Editor's introduction: Disability and generative form

Abstract

This special issue of jml is dedicated to the memory of poet and scholar Hillary Gravendyk. Two years ago I was the first reader of a submission titled “Chronic Poetics.” I knew right away that I would recommend publication of the essay, which broke important new ground in a subfield often referred to as literary disability studies. With the coinage of the term “chronic poetics” the author brought two aspects of disability studies into conceptual confluence. The activist ethos that drives many of the critiques leveled by disability scholars was pulled into alignment with an understanding of poetics as a dynamic register of the embodiment that grounds our (and by “our” I mean “everyone’s”) being in the world. To approach poetry from the perspective of “chronic poetics,” the author proposed, was to emphasize the phenomenological states entailed in both the writing and the reading of poems. Especially important to the argument were temporal states — among them simultaneity, duration, and, of course, chronicity — which the author explored through a sustained reading of Larry Eigner’s poem “there’s/a season.” Eigner (1927–1996) had cerebral palsy, the physical effects of which conditioned his activities of poetic composition, just as any writer’s state of embodiment at any given time determines at least in part the cluster of perceptual and expressive processes known as composition. And this was part of the essay’s larger point: that disability is one of innumerable generalizable features of embodied experience because it is a way of being-in-a-body, being-in-the-world. The universal fact of embodiment is characterized by particularity, that is, not by homogeneity, and “it is only by recognizing that particularity that we can talk about a shared condition of embodied perception. What is shared is the heterogeneity of bodily experience.” On this reading, Eigner “asks us not to register his physical situation, but to pay attention to our own.” We sent our enthusiastic comments to the still-anonymous author and asked for a few clarifications and editorial adjustments. On the strength of the essay’s central argument, I felt that it should ground a special issue that I would edit