Disability Culture in Jim Ferris’s Hospital Poems

Abstract

The advent of disability or crip poetry in the last decades of the twentieth century has become a crucial literary trend in contemporary American literature equally profound and socially influential as protest poetry against ethnic, racial, class, or gender discrimination. Within a culture that is dominated by identity politics, categorizing diverse communities based on their ethnicity, color, gender, or religious affiliation, disabled poets found in poetry a powerful instrument to express their bitter experiences and the suffering of their disabled bodies. Challenging the confinement of marginalization, contemporary American poets such as Larry Eigner (1927–1996), Vassar Miller (1924-1998), Laura Ann Hershey (1962 –2010) Jim Ferris (1950- ), Kenny Fries (1960- ), and Jillian Weise (1981- ) have established a new poetics of disability as means of resisting ableism or ableist societies, which consider the non-disabled individuals as the only accepted normal living beings. Their poetic works function to provide a new perspective about disabled people, deconstructing the static cultural presumptions of bodily normalcy to create a disability culture. The purpose of this paper is to explore Jim Ferris’s poems of disability, selected from his Hospital Poems (2004), arguing that disability is a social and cultural imposition much more than simply a state of body functionality. The paper also endeavors to bear evidence that disability poetry is a sharp manifestation of artistic creation rather than social or personal desperation. A non-normative experience of the disabled individual is to be discussed as an essential factor for constructing disability culture.