Publication Title
New Writing
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2024
Keywords
poetry, disability studies, contemporary literature, experimental literature, creative writing, poetics
Abstract
Disability poetics resist marginalisation by centralising disabled words and experiences, both literally and figuratively. In a world that prioritises ability, disabled bodyminds are marked as deviant from norms and conventions. Disabled poets have the opportunity to resist the normalised ‘body’ of the poem on the page. Conventions, rules, and norms can shape poetry – not just rhyme and metre, but line breaks, line arrangements, and limiting poems to the written linguistic mode. Disability poetics can include techniques such as poems written sideways, prose poems, and multimodally-composed texts, as explored in Tonguebreaker by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound by torrin a. greathouse, How I Bend Into More by Tea Gerbeza, ‘the snip’ by Tate N. Oquendo, and You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis by Kelly Weber. What might a poem inspire when its shape mimics the body? What can a poet bring attention to with simple textual markers like ellipses or strike-throughs? What might readers consider more deeply when exposed to different modes in a poem? Disability poetics has deconstructive benefits to consider (such as resistance to norms), as well as generative benefits (such as sharing different ways of being in and experiencing the world).
Funding Source
This article was published Open Access thanks to a transformative agreement between Milner Library and Taylor & Francis.
DOI
10.1080/14790726.2024.2425002
Recommended Citation
Heffers, A. T. (2024). Imaginary margins: disability poetics & reinventing the page. New Writing, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2024.2425002
Comments
First published in New Writing (2024): https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2024.2425002
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.