Please note: Open Captioning is provided for the videos in this series in order to facilitate communication accessibility; therefore, transcripts may not be a totally verbatim record.
Disability Poetics: A Reading / Interview Series
curated by Kenny Fries
Introduction by Kenny Fries
Body Language
What is a scar if not the memory of a once open wound?
You press your finger between my toes, slide the soap up the side of my leg until you reach the scar with the two holes where the pins were inserted 20 years ago.
Leaning back, I remember how I pulled the pin from my leg.
How in a waist high cast, I dragged myself from my room to show my parents what I had done.
Your hand on my scar brings me back to the tub.
And I want to ask you, what do you feel when you touch me there?
I want you to ask me, what are you feeling now?
But we do not speak.
You drop the soap in the water and I continue washing alone.
Do you know my father would bathe my feet as you do?
As if it was the most natural thing.
But up to now, I have allowed only two pair of hands to touch me there to be the salve for what still feels like an open wound.
The skin is healed, but the scars grow deeper.
When you touch them, what do they tell you about my life?
I’m Kenny Fries, curator of Disability Poetics, a video series of ten readings and interviews with contemporary disabled poets. Many issues, including poetic form and history, are discussed in the videos, perhaps most prevalent across the interviews is a discussion and investigation of metaphor. Throughout history, disability has been too often represented by metaphor rather than depicting actual disabled lives.
As I’ve always told my creative writing students for a metaphor to work, it first has to be actual. In Body Language, the poem I read for this introduction, I write about my actual scars and transform them into metaphor without eliding the life from which the scars have come. As you’ll experience in the Disability Poetics videos, disabled poets use metaphor, and each poet’s use of metaphor can be quite different from each other. And just as there are various kinds of disabilities, Disability Poetics itself can be viewed differently by each poet.
With thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts and the Office of Interdisciplinary Programs and Outreach in the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University, I offer this video series not only as an introduction to poets whose work you may not yet know, but also as a resource to learn more about what Disability Poetics actually is and can be. What disability poetics can tell you not only about poetry, but also about our lives.
Disability Poetics: A Reading / Interview Series
Concept, curation, interviews and introduction by Kenny Fries
The poets (in alphabetical order)
● Kay Ulanday Barrett
● Sheila Black
● John Lee Clark
● Meg Day
● torrin a. greathouse
● Cyrée Jarelle Johnson
● Stephen Kuusisto
● Travis Chi Wing Lau
● Naomi Ortiz
● L. Lamar Wilson
Project Manager: Rachael Zubal-Ruggieri
Video Editors: Intrinsic Grey Productions
ASL Interpretation:
Keri Brooks, CDI
Fidel Torres, NIC
Linguabee, LLC
Funding for Disability Poetics is supported in part by the Canada Council for the Arts and by the Office of Interdisciplinary Programs and Outreach in the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University.