Post-Language Poetries and Post-Ableist Poetics

Post-Language Poetries and Post-Ableist Poetics
Author(s): Patrick F. Durgin

Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Winter, 2009), pp. 159-184
Published by: Indiana University Press
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Post-Language Poetries and
Post-Ableist Poetics
Patrick F. Durgin
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
This essay1 brings together the discourses of contemporary disability studies and radical
modernist poetics. Reading the textures of subjectivity in the recent work of post-language
poet Laura Moriarty, I elaborate on a tradition in U.S. American poetries whose tenets
were pivotally formulated in and by language poetry. My central argument is that such
poetries contribute methods and materials key to furthering debates within disability
studies concerning 'dependency theory." With regard to the latter, special reference is made
to Bradley Lewis s work on ''post-psychiatry, "contemporary articulations of "crip"poetics,
and the hermeneutic ramifications of "psycho-social disability. "It is post-language poetries
that I find first disclose the promise ofpost-ableist poetics.
Keywords: disability studies / Laura Moriarty / language poetry / William Carlos

Williams
The problem of poetry at the end of the 20th century is who shall write
it, not in the sense of which persons, but rather persons of what order}
How will they be constituted, understand their own "individuality,"
and relate this to such audiences as each attempts to construct? Such
questions are both literary and social.
? Ron Silliman,
"Controlling Interests"
The history of radical modernist poetics reveals a shift in the fundamental

constitution of "witness" from a narrative account of the past to which
the witnessing subject has privileged access, to a participatory engagement
with the present triggered by the mutual witnessing of a textual event. If witness
is mutual, however, one wonders what purpose is served by literatures of witness.
But even in radical modernist renditions, past events and future readings are of no
less moment than the orientation toward the present implied by critical value of
textual events. For radical modernist poetry, it means they are more accessible and
more germane to the contemporary act of reading, the very presence of the text.
160 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 32, Number 2
Traditionally, this shift has produced "radical" texts, where the product reflects less
of an always-already outmoded inheritance. Rather, it has meant that the com
positional process continues with every act of reading, acts that root the work in
the lived experience. In so extending the creative labor to hermeneutic or critical
labor, radical modernist poetics has embraced "experimental" approaches. A more
inclusive sense of witness involves merging the writing and reading subjects, and
texts become sites for both contesting and forging new subjectivities. It is not that
authorial intention has ceased to matter, nor has it been supplanted by the deter
minations of readers, and thus meanings taken out of context. Rather, the motives
of either have been conceived as hypotheses, and formal means of articulating
these have followed the logic of these motives, deepening the poet's responsibility
while inviting readers' abilities to respond. Meaning emerges each time anew, in
the "now" of the textual event. Unlike conventional humanist science, however, the
results are only provisionally reproducible. Innovation, in fact, depends upon disin
terring some swerve from expectations, no matter how tentative these may be. The
"content" of such textual experiments is contingent not only upon the hypothesis,
but also upon the organizing principles of willfully conflated writing and reading
processes. Poetic "form," in the sense of the container and conveyer of the narrative
content the poem expresses, has thus broadened to include hermeneutic practices.
So by experiment we have come to understand a conscious congruence between
aims and means rooted in experiential and simultaneous events.
Generally speaking, the motives behind the variety of experimental forms in
this tradition are ethical: to more equally distribute the onus of witnessing lived
experience, and by so liberating such faculties, extending civic agency where it did
not before extend. Poets of such ambition, quite especially those affiliated with
language writing, have been understood as continuing the more metaphysical
projects of American pragmatism, along with Marxist, deconstructive and other
post-structuralist critiques. Which is to say that modes of poesis have seemed to
offer new rejoinders to the demands of contemporary culture, demands that include
subjects authorize themselves. In the following discussion, I will argue that a
nascent "post-ableist" poetics arises in the emergence of a variety of post-language
poetries. And this observation warrants a need to historicize and to theorize liter
ary witness in general, rather than simply to discuss any given set of poets acting
as witnesses. If post-ableist poetics represents a poetics of witness, then anyone will
write it. Beginning by postulating characteristics that post-language poetries and
disability-culture poetries more or less share, I will link to post-language poetries
the important work in contemporary disability studies in which the problem of
"the subject" is incisively returned to the fold of critical theory. This essay thus looks
at the strain of "dependency theory" within the discourse of disability and looks
toward an informed rapprochement of post-language and post-ableist poetics. I
will give special attention to a relatively marginal aspect of disability discourse,
one I call "psycho-social" disability. In offering a critical summary of the discourses
of interdependence in disability studies, I offer a necessarily partial definition of
psycho-social formulations.
Post-Language Poetries and Post-Ableist Poetics 161
This essay also attempts to account for the ways radical modernist poetics can
disrupt an essentialist impasse familiar in theories of subjectivity and can transform
the "intelligence" that is so often mired in "simulations of present experience to
the facts of the imagination?" (Williams 219). I cite William Carlos Williams's
bedrock text, 1923's Spring and All, not only because of its importance to language
writing, nor just because the persistence of its insights into interdependent subjec
tivity is felt in post-language poetries, but because Williams was a physician and
caregiver particularly attentive to liminal states of impairment and ability. His is
among a number of historical examples of post-ableist frameworks that inform
my analysis. But this is not primarily an historical account. It is more an attempt
to read contemporary articulations of radical modernist strains in the recent work
of Laura Moriarty (1952-), a poet virtually unknown to disability culture and
who does not identify as disabled. Her overall project is one of the most fully real
ized among discernibly "post-language" poetries. Her poetics represent a singular
practice informed by the tenets of language writing but hardly represented by
them. She is, incidentally, equally adept with the Romantic tradition, especially as
recycled in the work of San Francisco Renaissance poets Robert Duncan and Jack
Spicer. Her work in 2004 s Self-Destruction can and should be read as a nuanced
writing-through of the temporality of interdependence and disability, of which
ableism ? the ideological discrediting of differently-abled subjects ? is a more or
less calculated denial. The tradition this work exemplifies is important, but so is the
exemplary way in which poetics such as Moriarty's do ultimate justice to the logic
of "witness" that disability culture poetry struggles to harness in a generative way.
This poetry offers a way in which one might imagine an arena for identifications
beyond ableist ideology. These facts are further suggestive of the notion that, where
a fully-fledged post-ableist poetics is concerned, anyone will write it?a person
does not have to be or to identify as disabled.
Demanding that post-ableist poetics provides frameworks and findings to
"anyone" stakes a claim on identity-based practice. Creative and critical practices of
witness are nothing new in this regard, if they fundamentally diverge in the inter
war years when Eurocentric avant-gardes were domesticated in the U.S. context.
At the same time, the return of G.I.s to the U.S. homeland created a newly visible
disabled population. Further the very notion of world war defined the limits of
both civic autonomy and human ability, disrupting the humanist tradition with
many "advances," not least in eugenic, genocidal and military technologies, and
with the subsequent atrocities that occurred (as spectacle) during the period in
question. Even as scholars of modernity, we are accustomed to identifying acts of
witness with the thing seen and, in poetry, on the strength of the image in which
its literary form resides ? these are imparted by the authorial voice, the means by
which the form is authorized. By literatures of witness, we tend to mean those
narratives predicated on the authenticity of having been there, whose truth value
is contingent on the autonomy of lived experience. These are works that make
truth claims regarding characters, events, and settings that we might presume to be
"real" despite the definitive artifice of the literary?that is, despite a text's poetics.
In describing post-ableist poetics as anyone's poetics, the claim I make is, in part,
a veering away from a poetics valorizing personal expression toward a poetics
valorizing social construction.
The logic of witness Carolyn Forche famously describes in the introduction
to Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness sets the stage, even and
especially if the editorial criterion of the "personal" has the effect of omitting
from that important anthology many "significant poets who endured conditions
of historical and social extremity" (29); "the impress of extremity upon poetic
imagination" forges a "third term" between the proverbial poles of the psychic
autonomy of personality and "political" expression: "the social" (30-31). The poetics
of witness is described as "interpersonal," "public," exploiting religious, fabulous,
and ironic figures?that rely on communal beliefs to activate knowledge?shape
shifting figures, really?employed to interrogate "the problem of relativism" as it
arises in "the everyday"; it is a poetics of "difficult equivocation," "fragmentation,"
"self-alienation" (36-7, 40-1, 42, 44). Nonetheless, Forche's paradigm reinscribes
conventional humanist subjectivity where radical modernists like Gertrude Stein
and Williams, and later George Oppen, Allen Ginsberg and John Cage harnessed
the very effects she describes as formal ploys. To quote Oppen, such poets observed
the "shipwreck of the singular," autonomous, Cartesian subject and conceived of
a generative relativism (Collected Poems 151). Their signal works bear witness to
the very author-function in question. That is, they disrupt norms of wit, mental
functioning, and normal intelligence; they employ the very formal modes Forche
cites in opposition to the subjectivity with which she identifies literary witness;
and they scrutinize the etymological cues of witness by engaging the psycho-social
formulations that guide our attentions.
A truly contemporary poetics of witness must resonate with the radical mod
ernist project of actively producing an experience of the contemporary?that is,
as a mode of temporal presence rather than personal-historical "evidence. "Though
perhaps more than ever we seek to disrupt the -isms of postmodern identity poli
tics, their histories have remained fugitive and obscure. One such history concerns
psycho-social disability, the wide set of disabling circumstances faced by persons
with less visible and, by definition, veiled impairments. Such impairments simply
don't "present" in either the introspective or clinical sense, though they are resistant
to "passing" undetected in the sense that humanist witness grants to "the social."
But such a hermeneutic quandary is likely to confront "anyone" in a time when
history bends under technological acceleration and neo-liberal myths of global
ization are meant to erase socio-political discontinuities; thus the subject appears
under erasure. This, of course, was the point of departure for language writing's
critique of the textual politics of witness. Having to do less with self-recognition
than recursive cognition, these poets foregrounded language itself as the subject
and object of hermeneutic consequence. If the infinite play of signifiers that "lan
guage itself" embodies is a sufficient site of socio-political critique, as their work
variously suggests, the operative assumption of language writing is that a certain,
not inscrutable labor of the mind can be made palpable enough to implement as a
form of participatory democracy. Language poetry involved a generalized politics of

constructivist insights that we might think of as logical corollaries to coterminous
civil rights movements concerning race, gender, ethnicity, and, yes, disability rights,
among others. It is in this revised, formal sense of "witness" that I hope to disclose
the relevance of newer practices that take these tenets as their point of departure.
Moriarty s is a vivid example, but it is not alone.
DISABILITY, DEPENDENCY AND THE SOCIAL MODEL
It carefully comes about that there is no identity and no time and

therefore no human nature when words are apart.
? Gertrude Stein, The
Geographical History of
America or the Relation
of Human Nature to the
Human Mind
Disability studies is an interdisciplinary field unthinkable without the ascent of

humanistic cultural studies, and is furthermore an outgrowth of the Disability
Rights Movement (DRM) whose motto?"nothing about us without us"?deeply
resonates with so many scholars' impatience with the omission or misrepresenta
tion of oppressed and subordinated groups.2 Not surprisingly, the tension between
Enlightenment individuality and social minority-identity is frequently harnessed
by disability-studies scholars in the service of disclosing how bodily impairment
(an illness or other non-normative attribute) is rendered socially discrediting?i.e.,
a disability?through lack of physical, psychological, and ideological accommo
dation. This model by which impairment becomes discernibly stigmatized and
oppressive is called the "social model." The operative ideology is called "ableism."
Impairments, obstacles, impediments may be what any mind and body has; hence
naming something a disability is always a certain authorization of its bearing, a
claim with particular interests behind it. Charting the authorization of the ideal of
bodily normality, Lennard Davis's foundational study Enforcing Normalcy (1995)
set the pace of textual studies in disability studies by signaling the essentially
modern impulse behind the emergence of ableism so defined. This has provided
the field with an historical backdrop and partial canon against which postmodern
identity politics might be scrutinized from the perspective of disability, adjoining
the social model to literary study of representations of disability.
The social model of disability has emerged from the lived experience of dis
ability to define itself negatively against both the medical (or "deviance") and the
business models. These models, as a rule, highlight the attribute of impairment and
variously disengage from and even denigrate the agency of persons with disabili
ties (sometimes referred to as "PWDs"). One's ideological environment cannot be
conceptualized apart from material circumstances of "the body" according to the
dominant models of disability studies, thus making way for a privilege of "physical"
impairment. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's important concept of the "normate"

subject is based on the cultural capital assumed by certain "bodily configurations"
that are visibly and thus "physically" so constructed. However "extraordinary"
they may be by ableist standards, visual evidence of bodily difference is sufficient
evidence for ableist ascriptions of disability, no matter the intrinsic affective states
particular to any given body. Thus, one of the tasks of disability aesthetics and
scholarship has been to accentuate the intrinsic affect of impairment in contra
distinction to its extrinsic aspects. The dichotomy enlisted is not unlike Gertrude
Stein's between "entity" and "identity,"which she used to gauge the natural within
the labors (famously "masterpieces") of the mind.
In disability studies nonetheless, this enlistment veers toward the "physical"
such that one never loses the terms of modern science's principles of anatomical
decorum, which, it must be said, are congruent with the field's privilege of both
humanist tropes and specifically human subjects.3 The Cartesian mind/body divi
sion here compensates for the untenable relation of Enlightenment individuality
with a social body of others who inevitably assume attitudes of either care or indif
ference, attitudes that we read as registers of one's humanity. The trope of extraor
dinary physical variation meets its veritable affect through extraordinary figures. A
key text in this regard is Erving Goffman's Stigma (1963). For Goffman, a stigma is
... a special kind of relationship between attribute and stereotype.... By definition, of

course, we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human.. . .We tend to impute
a wide range of imperfections on the basis of the original one, and at the same time
to impute some desirable but undesired attributes, often of a supernatural cast. (4-5)
Indeed, supernatural figures in the literary humanities like Tireseus and Victor
Frankenstein provide enduring focal points for disability scholarship and creative
work. The trope of disability is as timeless as the first principles these figures repre
sent. Despite that, the overall thrust of disability scholarship's historical interven
tions aim to make such tropes more timely and particular, very often through first
person testimonials designed to demystify difference through humanistic reason.
Of course this history is a vexed one. According to philosopher of medicine
Georges Canguilhem, when adaptive processes give way to biological norms in the
late Victorian era, disability becomes equated with inability through particularly
modern disciplinary constructs of pathology. In light of this persistent connota
tion, formative studies both in and of the field emphasize the need of "construct
ing the axis on which disabled and nondisabled fall" (Linton 32). As one, Simi
Linton's Claiming Disability (1998) begins to address "the tremendous difficulty
in articulating impairment in ways that do not essentialize disability or reduce it
to an individual problem" (138). Nonetheless, it is a shared quality of lived experi
ence that allows ableism to read individual interests as "special" interests. The work
of disability scholar Tobin Siebers has sought to dismantle and deter subsequent
accusations of "narcissism" via two mutually constitutive insights: that "physical bar
riers are each and every one of them psychic barriers as well," and that "narcissism
is profoundly incompatible with the reality of disability because we of the tender
organs have to rely so often on other people" ("Tender Organs" 53). Any privilege
of the physical, even as a corrective, would seem to depend upon psychic states of
attention, that is forms of witness. If, as Siebers puts it, aesthetics "tracks the emo
tions some bodies feel in the presence of other bodies," hermeneutics is where the
false dichotomy of mind and body is challenged on the basis of those notoriously
fugitive affects that channel between experiential and epistemological certainties
("Disability Aesthetics" 63).
So while the DRM has been duly vigilant in realizing the ideal of "indepen
dent living" for persons with disabilities, disability studies has put pressure on issues
of caregiving and dependency; both cite the rhetoric of universal human conditions
that promise, usually with age, that the "nondisabled" are only ever "temporarily
able-bodied" (Davis, Bending 35-6; see also Kittay, and Kittay and Feder). With
disabilities associated with the mind, however, the sense of "temporarily-able
bodied[ness]" designating the decay of a presumably normal organ is shifted to
its fuller and more accurate sense of being momentously affixed to a willful act of
naming the norm, such that ableism becomes a sort of logocentrism. From a dis
ability-studies perspective, vitality and obsolescence are the mutually constitutive
categories to which processes of adaptation are subject.
Studies of literary representations of disability have focused on extraordinary
bodies as metaphorical vehicles for dubious tenors without significantly address
ing the questions radical modernism puts to the structure of metaphor itself.
Indeed, Garland-Thomson, Arto Quayson, and, especially, Mitchell and Snyder's
theory of "narrative prosthesis" have come closest to addressing these questions,
though they center their readings, as does Davis, on the novel. These pernicious
vehicles ? Oedipus'limp, for example ? have been shown to sustain what disabil
ity-studies scholar Michael Berube calls "the psychological distance most people
put between themselves and disability" (qtd. in Davis, Bending 36). At a time when
disability studies is attempting to render disability a "critical concept that reveals
the structure of dependence inherent to all human societies" (Siebers, "Right to
Have Rights" unpaginated), my emphasis on the term "psycho-social" as a disability
category?rather than "mental," "cognitive," or solely "psycho"?seeks to account
for literatures of witness that aren't exclusively responsive to critical practices based
in the logic of metaphor, a logic of substitution and restitution rather than mutual
constitution.4The point is to note that we may be at a point where the impasses of
essentialism are transforming our poetics into useful critical implements.
Something crucial happens when we grant that psychic and social determi
nants have the power to determine disability as an identity. We always do so to
some degree, though the determination is one of kind. What we think is a body is
actually an ideological lens through which we are (figuratively, though very often
literally) seeing a body. This categorical shift is where the opportunity to forge
identities occurs ? to make them, a poetic event?though it is equally where we
are interpolated as subjects?where ideology has its way with us. Thus we make
an epistemological virtue of the cognitive qualities of recursivity to which we
grant authority. These qualities are, of course, dictated by discourse and emerge as
epistemes?Foucault s term for the going set of truth values serving the interests of
power. In other words, to any degree that we grant that psychic and social deter
minants render variations of embodiment as disabilities, we delineate the horizon
of "the social model." This entails admitting to and confronting the observer's
paradox of "the social" per se, to map the unforeseen and non-normatively visible
impairments that lend variety to the ideal of humanity even if so doing invalidates
that ideal. That such impairments are in principle unforeseeable ? that they reside
in lived experience?and that lived experience is neither autonomous (asocial) nor
instrumental (universal) makes psycho-social disability the very contingency model
of that pathological "distance" ableism effects. Thus post-ableist poetics represents a
cleavage between essentialist and constructivist identity politics; it discloses points
at which individual expressions of this universe of biological variation are in fact
expressed as undivided attributes of ideologic?! constructs. In the "psychological
distance" between tenor and vehicle, "when words are apart," metaphor imposes its
epistemic trace. A post-ableist poetics recognizes this shift as a site of production
rather than one of legislation. The latter has rarely proved an adequate mode of
social resistance, in any event.
In the absence of a meaningful synthesis of essentialist and constructivist
forms of identity politics, disability as a category has, by some measures, become
an ethical foil for and signal of the end of identity politics itself. The editor of the
Disability Studies Reader, Davis has coined the term "dismodernism" to historicize
this "commonality of bodies within the notion of difference" and to translate the
Deleuzian model of "rhizomatic" subjectivity into a "more concrete mode of action"
(Bending 31). This investment in a post-humanist "vision . . . aims to create a new
category based on the partial, incomplete subject whose realization is not autonomy
and independence but dependency and interdependence" (30). This is a centrally
important finding, but the Deleuzian investment upon which it depends requires
an elaboration Davis himself does not provide. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's
figure of the "rhizome" is well-known as an iconic rendering of a body politic rooted
in multiplicities that are, rather than accumulated singularities (or a bland diversity
of individuals), a function of an ontological recursivity of difference and repeti
tion. "The multiple," they insist, umust be made . . . with the number of dimensions
one already has available . . . the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always
subtracted. Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write at n-\
dimensions. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome" (6). "[Subtracting
in each instance the value of the constant" is tantamount, on this model, to moti
vating the otherwise static features of the autonomous individual by releasing its
attention from a false sort of modesty, offering instead a non-dialectical "sobriety"
(99). In the rhizome, Kantian indifference gives way to a post-structuralist lack of
self-interest (see Gaston).
With a nod toward feminist identity philosopher Judith Butler, poet and
scholar Michael Davidson has subsequently tempered Davis's investment by point
ing out how it detrimentally "conflates a postmodern philosophical stance toward
performativity with a historical, post-civil rights cultural politics" ("Introduction,"
55).5 But it is not clear that Davis's stance recognizes such a level of performativ
ity. In fact, he is quite literally questioning the efficacy of identity politics once the
paradigm of interdependence is asserted. Davis's claim that "when all identities are
finally included, there will be no identity" transposes the logic of interdependence
to something like mathematical set theory or Steinian "entity" (Bending 88). He
means there will be no subsets inherent to the Utopian body politic. Meanwhile
identity studies'"taxonomical" instincts reinscribe them before the fact and thereby
forefeit their radical potential (ibid.). Davis means something like what Kenneth
Burke meant when he claimed the New Critics had made of modernist poetry
evidence in support of a hermeneutics that amounted to "mere prophecy after the
event'" (473). But poetics of radical interdependence rely upon a critical practice
of witness, identification, and authorization that is neither driven by such instincts
nor reducible to the displaced taxonomy of analogic thinking. Such a poetics can
be post-identitarian in the sense that Davis proposes. Perhaps it must relinquish
that particular sense of "identity "before the active identification with the contem
porary may be made. Identifications are something we make; but poesis, so defined,
is a trajectory, not a destination. And that may make post-ableist identifications
seem inevitable, since from a present standpoint, the past is literally inaccessible.
But inevitabilities are provocatively absent from the history if not the theory of
civil rights struggles, not to mention modern leftist achievement. However, the
urge to ^modernize these narratives, the question Deleuzian and other radical
frameworks raise is, where to begin? Partly to delineate the uses and abuses of
such models, I continue to define dependency theory by means of its relationship
to hermeneutics. "Dependency theory recognizes a sort of observer's paradox as its
point of departure; if no member of society can be legibly divided from it, how do
we understand and honor the differences in mind and body that allow us to care
for one another as members of a body politic?" (Durgin). That is, I see attitudes of
care and caregiving regimes as acceptable checks on the autonomy of lived experi
ence, rather than as plagiaristic and potentially exploitative appropriations of the
presumed autonomy of the individual.
Curiously reminiscent of Williams's threat, in Spring and All, to the "tradition
alists of plagiarism," the threat to identity politics that dependency theory repre
sents allows cultural studies to critically examine its methodological orientation.
Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell's recent study of the Cultural Locations of
Disability?in many ways an exemplary work of cultural studies for its "historical
referencing strategy" of texts from the "applied fields"? ends with what they call
"a heretical claim":
[T]hat textually based analysis is the only absolute remedy to the exhaustion of people
based research practices . . . [T]o some extent we have placed the emphasis incor
rectly if we value texts only for their "empowering" representations of people with
disabilities. ... In our perspective, the field of disability studies has functioned most
productively as a meta-institutional formation whose primary goal is to destabilize the
existing discourse of disability. Its first order of operation, then, is that which exposes
the dependencies of those fields that would situate disabled people as dependent. . . .
This change alone will prove monumental not because people with disabilities inher
ently know the truth of their own social and biological lives, but rather because their
visible entry into the discourse of their bodies makes all speaking positions in the field
shift, becoming necessarily self-conscious and increasingly self-reflexive. (Snyder and
Mitchell 201,203, final emphasis mine)
Snyder and Mitchell disclose their belief in this reciprocity in the service of a
critique of other models of dependency, such as the economic dependency of
rehabilitation enterprises on ideological norms of independent living. And while
dependency theory stemming from categories of disability is related to economic
theories of globalized dependency, it is moreso in consequence than in organiz
ing principles or motives. Thus, there could be significant confusion when anti
modernization theories of economic dependency brush up against "dismodernist
ethics," not to mention the role of empowerment in textual engagements with
disability.6 But these multiple valences of "dependency" must be clearly delineated
if we, answering Snyder and Mitchell's call, wish to use one against the other.
In the sense that Robert McRuer has analyzed the rhetorics of independence
utilized by the World Bank, as well as that Neel Ahuja has given to "second-order
interdependencies" through figures of transgressive re-appropriation and anti
colonial "mimicry," post-ableist poetics may promise a form of protest, but only
through foregrounding the first order of business: the author function. Preeminent
examples include Frantz Fanon's famous critique of "The So-Called Dependency
Complex of Colonized Peoples." Like the compensatory attributes projected onto
persons with disabilities by the processes of a stigma, the "fateful hieroglyphics"
of the unconscious harness the figure of "dependency" to sanction the "obedience
to an authority complex" (99). It is the pernicious veiling and strategic evasion of
the author function that, Fanon reminds us, is a matter of not just who is saying
so, but when and, as Silliman put it, "of what order."The "visible entry" of disabled
voices, however, is easier said than done. That is, important to this argument is the
fact that psycho-social disability is often veiled from those so afflicted, mistaken
and mistreated by the "new psychiatry," and rarely if ever "claimed" within disabil
ity advocacy. All of this provides opportunities to produce vivid voicings of one's
experience of the contemporary. Perhaps it is the social model of radical modernist
poetics that serves a dependency theory adequate to Snyder and Mitchell's claim.
Such meta-institutional critiques have been articulated. And one deserves
special mention for its fluid deployment of historical referencing strategies vis-a
vis texts from the applied fields in the interest of a radical application of poesis to
cultural studies. I'm referring to Bradley Lewis's attempt to frame what he calls
"postpsychiatry." In Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry, Lewis
outlines a "cultural studies of psychiatry" as an example of the emerging field of
"medical humanities," in part by a critical reading of the American Psychiatric
Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (or DSM). According to Lewis's
account of the "science wars," which inform the pharmacological fixation of the
so-called "new psychiatry," a dialectical impasse has been reached and will only
be broken by taking poststructuralist "third way approaches" to caregiving, thus
calling for a transformation in our interpretative frameworks.7 Lewis's colloca
tion of disciplines may magnify the kind of bland grafting of frameworks David
Holdsworth and others have criticized of late. Just as the new psychiatry faulted
the "talking cure" for its impressionistic lack of self-reflexivity, Lewis discloses a
disingenuous relativism endemic to both essentialist and constructivist theories of
subjectivity; he offers "to sidestep" the entire trajectory by returning to the prob
lem of "representation," post-Freud and Lacan. Just as Aristotle, in the founding
insights oi Poetics, reinstated temporality as a core problem of representation, Lewis
cites Ralph Waldo Emerson's admission that "The only ballast I know is a respect
to the present hour" (32-3). This form of "respect" relies upon a "semiotic realism
based in interpreters'interests, "whose philosophical apex is found in U.S. American
pragmatism (Charles Pierce and William James foremost). To so foreground the
author function requires participatory reading practices, generating what Lewis
calls a "pluridimensional-concequentialist epistemology" (ibid.). In other words,
cultural studies will have recourse to psycho-social formulations as it harnesses
that play of temporalities that distributes events into the plurality of dimensions
(past/future) that historical thinking requires. A focus on the present interest allows
Lewis to ask questions of power, of the author function. Indeed, this is Lewis's
focus in his reading of Michel Foucault; he "take[s] literally the course in Foucault's
notion of discourse. In other words, a discourse is never static: it is always en route"
(59, emphasis original). But to be "yet to come" is, by most disciplinary accounts,
to lack an identity. Part of what work like Lewis's suggests, beyond its admirable
interdisciplinarity, is that a methodology traditionally reserved for poetic praxis
become systematically wed to the motives of cultural studies, disability studies, and
more particularly dependency theory.
POST-ABLEIST SUBJECTS AND SELF-DESTRUCTION
Falling in with us he called

Me as a single note
? Laura Moriarty, "My
Name," Self-Destruction
Part of what I'm arguing here is that certain poets make poesis itself the site of
forging post-ableist subjectivity, even if it is a post-identarian subjectivity. And
what should equally interest the hitherto separate discourse communities of radical
modernist poetics and disability studies is that the tradition of poetics of radical
interdependence does not necessarily stem from the work of poets who, directly
or indirectly, identify as disabled. Rather, the formal self-reflexivity of the work
engages the psycho-social per se; "respect to the present hour" becomes a veritable
gauge of adequate witness. At the outset of this essay, I called ableism a denial of
the temporality of interdependence and disability. Below I'll demonstrate what is
meant by formal self-reflexivity as opposed to personal self-referentiality. The key

in doing so will be temporalities which make way for the "new" and unforeseen.
After all, these are key premises to post-ableist concepts of the body politic. And
such temporalities have characterized the tradition of radical modernism, especially
as pivotally conceived by New American and language poetics, and auspiciously in
post-language poetries of the present time.8
In many ways a protege of Williams, New American poet Robert Creeley
once wrote that,
The process of definition is the intent of the poem . . .Tradition is an aspect of what
anyone is now thinking?not what someone once thought. We make with what we
have, and in this way anything is worth looking at. A tradition becomes inept when
it blocks the necessary conclusion; it says we have felt nothing, it implies others have
felt more. (72)
In such an historical sweep, what is "worth looking at" is a core question of both
language poetics and cultural studies; both respond to exploitations of capitalist
labor relations and the discrepant distribution of benefits that persons with dis
abilities, not coincidentally, experience in bold relief. When, in Spring and All, Wil
liams does battle with the epistemological "barrier" that shields the unforeseeable
"reader" from "what he is at the exact moment that he is," he confronts "perfect
plagiarism," a textual condition of outmoded analogies (177-8,181). The "new" is
constantly deferred by analogic thought forms?"The terms Veracity'actuality'
real' naturaf'sincere' are . . . evolved from an identical discussion which took place
the day before yesterday" (ibid.). By metonymic juxtaposition, the verse and prose
passages of Spring and All literally pass into one another, accelerated by frequent
use of the long, Dickinsonian dash.9 Williams's segue into a central poem of wit
ness illustrates the formal stakes by announcing that the "modern" poem represents
"not realism'but reality itself?" (204). In the fourteen free verse couplets of Poem
XI ("In passing with my mind"), Williams describes a tableau in transit from the
modest perspective of his passing car. Spying "an elderly man who / smiled and
looked away," he watches him watch "a woman in blue // who was laughing" as if
to amplify the man's expression (205-6). She is, in fact,
leaning forward to look up
into the man's half

averted face
and a boy of eight who was

looking at the middle of
the man's belly (206)
The imagery of the poem is situated amongst multiply integrated tropes of motion
and intermediation: "passing," "past," "middle," activated by swift enjambment,
whereby a reader finds oneself "leaning forward to look" at the scene narrowly
arrayed in lines down the page. What propels the narrative subject is "The supreme
importance / of this nameless spectacle," whose incessant gravity only ends in
"imaginative suspense": "I saw a girl with one leg / over the rail of a balcony[.]"
Debating the "veracity" of the imagined scene here is beside the point, of
course. The writing subject and the reading subject found themselves in an observ
er's paradox, irreducible in its complexity, and mutually constituted by the scene
itself, which is itself rather sparse: a few characters in interlocking states of atten
tion. The image of an impaired body?if it is one?is invested with the extraor
dinary mystery of the "nameless," a figure of non-identical, imminent nominalism
on which he hinges his argument for a new form of witness, indeed "the real" itself.
This is not a "representation" of disability so much as a confidence trick. A play of
gazes in the mind's proverbial eye is what is seen. Is our narrator stopped in his
tire tracks by the amputee on the balcony? Or do we more accurately elide the line
break such that simply "one leg" of an ordinary set of two hangs "over the rail"?
Presuming the body began with the normal pair is a vulgarly ableist projection, of
course. Such a debate, for Williams, is indicative of the narcissistic identification
with the thing seen; that is, that every sensible impression our seasoned intuitions
permit affirms its truth value, affirms a given language of humanity and thus relieves
the rational sciences of that effort or duty. For Williams, this means that "the writer
of imagination" has no need to serve the reader without it; only a radically partici
patory, constitutive relationship of authorial and interpretative subjectivities will
keep from foreclosing on said writer's efforts. He [sic] is "released from observing
things for the purpose of writing them down later," even as he is implicated in that
world now (178).
This acute simultaneity launches Williams into the same dialectic between
the impress of extremity on the imagination and the obligation to bear witness
that accompanies attitudes of care; the same attention to the present that seemed
to necessitate the work of imaginative poesis was the causal circuit of narration in
reverse, like looking into the light and seeing waves and particles, neither a priorty.
The logic of witness, then, is demonstrated where it is most often, in conventional
literatures of witness, chronicled. To take an example from Forche's canon, Wil
liams finds himself in Primo Levi's predicament when, in the latter's account of
his formative mountaineering adventures with the morally auspicious character
Sandro Delmastro, the ominous foreshadowing of The Periodic Tables materialist
climax clumsily reconciles the spirit and the letter.
He did not belong to that species of persons who do things in order to talk about them
(like me) ... he spoke as no one speaks, saying only the core of things. . . . Today I
know it is a hopeless task to try to dress a man in words, make him live again on the
printed page ... he lived completely in his deeds, and when they were over nothing of
him remains ? nothing but words, precisely. (48, 53)
Williams's later interest in Ginsberg's logic of witness, a definitive antithesis to

language writing's critique of the lyric "I," concerns precisely the participation of
the poet's "own body" as it "sees through and all around the horrors he partakes of
in the very intimate details of his poem" (Ginsberg 8).10The iconic opening gambit
of "Howl"?"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness ..."?is
a synecdoche; Ginsberg's narrator claims witness to behaviors presumptively or
conventionally attributed to that always-already temporarily abled organ (9). But
"Howl" contains neither the kind nor the extent of bare metonymic juxtaposition
that from Spring and All through Paterson formally organized Williams's logic
of witness.11 Ginsberg's synecdoche subsumes and displaces the mind's labor.12
Self-evidence of this sort is inadequately self-reflexive, especially at the level of
the signifier (e.g., it is impossible to name the reflexive significance of"?"). It is
at this level that the gains of radical modernism were consolidated by language
writing via the New American Poetry.
With the Deleuzian investment elaborated, we can understand language writ
ers' sustained resistance to a humanist fetishization of the signified as a dismod
ernist impulse to "make language opaque so that writing becomes more and more
conscious of itself as world generating, object generating" (Bernstein 70-1). Such
writing figures the possibility of being "subtracted" from psycho-social circuits a
fallacy; though its negotiation of the ways "the one belongs to the multiple" is as
much subject generating as "object generating," it is not therefore a conventionally
subjective practice. A conversant formulation comes from Ron Silliman, who in
1983 remarked that the deterministic-chance-procedures of New American poet
Jackson Mac Low, a poet whose attention to the signifier was as much an influ
ence on language writing as dialectical materialism, had the effect of resolving the
"so-called problem of the subject" into the "mere sum of the writing" (40). Post
language poets continue this line of inquiry. I'm thinking here of the appropriative
writing of the "flarf" collective, the disjunctive lyricism of A Tonalism, Robert
Kocik's poetic critique of the culture of "fitness," Arakawa and Gins' project of
Making Dying Illegal (see also their Reversible Destiny Sayings, among which is
"Identity is a disease"), and Susan Schultz's ingenious use of blogging technology
to investigate the vicissitudes of dementia.13 Such post-language projects are highly
conceptual and self-historicizing, and in these senses and others, they are indica
tive of a time when language writing's fullest implications are being felt. In fine,
"post-language" poetics both thematically and formally constitute the grounds of
"the real" by which?if Williams's charge is taken to heart?their cultural efficacy
can be gauged. They assume this as a possible and desired motivation for poetry.
From the privileged site of the letter, they develop the spirit of "the multiplicity
to be constituted."
Undeniably, so have self-identified poets with disabilities. In anthologies like

Toward Solomons Mountain: The Experience of Disability in Poetry and To Come to
Light: Perspectives on Chronic Illness in Modern Literature, the recent special issue
of the Journal of ~Literary Disability on "Poetry and/as Disability," literary journals
like Wordgathering, and the collection Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American
Sign Language Literature, a variety of concerns and critical approaches have been
articulated. But it is a neo-romantic poetics of commiseration, tempered by a
preponderance of confessionalist and essentialist attention to authorial "voice,"

that is often articulated with the greatest alacrity. Witness Jim Ferris's definition
of "crip" poetry:
Here is how I know it: I know it when I feel it.
... A definition I have given for disability poetry is "poetry that seeks to explore and
validate the lived experience of moving through the world with a disability. Sometimes
referred to as crip poetry, disability poetry embodies a disability consciousness; it is
informed by and contributes to disability culture." That is a serviceable definition.
But here's what I left out: the possibility, the edgy potential, the openness and even
likelihood of transformation.
Crip poetry centers the experience of disabled people; it shows disabled people tak
ing control of the gaze and articulating the terms under which we are viewed. ("Crip
Poetry . . ."unpaginated)
Elaborating on the scope of this process of transformation, Ferris flattens or even

normalizes "the experience of disabled people" even as the privilege of affect in its
epistemological horizons of "edgy potential" and "openness" leaves little room for
knowledge of how this transformation actually takes place, for whom, and accord
ing to what arbiters' motives. By definition, "crip" poetry's project of identification
is limited to those who already identify as disabled, even though ableism is suffered
by those who lack the adequate consciousness to identify themselves as temporarily
abled. When Ferris remarks that the "single most important conversation that [one]
can have" is with oneself, and that the "still point" of the self "paradoxically" gives
rise to change in the world, he assumes that "the rest catch up" although our "best
work" provides no traction for them ("Future" unpaginated).
Essentialist crip poetics is concerned with minority-identity formation to the
exclusion of making connections, forging and critiquing relations. The exclusivity
here is the same as that which John Stuart Mill, in his distillation of Romantic
poetics, associated with "soliloquy." "Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in
moments of solitude, and bodying itself forth in symbols which are the nearest
possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the
poet's mind" (539).
Kuppers traverses the same line of inquiry but reverses the question.
What can crip culture do for poetry? It can turn things on a dime, open up layers of
living like the petals of a rose, see our world with different eyes. It does so by not con
densing difference to individual instance, but by allowing us to see our cultures as lived,
as experienced, and as a shaper for the forms of people's lives. We share roots, and many
stories, but our different twang, our own breath animates these stories, making them
sing as they are compressed against our specific bodies. "Going home"?who does not
long for connection, location, a place? I want foreigners to see how our country lies,
and find familiar living tales, sung with a different melody, (unpaginated)
We need a poetics to test the validity of these questions?of what order are
"foreigners"? or, for that matter, of what order is "poetry"? And how will we know
we've arrived "home"? Poetry is presumed to make this arrival self-evident. Yet
poetry is nothing less than a myriad tradition of values and their signifiers (e.g.,
prosodic conventions) assigned under the rubrics of the cultures that shape "the
forms of people's lives." If for Ferris difference is a given of an acute internal
sense of sensibility, for Kuppers it arouses anthemic commonalities, a sort of
nation-state of minority-identity that lies in wait and "mak[es us] sing" in glad
anticipation. Delineating "layers of living" outside of the solitary "we" of the puta
tive body-politic is a familiar wish, but what that familiarity alone contributes to
the capability of doing so remains indistinct. As sure as "a rose," the poems these
statements imply might merely reflect, rather than produce, the multiplicity of the
body. But the point is to live the new as the condition of one's "own . . . specific
bod[y]." Or rather, one's consciousness of it, we might say of the temporally able
bodied. We are all "foreigners" to that "home" we desire. And that is the sense of
it we hold in common.
If Ferris's and Kuppers's poetics seem insufficient, this is not to say that a radi
cal modernist poetics of interdependence must forfeit "the body." But it must fore
close on what Williams's contemporary and harbinger of the New Criticism Joel
Spingarn, writing admiringly on the 1913 Armory show, referred to as the "essential
madness" of poetic expression, "not something for the physician to diagnose, but
fancy's eternal contrast with the common sense of a practical world" (94-5). The
figures of contrast in Kuppers's poetics, in particular, are given as such static ide
ational borderlands as to permit no irony in, for instance, her riff on Neil Marcus's
"Disabled Country," in which lines of "disabled lilacs ... mountains... nights" and
"skies . . . sing to you / dance a disabled world." Kuppers's improvisatory elabora
tion of "Disabled Lilacs" at the 2007 MLA convention figured this erotic-physical
sublime using the phrase "bipolar hearts" as a vehicle to embody those lilacs'"smell
of the ice worlds." Asked about this potentially transgressive re-appropriation of
psychiatrized subjectivity (housed as it is in imagery redolent of early Surrealist
verse, whose ties to early psychiatric dogma are common knowledge), Kuppers
dismissed the presence of ableist tropics in her performance while denying she had
so appropriated "bipolar. "It just presented itself to her "imagination."The notion of
"eternal fancy" at work here singularly fails to, as Snyder and Mitchell so eloquently
put it, make "all speaking positions in the field shift."
By contrast, in a recent essay on her poetics, self-described "A Tonalist" Laura
Moriarty counters the "eternal" as such with a specific, disjointed phenomenol
ogy of temporal presence: "Memory is destruction. It is also self. It takes apart
the present" (55). Moriarty s historical cleavage to and from language writing is
informative in this regard. She was in it, but was and is not of it. First active in Bay
Area radical modernist poetry circles in the mid-late 1970s, Moriarty has lately
come to prominence through a series of exceptionally complex and sustained works
centered on lived experience, often pitting memory and history against one another.
Her Nude Memoir (2000) is a key text in this respect. More to the point, though,
is Moriarty s 2004 volume, Self-Destruction. It is a sort of companion piece to her

1996 volume entitled, logically enough, Symmetry. Here is a brief passage from her
"Notes on Symmetry as a Procedure," a highly nuanced consideration of prosodic
engagement written in the interim:
If it is given that the poem is a unit of language readable as a poem and further given
that this unit can be regarded as being the same as a physical state of equilibrium (sym
metry), then the operations (procedures) that occur both to produce this unit and to
alter it are the symmetries (transformations) which keep it the same.
Symmetry is defined here not as simply the state of being equilateral or commensurate,
but as being that which exists as a result of transformational operations which affect
but do not change the symmetrical unit.. . . Symmetry consumes itself. (177)
Although reminiscent of objectivist notions of the poem as object?a cornerstone

of language poetry's materialization of the signifier?Moriarty s concept of "physi
cal equilibrium" deconstructs symmetrical relations within the sign while holding
the significance of the subject in a balance that is, itself, foregrounded. Since its pri
mary impulse was to correct an imbalance, language poetry managed to tip the scale
heuristically away from the subject. Moriarty, on the other hand, has panned back
from the sign to "the poem [as] a unit of language" without granting autonomy
to either. It is important to read the resonances Moriarty was amplifying between
Symmetry (the book and the concept) and Self-Destruction. It helps us temper the
impulse to read her work through the lens of either language writing or crip poetics.
But it also signals how "physical state[s]" are just that?states in the temporal sense
of phases that indicate a mode of being "transformational." Moriarty is speaking,
when she does, of the "self," not, as the titular suggestion would have it, dismiss
ing it. But she does not speak of it according to the conventions of her immediate
predecessors, nor her contemporaries in disability culture. Her extension of radical
modernist poetics relates the "physical" to the psycho-social without embodying
the intangible affects and percepts of the bourgeois lyric "I" precisely because this
sort of "symmetry consumes itself."
The subject can and is then returned to the context of a life lived, "existing] as
a result of transformational operations," often imposed from without and impor
tantly prone to affective states. Embodied hermeneutic tropes of visibility ("this
unit can be regarded") perform, but stop short of fulfilling the affective state, which
she later describes as "natural," and thus the capability of being fulfilled is "death":
"the individual life was the prosody in the fact of life, the forming feature, the
breaker of symmetry" (179). And this makes one book cleave to the next: "Here
the activity was to accept a broken, chaotic writing in the midst of trauma, possibly
as a means of survival (though T didn't survive)" (Letter). Self-Destruction situates
this seemingly sinister cleavage in the hyphenated title ? as an aside, it may be
important to note that production was halted for a spell when Moriarty discovered
the hyphen had been omitted from the cover designer's final draft. The cleavage
persists also in its two chapters respectively titled "My Disappearance" and "The
Second You" (titles which signal the play of gazes throughout); and especially in
the book's protagonist, Josephine Minka, which Moriarty describes as a "hetero
nym. Her name is a combination of family names . . . Josephine is responding to
the crisis I am having by not existing so therefore it is not my crisis but hers and
is not solvable by her. The symmetrical exchange is between cause and effect but
that is broken in Self-Destruction'(Letter).The subject's authorization is incessantly
imperiled by the mitigating "procedure"; the "cleavage" articulates the ontological
absurdity of being subject to verse. Embodiment is rendered as a sort of psychic
entanglement that is necessarily partial to what the prosody permits: as the book's
epigraph, from poet Taylor Brady, puts it, "Let me sing you / Two yous A shred."
The book's sequence of prose poems, rondeaux, disjunctive free verse lyrics, and
quasi-concrete word grids is long and highly complex in its cumulative subplots,
notably, Josephine's vibrant love affairs about which the "I" is alternately ambivalent
and anxious. I will focus briefly on two formally symmetrical poems, "Missing" and
"The Second You," cited in full below.
Missing
I don't miss my friends

Who have become unknown to me
The truth can't be communicated
The war keeps us in touch
From one direction only the sky

Letters not about love
Delivered randomly people die

They watch themselves as they fall
Nothing misses us
Opened like a letter
Already before it happens
I won't know (49)
The Second You
We go on a little
After the new
The second you see me
To exist we stop
I am already you complain

All your silence is mine
The form of your mind
Mine to lose
Mine to have lost
The named phases
Gravity like grief holds
Nothing like the moon (91)
Moriarty's quatrains consist of lines of prose syntax seemingly cut short?pre

cluding what we might call enjambment or syntactic conjunction. The first stanza
of "Missing," in fact, reads very much like syllogistically stacked options, line by
line. But the line breaks quite literally live up to their name here. Trie disjunctions
of the following stanza logically follow from the disabled conjunctions of the first.
The second stanza lapses into nearly perfect hymn-ballad meter; what would in the
initial gust of radical modernist poetics have seemed an ironic metrical ploy is now
over-determined and so symmetrical to the ways in which "The war keeps us in
touch[.]" So much so that, it matters little whether we attribute this war to a given
contemporary military arena or to the anxious duel between the parts of the "self"
so arrayed. Indeed, as the "I" finds itself out of time, "Nothing misses us," and so we
are what we are doing. We are our gaze, a gaze embodied in the recurring allusion
to the courtly dialectic?in "The Second You" as an allusion to the Shakespearian
sonnet?"Nothing like the moon."
This temporal oscillation is again meted out through the disabled prose of "The
Second You'"s first stanza, as though visibility is a result of the ontologically absurd
state of being "After the new." Another symmetry: the following stanza interrupts
the syllogistic thrust of the first, "I am already[,] you complain / All your silence
. . .". Here, what's gone "Missing" is claimed in the perfect infinitive, or present
perfect, as if what is hers to have is simply lost?the conspicuous absence of punc
tuation allows one to oscillate in this manner between reading "lost" as a noun and
as part of a compound verb tense. Indeed, in this equivocal meantime, it is only pos
sible to name "phases."But these are given as such, definite article and all. "Nothing"
"holds" but the equivocation, in fact the cleavage along which that Utopian leap of
interdependence Moriarty seems to describe as a visibility as inevitable as death:
"From one direction only the sky." Crucially, this is where that one direction insti
gated in the capital letters flush left?the direction of prose logic?is disrupted.
But "Gravity like grief holds / Nothing like the moon"?"cause and effect" is
broken in the prosodic itinerary, the affective momentum, the becoming-untimely
of this cleavage. In this sense, although Moriarty's work appears beholden to lyric
conventions that many post-language poets continue to question, it is significantly
post-language in the fact that it puts them in the service of that line of inquiry. As
much an inherited, potentially cliched trope as "regard" is to "thought," the figure
of madness as losing one's mind is^rformed. But an mformed regard for the way
the psyche and its society cleave becomes the only possible purport of these lines:
"All your silence is mine / The form of your mine / Mine to lose." And the cleav
age occurs at the level of experiencing witnessing, which is never an autonomous
process ("The war keeps us in touch"). If it were, there would be nothing to witness,
no mindfulness whatsoever, and no becoming-identical (one would be out of time,

in fact not living). So our metonymic relationship of mutual constitution relies
upon formal recognition in order to produce the "post-ableist" subject to which
we could only, otherwise, aspire.
In fact, early on in the book, Moriarty addresses the act of aspiration in a
prose poem whose countervailing logic inverts the "poetic" logic of inspiration and
introspection.
The Phrase Identical
To itself. The convention of my being. The convention of being. Everything is new.

Before being for a while anywhere. Trying to get. Transferred. Setting limits to this
new. Prescription. Place. Falling back on the habits of my companion. But is that me?
Hold breath to avoid spending air. (27)
Here the mitigating procedure opens with a fragment, the significance of which
is in a causal relationship with the title which avails "To itself." Citing Williams,
"Everything is new." Yet it presents "itself" as prescribed, the full, practically con
tradictory meanings of "convention" denote both the self as a delimiting tradition
and an active memory, neither of which is relieved of its "companion." "But is that
me?" The question dies on the lips of a voice that is not waiting breathlessly for a
reply, but is so locked in self-regard as not only to reflect, but also to feed the habit
of/^dependence. The logic of inspiration is not only prosaic in a pejorative sense,
but it is circular in a grammatical one. What appears as the final word is really the
opening gambit. What form of witness minds the imperative: "Hold breath to
avoid spending air // To itself"? This recursive structure, which importantly must
be activated by readers, is a prosodic cleavage and a mode of semantic and syntactic
"survival." So animated, the prose paragraph (as stanza) "consumes itself."
But Moriarty s poems are not merely illustrative. No poem is. The frame
work I've assembled to read them, even tentatively, does what it can to activate an
encounter with Moriarty's practice that respects the integrity of poetic form and
its informed entailments. These entailments I read partly to offer an historically
situated reading of post-language poetries, to borrow Ferris and Kuppers's term,
"and/as" post-ableist poetics. Such poetries are "our" poetries ? as modernists and
contemporaries ? if "any one is now thinking" to forge identifications with the
contemporary.
Notes
1. This essay developed from papers I presented at the American Culture Association and Popular
Culture Association's annual conference in April of 2007, the Society for Disability Studies annual
conference in June 2007, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in January 2008.
2. For an excellent history of the DRM, see Shapiro. For more on disability studies as an academic
area of study, see Kudlick, and also Lennard Davis's "Crips Strike Back" in Bending Over Backwards.
The Society for Disability Studies (SDS) website provides a crucial snapshot of the contemporary,
institutional means and materials of interest to the field, at http://www.uic.edu/orgs/sds/index.html.

Disability as an identity category has resonated particularly well with queer theory and feminist phi
losophy, as evidenced in the work of Robert McCruer (author of Crip Theory) and Eva Kittay (author
of Loves Labor).
3. Martha Nussbaum's study, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (2006) is an
important exception which tries to link human rights to animal rights, in large part through the tropes
of disability studies. As such, it is a controversial contribution to the burgeoning field of "dependency
theory" discussed below.
4. Sociologist and disability theorist James Overboe has coined the term "psychocrip" as "not simply a
reclaiming of the terms psycho'or crips'but a realisation that many people (including some in disability
studies) still negate the vitalism of [those] expressions of life" that, congruent with being psychiatrized,
"fly in the face of liberal ideology." Overboe's research is a crucial part of the growing critical literature
within disability studies on psycho-social disability. For an acute, rhetorical study of the precarious
situation of psychiatrized subjects, see Prendergast and Schneider.
5. Deleuzian investments of this kind are being given broader attention among disability studies schol
ars. Notable examples include Petra Kuppers's use of rhizomatic temporality and desire in her Scar of
Visiblity: Medical Performance and Contemporary Art (16,60-61), a special issue o? the Journal of Literary
Disability devoted to "Deleuze and Disability" in the works for 2009, and Alan Clinton's remarkable
paper, "Tracts without Organs: The Poetry of Larry Eigner," presented at the 2007 Modern Language
Association annual convention. Meanwhile, Davis has moved on to what he calls "Bioculturalism" as
a critical methodology that can only be read as a response to the ethical category of "dismodernism."
As an aside, it might be added that Davidson's earlier work on Eigner's poetry is oft-cited in the field,
and, not unlike Moriarty but to a greater degree, he is affiliated with both language writing as well as
the San Francisco Renaissance (his first volume of poetry, The Mutabilities, carries blurb by none other
than Robert Duncan).
6. On the better-known branch of "dependency theory," one must look to the disciplines of macro
economics and political science, initially to Paul Baran's The Political Economy of Growth. It is no mere
coincidence that Baran's reactionary anticommunist program (along with the famous work of Nobel
Laureate George Stigler and Milton Friedman of the "Chicago School") spearheads contemporary
free-market neo-conservatism, no irony in his use of the term "dependency." Post World War II cultural
clampdowns, like those Alan Filreis explores in his study of "The Conservative Attack on Modern
Poetry: 1945-1960," were often interdisciplinary in the least self-conscious ways possible: though
"they were not ideologically of a kind . . . formally [antimodernists] knew what they opposed" (Filreis
ix). Compare, for example, the rhetoric of U.S. eugenicists against the human rights of PWDs to the
League for Sanity in Poetry's cold war, neo-Platonic and admittedly genocidal attack on modernist
poetics (see Snyder and Mitchell 84-91 and Filreis 166-168). Such psycho-social formulations are,
of course, faultlines in the ongoing saga of claiming political efficacy through symbolic production.
7. This aspect of Lewis's reading is one of its most timely and potentially accessible ones. For more on
his harnessing of what Nicholas Rose calls the ideology of "neurochemical selves," see Lewis (90 anon)
as well as Dumit and Blackman.
8. The so-called "New American Poetry" is the generic namesake of Donald Allen's influential anthol
ogy of U.S. American "anti-academic" poetry, where designations such as "Beat,""San Francisco Renais
sance" and "New York School" were born. As a bridge between high modernist and post-modernist
trends, it's helpful to look at its sequel, 1973 s The Poetics of the New American Poetry, which includes
a wide cross-section of radical modernist tendencies, from Whitman to Mac Low. With both collec
tions we are on the historical cusp of language writing, and the tradition as seen from a post-language
vantage culls its signal works from a similarly wide historical range. Such works would include Stein's
"Composition as Explanation"; Williams's acute appreciation of Stein's method and formal means in
"The Work of Gertrude Stein" (easily read as a distillation and/or displacement of the insights gathered
in composing Spring and All); those works by Stein, Cage, and others that Joan Retallack has rendered
as modes of "complex realism"; influential texts from related disciplines, such as the revolution in
anthropology Joshua Schuster has recently read as key to the participant-observer that grounds Spring
and All, going some way to distinguishing the radical from the "high" modernism of Eliot and his
company; and the centrality of related figures of subjective interdependence in the themes dear to Lyn
Hejinian's work on Oppen and Stein. Language poet and historian of language writing, Bob Perelman
has recently developed Ginsberg's term "social candor" to describe Williams's mature poetics and as an
ostensible "updating" of his subject position: "[H]is writing never hides any of his social coordinates
. . . they intersect ceaselessly with the positions of many others" (88). This emphasis on intersubjectivity
warrants most such affiliations in the radical modernist tradition.
9. One of the language poets' best-known readings of early modern American literature is Susan
Howe's recuperation of the formal difficulties of Dickinson's fascicles, not the least difficult being the
long dash. For readings of Williams's use of the semantic indeterminacy of the dash, among other
important ploys in Spring and All, see Hatlen and Perloff s Poetics of Indeterminacy.
10. See Perloff s "Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject" and Hartley for cogent summations of this
critique.
11. For a Deleuzian reading of this logic at work in Paterson, see Crawford.
12. To say that, in consolidating the gains of radical modernist practice, language poets did not break
with many tenets associated with the New American poetry would be inaccurate, of course. Articulating
his poetics in contradistinction, Charles Bernstein's contends that there is "no such thing as phenomena
itself apart from ideology . . . because it is the system through which we constitute objects," but yet
Ginsberg's transcendent spirituality based in a poetics of breath?one that is thus staunchly embodied,
in alternately vulgar and supernatural senses?makes his own "possible" {Contents Dream 417). More
recently, Barrett Watten reads Ginsberg's poetics of "real-time presence" as one that "sets the stage
for a materialist poetics of the body," which he credits with other formative "agonistic demand[s] for
a democratic polity, measured by its impossible representation," and continued in language poetry's
"confrontation with the historical present. . . returned to constructivist ends" (182-3). Watten's study
of the "turn to language in the 1960s" tries to "locate a common ground" between expressivist and
constructivist poetics by setting his discussion on the campus of UC-Berkeley where, despite the pres
ence of radical anti-racist, feminist, and other struggles whose gains are common knowledge today,
the word "disability" never appears. The DRM was "born" there, according to Joseph Shapiro, "the day
[Ed] Roberts," the founder of "The Rolling Quads" and the first disabled students admitted to the
campus, arrived in 1962. Neil Marcus, perhaps the most widely read disability-culture poet, migrated
to Berkeley, due in part to the many advancements the experience of disabled student articulated both
politically and aesthetically (aesthetically to the degree that one can speak of a visible "disability cool"
by the mid-late 1970s ? see Ehrlich).
13. For more on the unforgettably named "flarf" collective of contemporary avant-garde writing
practices, see Hoy and Sullivan.
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Post-Language Poetries and Post-Ableist Poetics - DURGIN Patrick F.

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Author(s): Patrick F. Durgin

Keywords: disability studies / Laura Moriarty / language poetry / William Carlos

The history of radical modernist poetics reveals a shift in the fundamental

form of participatory democracy. Language poetry involved a generalized politics of

DISABILITY, DEPENDENCY AND THE SOCIAL MODEL

It carefully comes about that there is no identity and no time and

Disability studies is an interdisciplinary field unthinkable without the ascent of

impairment. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's important concept of the "normate"

... a special kind of relationship between attribute and stereotype.... By definition, of

POST-ABLEIST SUBJECTS AND SELF-DESTRUCTION

Falling in with us he called

meant by formal self-reflexivity as opposed to personal self-referentiality. The key

leaning forward to look up

into the man's half

and a boy of eight who was

the man's belly (206)

Williams's later interest in Ginsberg's logic of witness, a definitive antithesis to

Undeniably, so have self-identified poets with disabilities. In anthologies like

preponderance of confessionalist and essentialist attention to authorial "voice,"

Elaborating on the scope of this process of transformation, Ferris flattens or even

is Moriarty s 2004 volume, Self-Destruction. It is a sort of companion piece to her

Although reminiscent of objectivist notions of the poem as object?a cornerstone

I don't miss my friends

The war keeps us in touch

From one direction only the sky

Delivered randomly people die

The Second You

I am already you complain

Moriarty's quatrains consist of lines of prose syntax seemingly cut short?pre

no mindfulness whatsoever, and no becoming-identical (one would be out of time,

To itself. The convention of my being. The convention of being. Everything is new.

institutional means and materials of interest to the field, at http://www.uic.edu/orgs/sds/index.html.

A Tonalist. 16 April 2008 <http://atonalistdoc.blogspot.com/>.

Aristotle. Poetics. Tram. S. H. Butcher. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997.

-. The Mutabilities. Berkeley, CA: Sand Dollar Books, 1976.

-. Reversible Destiny. 16 April 2008 <http://www.reversibledestiny.org/home.php>.

Hejinian, Lyn. The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000.

Holdsworth, David. "Becoming Interdisciplinary: Making Sense of Delanda's Reading of Deleuze."

Moriarty, Laura. Letter to the author. 4 June 2006.

-. Nude Memoir. San Francisco: Krupskaya Books, 2000.

-. Symmetry. Penngrove, CA: Avec Books, 1996.

Oppen, George. Collected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1976.

Retallack, Joan. The Poethical Wager. Berekeley: U of California P, 2003.

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