an aliveness to an earth and land, a resting place, a home. Limbs and lambs quicken beneath a patch of land, make a home in the “we” and “our.” The fire of a blaze, stones and compressed earth, a wind’s stillness, and the moon–a silver water-goddess: the elements are assembled in this poem, but shrouded, in the background, holding off to swamp and bury beneath a wave a home’s solidity. There is a hinge here: a dramatic turn, a wave’s crest, and a shadow zone, and a dramatic tension in balance.
Blackberry draping around a bed of stones: these contrasts of life and death animate the poem’s sensuality, which touches me with the thick lips of tulips, the smell of fennel, and the force predicted by feathery cirrus clouds, foreshadowing a heavier wind, a storm coming. “Nothing is ever guaranteed here”: there is a geological sense of time, upheaval, against which an “I” can see “stillness gather itself and abandon” – a stillness, a moment, that seems to snare time itself, as morning gives way to a quarter moon during that generous, reaching watching. How long did that “I” look upon the blotched iris, what times passed by? What temporalities are appropriate to this “I” and its “we”–the moments of human time, or longer sequences, of earth, or the temporal sense of a plant, to whom morning to moon might have a lifetime’s meaning? The sense of temporal upheaval, echoing the bucking of earth’s balance, certainly holds much of the terror beauty, the captiveness that is both home and unheimlich, uncanny. And yet, even though these threats and these elements of the uncanny are here, there’s also a tranquility, in the sounds and rhythms of the poem: there is no storm presaged by the form.
Disability readings can further unfold my engagement with the poem. Skloot is the author of multiple poetry books and essays, but also of a memoir, entitled In the Shadow of Memory. In this book he chronicles eloquently his experiences of living with a virus that changed his memory, and affected his mobility. Without isolating specific experiences in specific poems, Skloot’s location in crip culture makes me think about the affective qualities of the sublime again. When the momentariness of the sublime, that once-only moment of astonishment and spatio-temporal upheaval becomes a more permanent guest, cannot new arrangements with surprise and delight be found? The quietness of vision in “The Geology of Home” speaks to me about different affectual regimes, emotional connections, ways of finding peace with instability and change.
In another poem, “Home Repairs,” a father wallpapers his daughter’s bedroom on a summer day. The last lines present an image of the labor needed to keep a home, a memory, a family, intact:
He could hear the thin
cry joists make as they dry. He worked by himself,
a storm of plaster around his shoulders,
the air thick with mould and age, nothing left
to mark the past but bare wall, a tapestry
of cracks, a door that would not stay closed. (Skloot, 2005, 25)
Again, there is no specific reason to go to disability readings to understand the poem’s concerns with memory, loss, insecure anchor points, and the home as a place of uncanny strangeness and assault. There is an embrace of matter, a connectedness here, in the listening to the joists on their journey through time, hearing the “thin cry,” and in the material of a home: “a storm of plaster around his shoulders,” like a cape, an elevation, a lift of air in the labor. There is a materiality to the air, too, in the thickness of mould and age, and there is a blankness, a danger in that non-human air–mould spores, decay, bareness, cracks, and in the bleakness of the end of lines, cutting away: in “nothing left,” and in “a tapestry”–“closed.” But in “The Geology of Home,” the assaultive, dangerous darkness of that memory imagery seems to be modulated differently, and a more open gaze at the blotched iris speaks of a wider relation to the outside than the one I hear in “Home Repairs,” in “He worked by himself,” the closeness, familiarity of the joists, the wall, the tapestry. And yet, in the “door that would not stay closed” an ambivalent connection with the life of things outside the home, out beyond the threshold, seems to be still alive. The act of making a home, living itself, a man’s frontier experiences without the convulsion of conquest: there is an interpenetration of self and location in “The Geology of Home,” under the quarter moon.
From the crook of the quarter moon, to the late afternoon sun, and a different light. To end this essay, I will turn to one last example of nature poetry, by Jim Ferris, a disability culture poet best known for his collection The Hospital Poems, where a hospital setting allows for a complex meditation on agency, structure, and growth.[3] In the poem “Late,” imagery of penetration and suffusion run up and down scales, setting human body and animal world into relation. With this, the poem’s theme places it in a well established tradition: boundaries and their penetration, a familiar theme in the literary canon, where boundary transgression, in particular the penetration of tightly guarded male bodies, becomes so often equated with horror and disgust. Here, the treatment has little of that melodrama, and a different affect guides an intermingling of worlds and bodies. Disability is itself not a theme, but informs a sensitivity, as it does in O’Brien’s, Kuusisto’s, and Skloot’s poetry. Interdependence, penetration, bodies in intersection are thematic complexes that nourish much disability culture poetry, and inform my reading of “Late.”
The poem penetrates in multiple ways, in its words’ meanings, but also in its formal elements: it has a musicality which draws my ear. In this last discussion, my emphasis is on the tonal and aural quality of poetry, its song, that seductive quality that snags the reader’s attention in all of the poems I have considered, but captures me in particular in the sounds and hooks of “Late” that bring me to an embodied experience of a sun’s warmth:
It’s the late afternoon sun, that’s why
it stings so, warm, rich, exhausting
its gorgeous fumes right through
us as its color temperature sinks
lower than a mosquito,
a gnat, worm slug amoeba
molecule atom photon
piercing through skin, between nerves,
warming our hackles as it dries
up the lake we rely on
for fish, for breath, for water in the pail,
for some splash of clarity
that cannot prevail. (Ferris, unpublished)
Warm and cool temperatures, fumes that infiltrate, waves of light and water: they all bind a world together, a world of interdependency. Clear boundaries emerge only momentarily in the enumeration of words, in their careful crafting, on a limit between their sound and their meaning. Humans have hackles, our water is the lake’s water, smell and thirst and instincts guide us, light becomes stinging insect, and the photons that make up all bodies. There is threat here, a striving against infiltration, and against a waterless death, but also a sound-sense, a rhythm, that underlies the inevitability, the “cannot prevail.” That “splash” with its sound painting, its onomatopoeia, anchors the poem in an immediacy: a synesthesia that merges vision, sound and touch as I feel fresh water on a warm face.
Interdependency and relation are also at the heart of the practice to which I put this poem, for it is not a poem I only read in private. Instead, this is one of the poems, or, to give the form other names, sound landscapes, language at sensory play, which I (respectfully) offer to communal work, and to the kind of practices with which I began this essay: engaging in finding aesthetic access together, in a group, as I try to open up both the scripts of ‘nature’ and of ‘poetry.’ Both concepts are often seen as exclusionary, and in my pedagogy and art practice, I try to find ways of opening their pleasures up to others. So I often use meditation when teaching poetry, entering worlds of sounds and shapes. Sometimes, after reading a poem together, we use silent contemplation following a relaxation exercise, and a line of a poem becomes a mantra, something held in one’s ear or, for those students more visually inclined, held like a sign in front of one’s eyes. At other times, I lead a movement or sound meditation in my community art events, as a way to find new, embodied meaning and pleasure in poems, opening up to our imagination and experience. Some poems lend themselves better than others for these exercises: generous, open ones that do not easily invite a narrative can stimulate exciting experiences in the classroom and in community arts sessions.
I have worked with “Late” in my classroom, at arts events, and at writers’ conferences, as a shared meditation exercise–having first discussed what I do with the poem with its author. In the group, we read the poem: not one person reading the whole poem, mimicking an author’s delivery, but one by one, each person taking a single line, and sending the poem into a circle. And we read and read: one line each, once round the room, twice, until a rhythm is established, and the poem becomes familiar. I then add another instruction: all are invited to say those words they like best, in each line, speak it with the person who is reading the line. Round we go again, once, twice, three times: the exercise does not get boring, as the poem unfolds on many breaths, and people can try out words in their mouth, hear them in chorus with others: “rich,” “mosquito,” “warming,” “lake,” “splash.”
I have noticed how at first, people tend to chorally take up the particularly interesting and unusual words, often the non-Anglo-Saxon ones.[4] These are invitations anchored in the poem, leisurely, vowel-rich words like mosquito and amoeba, and the (French-derived) hard and crystal sound of “clarity” with its short syllables and its clicking consonant attack. But as the circle continues, other favorites emerge, words that might mean something personal to the person mouthing along with the main reading, or are just pleasurable to say out loud, in isolation, with that clarity the poem invites us to imagine, momentarily. It is quite astonishing how long this exercise can be kept up with joy: it brings us back to the origin of words and their power to delight, as well as to the often little exercised enjoyment of choral work, of speaking rhythmically in a group, our own sound becoming part of an aural landscape that gives location to our voice. In discussions after the exercise, we talk about the feel of sounds in our mouths, where meaning is there, yes, but somewhat secondary to the drone, the rhythm, the immersion into sound that the merger of individual decision (which word to sound) and choral breath enables.
But before this discussion takes place, after we have stopped our sound round, we all write: letting the word pleasure the poem has given us spill over into our own writing, and new poems are born, often with a word from “Late” at its heart. Embedment and location, sensations in nature and of nature are often the nourishment of these poems, but instead of narratives of sitedness, the inspiration of “Late” offers alternatives to capturing a place’s sense world. Sound, touch, vision, taste often become the main focus of the poems generated by group members.
In “Late,” nature imagery becomes breath itself, not so much landscape description as the experience of sun on one’s skin, bordering outwards. Physical sensation echoes through word sounds, the deepening of tone, the narrowing of focus from outer landscape to inner bodily one (under skin, between nerves, in a contraction of enumeration, dwindling line length). Other image elements of a nature poem, from mosquitoes to lakes, emerge through the contemplation of a body’s experience of location.
A poem that flirts with dissolution, holds only formal, rhythmic and rhyming barriers against (skin’s and words’) permeability, becomes the sensory anchor for other people, new explorations, and its material is recycled into an ongoing ecology of poetry, as all poems are nourished by the stream of language we all only momentarily inhabit: that is a different vision of ecowriting.
Conclusion
Disability culture knows beautiful nature poems, sensations lived through language. We can turn to our environment, our words, our wider location, with deep pleasure, as all humans do, using our own body and our sensations as anchoring points and deeply rich sites. Different poems find breath and space, and re-imagine the traditional tools of poetic nature imagery to allow for new alignments of power and usurpation: I hear little triumphant or melancholic masculinity, conquering and conquered, wrestling with mountains and awe, in the lines I have discussed in these pages. Instead, in different ways, all of these poems speak to me of accommodation, of an alignment with forces inside and out, not in antagonistic struggle and surrender, but in a carving out of space even as death and dissolution is on the line.
The themes of interdependence and embedment are prevalent in much ecological poetry, a subset of landscape poetry, and I make no claims that disability itself somehow invites these thoughts. And yet, as varied and diverse as disability experiences are–and the poets in this essay live with different mobility, sensory and pain-related impairments–to name oneself part of disability culture often means accepting a version of selfhood different from heroic individuality, and to understand the political, social and personal participation in networks of dependency, care-giving, and accommodation as central to all lives, not just disabled lives. In this way, disability citizenship and aesthetics can model a form of being in space and in relation that aligns with many ecological thoughts, but can foreground access and its diversity, questioning notions of the pristine and too-carefully-guarded boundaries (of all kinds), of virgin land and heroic forays.
This is to me disability culture in action: the improvisatory, creative living of disability as an art of paying attention, because we must, and because we can, and because there is pleasure in that openness to the connections between our bodies and our world.
Epilogue
I am finishing the second part of this essay on winter vacation in the Florida Keys, outside our tent on a picnic table, keeping my laptop marginally safe from saltwater and sweat. Like the romantic poets, I have capital that allows me to physically access spaces called ‘natural,’ and so here, for me, the engagement with the history of nature poetry can bring the sensations of words and physical experiences traditionally associated with ‘nature’ together. On the last day of polishing this writing before returning to the mainland, I walk on an accessible path in the middle of the Deer Key National Park. Moving happily with my hesitating, tripedal walk, I listen to the wind and feel the sun on my skin as I discard some gendered scripts and walk bare-chested like my lover in the quiet, lonely park amongst palm fronds and water holes.
During our holiday, I found much pleasure listening to and thinking about nature poems by fellow crips (as well as a collection of Goethe’s poetry), aligning all these rhythms in my ear, while drifting in the ocean. It seems fitting to find another crip presence here in the park, affirming what I know: yes, disabled people have presence in our world, know our world, shape our world. For the path we are walking on here in the Deer Key National Park was created through the efforts of environmentalist and activist Frederick C. Mannillo, Jr., and his photo greets us at the path’s beginning: it shows a smiling man with his power chair.
Notes
[1] Dr. Petra Kuppers, Department of English, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
[2] For more on Kuusisto’s autobiography, see Mintz, and for more on his poetry, see Kuppers, “Performing Determinism.”
[3] For more on this collection, see Kuppers, “Disability Culture Poetry,” “Performing Determinism,” and “Revisiting the Hospital.”
[4] For an interesting discussion of the relative sound qualities and seductions of Anglo-Saxon and Latinate words, see Longenbach.
Works Cited
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Kuppers, Petra. “Disability Culture Poetry: The Sound of the Bones.” Disability Studies Quarterly 26.4 (2006). Jan. 20, 2007 <http://www.dsqsds.org/_articles_html/2006/fall/kuppers.asp>.
---. “Performing Determinism: Disability Culture Poetry.” Text and Performance Quarterly 27.2 (2007): 89-106.
---. “Revisiting the Hospital: Disability Culture, Non-Confessional. A Review of Jim Ferris’s Hospital Poems.” Valparaiso Poetry Review 8.2 (2007). Apr. 1, 2007 <http://www.valpo.edu/english/vpr/>.
Kuusisto, Stephen. “Only Bread, Only Light.” Only Bread, Only Light. Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2000. 22.
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---. “The Man in the Iron Lung.” 1988. Mark O'Brien's Web Page. 1999. Jan. 1, 2007 <http://www.pacificnews.org/marko/>.
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---. In the Shadow of Memory. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2003.
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