April 18, 2017 - 18:37
Last semester I took an English course on comtemporary poetry, which featured explorations of peotry/poets concerned with gender, race, queerness, and other identities that had been excluded from the academy. I wondered if similar theoretical lenses could be applied to disability poetry. Fortunately, people have started to think about this. There is a 2011 anthology of disability poetry ('Beauty is a Verb') that I plan to dive into to in search of the seed of a project.
Some questions I am wondering about at present are the following. What does disability aesthetic contribute to poetry? How do disabled poets go about caring out a space for themselves in the world of contemporary poetry? What does poetry contribute to disability narratives? How does the artform of poetry itself conduce to and/or exclude expression by disabled people? Does some non-disabled poetry have a disability aesthetic? Is poetry itself disabled? How does expression of disability through poetry enjoy freedoms that disability narratives cannot? Does this combat the hegemony of disability narratives? Can we create access for those with intellectual disabilities to create poetry? What do disabled poets write about? What is disability poetry?