I have been contemplating the question of why so many disabled artists/activists write poetry, and I wonder if it is because trying to describe an embodied experience is so challenging that poetry’s natural tendency to use metaphor and simile lends itself well to conveying it. Poetry is a way of communication and knowing that doesn’t (always) rigidly confine itself to strict rules, forcing knowledge into discreet, well-defined boxes. Disabled people, disability, and impairments rarely fit into discreet, well-defined boxes.
Jim Ferris wrote a great piece titled CRIP POETRY, OR HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE THE LIMP discussing how crip (disabled) poetry is a mode of expression rooted in the lived experience of disability, one that resists dominant norms and reclaims the gaze of how disabled bodies are seen. He sees it as more than protest or testimony. It has the potential to transform not just individual consciousness, but cultural imagination, making space for a wider diversity of ways to live, move, and feel. He describes crip poetry as foregrounding embodiment, challenging stereotypes, centering marginalized voices, and pushing toward a richer, more inclusive understanding of what a “body” can be.
In this article, Ferris writes, “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.” Crip bodies hold a hypnotic magnetism for nondisabled eyes. We are experts in surviving The Stare; that slack-jawed (metaphorically or literally) gaze at the ways in which our bodies disrupt their assumptions of normality. Instead, “…crip poetry rejects views of disability as a shameful, pitiable, tragic and individual phenomenon.” In poetry, we choose how we are perceived. The mirror gets turned back onto the reader and their skewed objectification of our far more complex realities.
In Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s 2009 book Staring: How We Look, she describes this kind of staring as “baroque staring,” since it is akin to baroque art in that it “…overrides reason and restraint, revels in contradiction, and arouses fervor…” It is not “decorous, selective looking”, a casual gaze of curiosity, but rather “blatantly announces the states of being wonderstruck and confounded. It is gaping-mouthed, unapologetic staring.” (p. 50)
As disabled people, we’re already placed on a stage of sorts, so why not take control of that forced display and play the performance of our lives? Let’s turn the baroque into the beautiful.
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