10TH ANNUAL (AND FINAL) NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 3 :: JIM FERRIS on CHERYL MARIE WADE

Week one of this year’s Poetry Month series is curated by Ellen Samuels, whose theme is “On Crip Poets and Poetics.” Read her curatorial statement here.

First, an invitation: lower your shoulders and breathe with me. In through the nostrils, if you can, out through the mouth. Make a little bit of noise as you exhale — not enough to alert the neighbors, just enough that you can hear. If you can hear. Take care of yourself while you do this, and crip this practice wherever you need. But make a little noise when you exhale.

That noise is the beginning of poetry. Poems and poetry can have many beginnings. But breath — breathing — is essential to poetry.

And there is no breathing without the exhalation, without giving back into the atmosphere even as we take a little something from it. Giving, taking, taking, giving — this is what it means to be a part of the world. Poetry is a vital way of being a part of the world.

For decades and centuries, at least since the spread of literacy, we have been nudged to think of poetry as a written form, as literature, writing, letters, from litera, Latin for letter. But, at heart, poetry is an embodied art. It arise from and comes alive in the body, in these collections of gristle and guts and bone that, for a time, anchor us in this world. Breathing is an opportunity to remember that we are best centered in the body, and that our art, heady though it might be, must be grounded in these bodies we each get to use for a limited time.

Cheryl Marie Wade knew this in her gnarly bones. Wade, diagnosed with progressive juvenile rheumatoid arthritis at age ten, approached poetry as a way not to escape her disabled body but to claim it, to embrace it, to flaunt it. To be a part of the world.

Whether that world shows that it wants you or not.

For disabled people, too often this world suggests that it doesn’t want us, doesn’t want to make space for us. Too often this world insists that it’s just too much trouble for human spaces to be accessible, let alone welcoming for the differences that disabled bodyminds represent. Too often disabled bodyminds are hypervisible yet still somehow overlooked.

Cheryl Marie Wade could be shy with people she didn’t know well. But her work, whether on the page or enlivened by her breath in performance, did not tolerate overlooking or excluding disabled bodyminds.

We’re here, and we belong here.

like all of us crips who sing a struggling tune

and at midnight, together, howl at the moon

You clap hands, you shimmy, you shake

Ain’t nothin’ but your worn-out notions at stake

You skip a rope, hear that sound?

A bunch of stereotypes hitting the ground

— Cheryl Marie Wade, from “Sassy Girl”

The poem “Sassy Girl” started with memories of a jump-rope rhyme, and Wade put that rhythm on the page as well as in her lively performances both of the poem and of the solo performance it led to, Sassy Girl: Memoir of a Poster Child Gone Awry. That performance led in turn to a solo theatre artist fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. And disabled artists around the country were thrilled that the NEA actually gave a fellowship to one of us.

Like most disabled people, Wade did not start out sassy. She learned to lift her head and speak up, speak out, in community with other disabled people, especially women poets and performers. And in speaking up and speaking out, she cleared room for others to unapologetically claim space for disabled bodyminds in an ableist society. Crip community is a central part of Wade’s poems, as can be seen in one of her best-known poems:

I Am Not One of The

I am not one of the physically challenged –

I’m a sock in the eye with gnarled fist

I’m a French kiss with cleft tongue

I’m orthopedic shoes sewn on a last of your fears

I am not one of the differently abled –

I’m an epitaph for a million imperfect babies left untreated

I’m an ikon carved from bones in a mass grave at Tiergarten, Germany

I’m withered legs hidden with a blanket

I am not one of the able disabled –

I’m a black panther with green eyes and scars like a picket fence

I’m pink lace panties teasing a stub of milk white thigh

I’m the Evil Eye

I’m the first cell divided

I’m mud that talks

I’m Eve I’m Kali

I’m The Mountain That Never Moves

I’ve been forever I’ll be here forever

I’m the Gimp

I’m the Cripple

I’m the Crazy Lady

I’m The Woman with Juice

The persona of this poem rejects euphemism, rejects stereotypes, claiming kinship with disabled people throughout history, especially those closeted away, left to die, even murdered for their differences. Every time she spurns a euphemism, she offers images that confound dominant expectations for disabled people: images of strength and perseverance, of action, of sexual pleasure.

Disabled people as sexual beings? Shocking! And actually enjoying it? Even more shocking!

And shocking as it may be, the poem goes farther yet, establishing disabled people in the center of human experience, marginalized no longer. By the end of the poem, she reclaims negative terms and transforms them with jubilant assertion: “I’ve been forever I’ll be here forever . . . I’m the Woman with Juice!”

Art fueled by activism took me from a girl who hid her deformed hands under a shawl to a center stage diva waving her Queen Mother of Gnarly paws in the Booga Booga spotlight. Activism gave me a stage, juice, an audience; a way to find my voice. Art fueled by activism gave me the chance to set free and empower the isolated teenager I was, a girl desperate to find some image of herself that didn’t carry with it the burden of shame.”

Cheryl Marie Wade “Postscript,” Moving Over the Edge: Artists with Disabilities Take the Leap by Pamela Kay Walker (Davis, CA: MH Media, 2005)

Cheryl didn’t sugarcoat or romanticize disability experience. She resisted the political push to minimize the tough stuff in her own crip experience, including increasing pain and deteriorating vision. But she insisted that the experiences of disabled people are fully human experience, worthy of attention, worthy of art. She recognized disability experience not only as a font of art but as a wellspring of change that could make society more accessible and more usable for all.

More of Cheryl Marie Wade’s work can be found here:

Jim Ferris is author of Slouching Towards Guantanamo, Facts of Life, and The Hospital Poems. Past president of the Society for Disability Studies and the Disabled & D/deaf Writers Caucus, he has received awards for performance and mathematics as well as poetry and creative nonfiction. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Text & Performance Quarterly, among others. Ferris was Poet Laureate of Lucas County, Ohio 2015–2019. He earned a doctorate in performance studies; he currently holds the Ability Center Endowed Chair in Disability Studies at the University of Toledo.