Crip Poetry

“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’… Crip poetry centers the experience of disabled people; it shows disabled people taking control of the gaze and articulating the terms under which we are viewed.” 

-Jim Ferris

Do you think crip poetry could expand to extended formats that often shut out cognitively disabled folks, because of things like brain fog and memory issues that affect linear storytelling? What would the crip novella or crip novel do to long format and linear narrative?

I think a lot about this question pedagogically: often poetry feels inaccessible to students, precisely because it takes such particular forms-- some highly regulated and rigid while some fragmented and loose. Much of how poetry is often taught (at least to me when I was in grade school) felt like an ableist exercise in mastering canonical forms and being able to discipline your thinking to being compatible with them. I've spoken before about how classmates in my high school creative writing course fetishized extremely difficult poetic forms like the sestina as if it were a kind of rite of passage to complete one successfully. The ableism of that "rite of passage," as well as the ways in which legitimacy is often afforded to poets who can perform this kind of ablemindedness really weighs on my poetics now, which embraces fragmentation and non-sequitur rather than  linear, "clear" thought.

From a theoretical perspective, I think crip poetry models what crip time feels like: this sense of slowness or resistance to "efficient," "straightforward" reading. If disability itself challenges linear time and the expectations of normative development, recovery, and cure, then crip literature embodies in form and content.

My favorite quote from the piece ("The Crip Poetics of Pain") comes towards the end. On page 17, you write: "Our two bodies connected by her arm on mine, our mutual balancing in careful motion. We teeter, we limp, we backtrack, we stop to rest This, too, is crip poetry." Along with being an elegant piece of prose, the quote demonstrates that poetics of disability present themselves in those nuances and personal spaces that characterize daily living. What other examples might you have of crip poetics in your daily life? Have there been changes in how you navigate life with chronic pain after immersing yourself in crip poetics?

Thank you so very much for this - sharing the very same scoliosis-related disabilities with my mother has been a real reminder that theory has to have a basis in lived experience. The kinship we share is not just of blood but of crip solidarity - we have both had to navigate pain's shaping of our lives, often silently and alone because of our cultural heritage and ableist society we live in.

In my second chapbook, Pairing, I end the collection with a poem called "Pithy," which articulates a series of things I wanted to say to my partner in really ordinary, every day moments but that I didn't have the capacity to say. So much of our relationship has been navigating the prospect that he will inevitably have to be a caregiver in ways he may not be fully prepared to do. As an ablebodied person, he is often having to learn about the shapeshifting needs that I have as a disabled person, as well as the way ableism shapes so much of those interactions even when neither of us intends. It's a messy process, but I think crip poetics has helped me to be more deliberate of how I go about that process and to be more in touch with that process - sometimes, it involves a lot of failure and conflict as much as it does progress. Poetry has always made space for both.

Are there any other forms of art that you tried that made you feel able to express yourself in a way similar to poetry?

Because I read/write/think for a living, I wanted to pick up a practice that was really embodied and tactile, so I started playing with charcoal portraiture. I've always loved the quality of charcoal to express motion and gesture in subtle ways, and I came to adore how queer artists were using the medium to explore sexuality, embodiment, and desire in minimalist portraiture. It's telling to me that the history of Western portraits typically doesn't involve disabled subjects, and I love thinking about how I might represent queer, disabled bodies like mine that are seldom aestheticized, if represented at all. I'm a terrible visual artist, but there's something about the tactile sensation of working with charcoal that involves me getting into the physicality of the process. It's such a tricky medium to control because charcoal smudges so easily - but I love that my fingers bear the evidence of my play and experimentation.

If you had to choose, what structure of crip poetics best communicates the experience of chronic pain in your opinion? If that is not possible how should people living without chronic pain critically analyze the structures of crip poems to better understand the broadness in the experience of chronic pain?

This is such a fascinating question and one that I think I'm still working through as a person who came late to poetry and only just began publishing my work since 2016. I tend to be resistant to the notion of a "best" structure, which suggests a hierarchy of structures. This may seem like a strange answer, but my suggestion is not to have a critical framework or structure prepared when encountering poetry. This sometimes stands in the way of what the poem is trying to do - I like to have my students engage with poetry on its own terms, which sometimes involves not fully knowing what the author intended or being fully sure what the "takeaways" are. Allowing a crip experience to wash over you or to feel fully the disorientation of inhabiting a crip life, if even in the form of a poem, is itself a kind of "understanding" may not be complete but powerful nonetheless.

Are crip poetics able to be mainstreamed as a form of contemporary literature, and are there other ways to deconstruct the ableist mindset ingrained in most individuals today?

To be honest, this is a problem of the publishing industry as much as it is about cultural bias and taste. Crip literature still tends to be not published on the grounds that it is too "niche" or too "negative" to be marketable. This extends to the structures of publishing that so often keep disabled people out: editors, staff, interns, admin, and copyeditors tend to not be disabled people, so even if a disabled writer is able to publish, their work sometimes gets ableist treatment or doesn't get recognition on its own merits (a kind of gross "diversity" tokenism where the author is "just a disabled writer" that the publishing house or publication can point to as a sign of their commitment to disability issues but not actually invest resources into). This means the people making decisions about what is worth publishing typically are ablebodied and ableminded, which then also determines what work gets invested in and gets marketed to the public as worthwhile literature. I think until these dynamics change, crip literature will remain marginalized (and maybe for good reason if it can expose the ableism that shapes literary production and publishing).

How inclusive is crip poetry of all types of diseases and disorders? Specifically, would mental diseases and disorders fit into the crip poetry category or is this more the focus of physical illnesses/ailments?

Many of the contemporary crip poets I've read actually grapple a lot with neurodivergence and cognitive disability, particularly autism, OCD, and depression. I think physical disabilities get overrepresented because they are often the most easily accessible to readers as disability-centered literature (and tend to be assumed as the "face" of disability justice movements), but the field really embraces all types of disability and chronic illness. Also, many crip writers refuse the divide between mental and physical disabilities (myself included).

How else do you demonstrate pain in your poetry? The spacing, dashes, and irregular periods are grammatical and stylistic ways, but do you also play with words to demonstrate different effects on disability? (e.g. incorrect spelling, crossed-out words, jumbled up words) Do you also design your poetry with accessibility features?

I appreciate your attentiveness to my work! Yes, I like to use punctuation and spacing as a way of marking pain's presence during my writing process and forcing the reader to engage with it on the page, however disruptive or disorienting it can be. As someone who does not have dyspraxia or dyslexia, I am very careful about not "masquerading" even in poetry as if I did have those conditions, so I tend not to do incorrect spelling/jumbled up words unless I'm trying to signal something specifically related to the poem's experience or purpose. In terms of accessibility features, I'm thinking of what blind and Deaf writers like Stephen Kuusisto, John Lee Clark, Ilya Kaminsky, and Meg Day have done to signal our ableist assumptions about reading and writing: the inclusion of images of ASL signs, tactile poems, a refusal of linear left to right poems that can be read aloud etc.

How could crip poetics enact an effective step towards the normalization of patient-centered narratives in regard to disabilities?

I think crip poetry deemphasizes physicians as the authority on disability - we get a disabled person's interiority and their response to their medicalization. Crip poetry can defamiliarize the way we talk about disability, especially in pathologizing, stigmatizing ways - disabled people are getting to set the terms and vocabulary for their own experience. How disabled writers ventriloquize, parody, and critique medical discourse seems particularly useful in this respect. 

You have demonstrated what a powerful role crip poetics can have, both in your essay as well as your poem. It's become clear that work such as yours is really impactful in the transformation of the cultural views on disability. However, I wanted to ask you about your thoughts on who gets to create such work. Should people limit themselves to writing about their own personal experiences in the context of disability, or is it possible for someone to create "crip poetics" without living with disability? If it is possible, what limitations should be set and how should the writer go about creating work on disability?

I get this question a lot: I don't believe in the adage that "you should write what you know." We write in order to know, we write toward knowing. But that does not excuse us from the ethical responsibility to do our due diligence if we're writing about what we don't know. I think it's again about intention and commitment to thorough and thoughtful research that really does justice to the identity/community you are writing about. Sunny Singh's questions to ask yourself when writing about minoritized peoples are really helpful. (below)