Deafing the Sonnet

Abstract

Deafing the Sonnet Meg Day (bio) Creative writing, as both a field and an industry, is steeped in ableism and audism. That is, it prioritizes non-disabled, neurotypical poets and poems, and pretends we are neither present as your contemporaries nor holding the whole of the canon on our shoulders, rooted as we are—Blind, Deaf, and Mad among us—in the very bedrock of lyric history. And despite our belief in the capacity of literature to teach empathy and drain ignorance, poetics reiterates ableism and audism at rates and in ways that, while creative, rival Hollywood. We have mythologized hearing poet Allen Ginsberg as the father of American Sign Language poetry and honored countless collections—by non-disabled poets borrowing Deaf and disabled experiences—with the field’s most respected awards. We are ground zero for blind love, deaf heaven, phantom limbs, and paralyzing—no, crippling—fear. Contemporary poetics has taught us to anticipate a nondisabled readership or no readership at all. The irony, of course, is that non-disabled writers are the ones to join our disabled lineage of dis-kin such as Homer and Milton, Dostoyevsky and Borges, Woolf, Joyce, O’Connor, Lorde, Butler—I could keep going, but I don’t have to; if one in five Americans is disabled, then I’m already speaking to my kin and comrades today. We’re here, despite the illusion that erases us. In this paper, I wish to be a poet and not a scholar, which is to say I wish to speak more to the making aspect of poetic craft, and less to the made thing of literature. As a Deaf poet who is also queer and trans, I wish to take a break from being analyzed by that which already dictates so much of my creative mind and the ways it is permitted to [End Page 196] move on and off the page. But I resist, in particular, the critical gaze that evaluates one’s capacity for participation in poetics; one might assume—based on popular, phonocentric definitions of poetry, or the Norton Anthology’s table of contents—that Deaf poets writing in English simply don’t exist. I wish to passively refute that idea with the fact of my corporeal form, so that we might engage actively instead in what might be possible when Deaf and disabled poets are not regulated by the limitations of the nondisabled imagination and allowed, without having to reiterate our existence, to freely make. There is not enough space in this paper for me to lead you gently through a Disability 101 primer, so let’s just assume we are in agreement about the following: “disability” is not a bad word; disabled lives are essential, not expendable, and absolutely worth living and protecting; disabled pride includes resisting the cure model that seeks to eliminate us and therefore resists the contemporary eugenics movement, which stretches from the medical industrial complex through to the academic one and right into poetics; disabled people should be the ones to tell our own stories and be participant to legislation that impacts our lived realities; and accommodations, while often treated as a privilege and a burden, are not only a legal obligation, but a human right. This paper is meant to be about Deafing the sonnet. But the problem with Deafing the sonnet is that I would have to then concede that the sonnet is first and foremost a hearing form. And why shouldn’t it be? Aren’t they all? Doesn’t all of poetics rest upon the assumption that lineation and meter sets poetry apart from prose by prioritizing musicality and sound? In Hirsch’s Essential Poet’s Glossary, the entry on sound poetry reads, “Sound is crucial to poetry and thus, in one sense, all poetry is sound poetry, except, perhaps, deaf poetry.” But there is no entry on deaf poetry, which is a digression we don’t have time for. So, the text implies without imagination, sound is crucial to poetry. And don’t hearing people assume that Deaf people have no access to or concept of sound? And even if we did, certainly we were not the ones to invent...