“Is poetry disabled?”

So read the headline of an article from Griffith Review, which appeared in my inbox on May 22. I admit, I immediately fell for this bordering-on-clickbait title. The article, however, written by Tim Loveday, was more nuanced than the title would have you believe.

The subtitle, “A new lens for an old form,” hinted at ideas that have interested me for years: inventing and stretching the limits of poetic forms, as well as juxtaposing poetry and different types of creative expression. But what, I wondered, was the connection to disability?

The article begins with a mention of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s book, The Future is Disabled (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022), which asks the reader to imagine “a future where disabled, Deaf, Mad, neurodivergent body-minds are accepted without question as part of a vast spectrum of human and animal ways of existing.” In other words, a future that includes something we’re sorely lacking: a radical amount of empathy.

There’s no getting around the fact that everyone’s future involves some form of disability. As we age, our bodies show the results of living, i.e., aches, stretch marks, and memory lapses, to name just a few. Poets, it appears, intuit this reality more readily than others, even embrace it. As Loveday puts it, poets, “though not necessarily identifying as disabled themselves, turn to language in order to speak to those instruments of human greed and violence that disable us.” As I read those lines, I thought of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Kindness,” which includes these familiar lines:

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

Poised between kindness and sorrow, poetry beckons us towards what Loveday calls “connection, mutuality and simultaneous recognition.” How often have you read a poem and felt a deep gratitude, something far beyond the words on the page? This is poetry’s gift. It delves into our shared humanity, reminding us that the world of poems includes all of us. “What poetry embodies, deliberately or inadvertently, fiercely or with great subtlety, is a kind of seismic registry of the zeitgeist, what’s coming and what’s possible.”

The article goes on to connect poetry and disability: “Contemporary poetry, increasingly, registers our proximity to disability…Poetry, like disability, is charged with response in real time.” You could say that poetry takes a stand against ableism, which the American Psychological Association defines as “prejudice and discrimination aimed at disabled people, often with a patronizing desire to ‘cure’ their disability and make them ‘normal.’” 

But is, as the title asserts, poetry disabled? Or is it “differently-abled,” a term sometimes used as a kinder-sounding alternative? I don’t have the answers to those questions. What I do know is that this article made me think hard about my assumptions regarding both poetry and disability. And for that, I’m glad I clicked on the title.