10th Annual (and Final) OS NaPoMo 30/30/30: Week 1: On Crip Poets and Poetics with Curator Ellen Samuels
Editor’s Note: for the 10th and final year of this annual series, we’ve asked OS community members to curate weeks in keeping with their own work in the world, highlighting myriad perspectives and networks of making. This year, Ellen Samuels, Kate Hedeen, JP Howard, and Caits Meissner generously agreed to be our final curators. Each of these brilliant humans gave us framework for their approach to their week, which we share with you here. Click through the links here to check out Kate, JP, and Caits’ notes on the weeks ahead!
— Elæ Moss, March 2021
I’m sorry — this space is reserved
for poems with disabilities…
— Jim Ferris, “Poems with Disabilities”
I had the good fortune to join The Operating System and Liminal Lab family this year because I wrote a little book of crip poetry that needed a home where it could nestle and stretch and sing its crip music outside the boundaried norms of the poetry I learned to write in my M.F.A. program. Like Jim Ferris, one of the contributors for this first week of The OS Poetry Month, I have found myself writing “poems with disabilities” and rather than trying to rehabilitate or cure them to fit them into existing poetry spaces, I am learning how to carve out new openings for them to breathe.
But far from doing so alone, I have been and still am sustained by the radical unafraid work of so many other sick and disabled poets. By some definitions, this community stretches back centuries, but I am most indebted to our present generation of poets who boldly and publicly identify themselves as disabled, as chronically ill, as cyborgs, as crips. For this reason, I am deeply grateful to have the opportunity this week to curate essays by six remarkable crip poets, each writing a tribute to another poet who has influenced their work.
These poets live and write out of the depths of experience shaped not only by disability and illness, but by sexuality, gender, race, class, and other intersectional identities that are also a fundamental part of what we call crip culture. To curate such a grouping is to make a fairly bold move in a world that still largely understands disability as medical tragedy and inspirational trope. It is to suggest that these poets share not only a cultural identity, but perhaps an aesthetic one as well. The tributes this week’s contributors offer here testify to the range of their poetic allegiances and influences, speaking from, across, and beyond lived experience to the liberationist imaginary that poetry affords.
Disability, which Alison Kafer in her book Feminist Queer Crip describes as a political-relational identity, materializes in the frictioned encounter between bodyminds, physical environments, social constructions, capitalist constraints, and political engagements. With the recent emergent coherences of disabled poets and poetics — such as a forum in Poetry magazine; literary journals like Wordgathering, The Deaf Poets Society, and Rogue Agent; the widespread success of Jennifer Bartlett, Michael Northen and Sheila Black’s anthology Beauty is a Verb; the founding of Zoeglossia, the first national organization for disabled poets; and Khadijah Queen and Jillian Weisse’s curated showcase of disabled poets in The New York Times — I contend that disability is also taking form as a poetic-relational identity.
In this week’s curated posts, we see the generational world-making of crip poetics played out live, in the generous, vulnerable, ringing and raw words of T. S. Banks, Meg Day, Jim Ferris, Amy Gaeta, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, and Travis Chi Wing Lau. I am honored to be able to share their writing with you and grateful once more to The Operating System for making this poetic crip space possible.
Ellen Samuels is a disabled writer and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her verse memoir Hypermobilities will be published by The Operating System in fall 2021. Her poetry and creative nonfiction can be found all over, including in Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, Brevity, Rogue Agent, Mid-American Review, Disability Studies Quarterly, and Disability Visibility: Voices from the Twenty-First Century. Find her on twitter and instagram @ehlastigirl.
