August 2022
Zoeglossia Poem of the Week Series: Crip Grammars and the Fullness of “Silence”
Curated by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
To speak of “crip grammars” reaches for the multitude of ways that disability structures language against and outside of the norms of language’s compulsory ableism. We, and our uses of language, are often seen by ableist society as “afflicted” or “defective”—judgments made to delegitimate the methods and modalities through which we’ve come to communicate ourselves to the world. The silences and contortions of bodily time and space that shape our speech patterns are often read as failures. This is part of the capitalist, eugenicist organization of the world that compels non-disabled uses of language, especially where compulsory able-bodiedness conscripts us into efforts at “mastery” over normative language and expression, as acquisition is conflated with accumulation. How then, do crip poetics subvert and fly fugitive from these logics?
Deaf, genderqueer poet (and Zoeglossia faculty!) Meg Day writes in “Portrait of My Gender as [Inaudible]”: On the first day / there was no sound / worth mentioning. What I love about these lines is how they ignite in me a sense of the sacredness and fullness of what gets called silence, against the ableist privileging of sound. For me, the poem brings into question which sounds are worth mentioning, which sounds are valued as legible/audible word, speech, and poetic form, in this case, from a Deaf poet whose contentions with the privileging of the page over the more ephemeral space of ASL invites us to more deeply inquire into how crip grammars might open us to the vast horizon in the landscape of the body in language, poetry, meaning-making, and our (re)arrangements of what constitutes the human itself. Day’s work has been so important to my thinking on d/Deaf poetics specifically, and crip poetics more broadly, particularly in how it brings me ask: what are the ways the page can never accommodate us? How are crip poetics and grammars always operating in excess of the page’s material, bounded space? How do access and this excess of ours meet each other as we crip and hold close the ethical and political claim to what Edouard Glissant has called “the right to opacity”?
In this month’s poems, JJJJJerome Ellis (Aug. 8), Hannah Emerson (Aug. 15), Tala Khanmalek (Aug. 22), and I (Aug. 1), all write to illuminate multiple upendings made possible through diverse crip grammars, overturning established hierarchies of recognizable structures of language, and therefore, recognizable being, both on and in the world. We each take up what ableist culture can only read as silence and failure, transforming language by way of speech’s absences, collisions, and lacunae. What emerges again and again, I notice, is evidence of our lives as given to a kind of music, and as foregrounding our ecologically-constituted, more-than-human profusion in a world shaped by the ableism intrinsic to racial capitalism and coloniality and its privileging of the figure of the human as a “properly” speaking subject. The poems we offer you this month, dear reader, rewrite the conditions of our living and thriving as each our everyday are shaped by chronic illness-based aphasia, stutter and dysfluency, non-speaking autism, and the idiomatics of idiopathic “dis-ease”. These poems gather with each other to insist that to be non-speaking, whether in the long or short term, isn’t to be inarticulate: in the speechlessness, there is still articulation (still and still), a spillage of signs. In the delay, in the lag, indefinite grammatical substance makes of language rich possibility. Across each work, it is the spaces in between, outside of, or absent from “proper” speech where meaning is made; where song is found as embodied form that breaks free of the confines of the requisite legibility of the word. In these poems, we are intimate with what lies beyond the enclosures of ableist grammar, skin, time, and subjectivity. We earth and creature ourselves into an abundances of yeses. To return to Day’s poem: there was a shadow in a field / & I put my shadow in it. You / can’t hear me but I’m there
You can’t hear me, but I’m there. Here. There. In the field, in the clearing. Everywhere.
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Zoeglossia invites guest curators for the poem-of-the-week series to include a selection of their own work as part of the month’s publications. I’m sharing with you my poem “aphasia quasi una sonata” as I continue my own explorations of the poetics of aphasia that often emerge through my own chronic illness-related aphasic episodes. Inspired by Harryette Mullen’s poem, “Wipe that Simile Off Your Aphasia”, my poem also riffs on Beethoven’s Fantasia Quasi Una Sonata, as well as Fred Moten’s theorizing of Beethoven’s musicality in his essay, “Sonata Quasi Una Fantasia”. As I’ve explored elsewhere, poetry in or from illness can reinvent the givens we have come to expect of language and its worlding, wresting it from predetermined modes of self and text. I reclaim “ill-formed language” as language formed by or through illness—its poetics allowing me to resist grammatical ableism and its accusations that such language lacks formation, form, and formality. In aphasia’s word-replacing, letter-jumbling, and stuttering modes I find a song, or an almost-song, a paralinguistic lyric. Fantasia (fantasy) almost a song lingers within aphasia almost a song. My own ill-formed language opens me up to fantasy, to dreaming, and its flights—in the mouth, on the page, in relation. As Moten writes, “fantasy refers to a mode of polyphonic composition that is at once improvisatory, transportive (of composer, performer, and listener), and montagic (not only in its sequencing of musical sections that are not thematically connected but in its yoking together of seemingly disparate emotional contents).” For me, the polyphonic compositions of fantasy converge with the polyphonemic compositions of aphasia. The paraphasia, defamiliarization, detour, and stutter of aphasic bursts unfold language and relation into new temporalities and meanings that critique hegemony and abuses of power and transform my sense of what is possible as language organizes the world and our becoming in it. What is said is simultaneously palimpsestic to what I meant to say, and transposes thought into non-linear grammars that erupt in the layers of each line. Beneath the aphasic said of castle, factory, cynic, trumpeter, dictator, subjunction, slip, ladder, the opaque unsaid bubbles and flashes, questioning authority and violence. Each stanza a complex ecology of in/visibility. The aphasic stutter makes of the mouth an unfinished space, intimacy an open incomplete. The delay, its extended silence, is interval, half-steps in motion. (You can’t hear me, but I’m there.) Fantasy, the polyphonic and polyphonemic composition on the fly. The always-becoming of the almost, which is also a not-yet, undetermined. A speculative music. A song that could become anything.
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In JJJJJerome Ellis’ musical album and accompanying book, The Clearing (Wendy’s Subway, 2021), the stutter is a kind of parafluency, a melismatic becoming and intimacy and traversal of space and time. Black music lives in the stutter’s melodic extension of syllable. In the stutter, Ellis finds not an absence of speech but underground currents that, through dysfluency, bend matter and challenge white temporality and ableism’s articulations of normative fluency. Refusing the more clinical and ableist notion of “disfluency”, which, as Joshua St. Pierre has argued, pathologizes the speaker through lack as the stutter is framed as speech disorder, the use of the morpheme “dys” renders the stutter’s disruptions of speech a kind of civil disobedience and transgressive power for the speaker to challenge the ableism of moral codes attached to fluent speech. As Ellis shares in a November 2021 interview in The Wire, “dysfluency can disrupt normative or conventional mappings of speech onto the world. It can create a kind of blur or porousness in the borders between language and world (and language is part of the world, no?). When I’m stuttering, the world can come rushing into the clearing that’s opened by my dysfluency.” The clearing, for Ellis, is the space opened by the stutter, the field wherein the music already existing in the natural world finds kinship with the melismatic compositions in the mouth. The clearing is a place of black gathering: of history, of possible thought in the not-yet of the word. In his prose poem, “[the name of that silence is these grasses in this wind]”, Ellis extends the metaphor. The clearing is a fertile field where the stoppage of the stutter cloaks the landscape as an altar of parafluencies in multitude. Listen, the grasses, the mouth, the flowers, the tongue, the pines, the larynx, the wind, in ceremony. The poem and its rituals form a crip ecology that calls back to the clearing. Within the instant that carries the stutter, the stutter that carries the instant, we find a year wheeling within a day, two round moments of warm mouth. In the instant, in the stutter, we crip time travel. The musical looping of black stutter is a portal in refrain, a loop(hole) of retreat inventing crip grammars in new rhythms. As Sarah Jane Cervanak writes, the “looped phoneme might be a place to…access a togetherness, without being seen or heard.” (You can’t hear me, but I’m there.) In Ellis’ poem, the silence has a name that must be listened for. The silence is a way in toward the fullness of the clearing. The silence a dwelling and invitation to come as you are. To linger in the music of syllabic (re)arrangements of the world, an orchestral quiescence, never acquiescent to the force of ableist measures. Dysfluency’s instants always becoming a riot. Of flowers in the fertile field. Procession. Crip infinitude.
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At home, I have a note I received from Hannah Emerson, printed out and pinned to my wall, in which she wrote that our making poetry is a “great dream” in which we are “trying to become the mud that frees the freedom to make more mud yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.” I cherish Hannah’s words for what they open me toward, and how they resonate with my own non-normative ways of being and relating. As with her poem “Becoming Mud”, Emerson writes us toward crip futures in which neurodivergence is a vital source for us all as we make ourselves “great free animals” in a world in which poets “are the first autistics.” Across her work, including her stunning, recently-released poetry collection, The Kissing of Kissing—the inaugural book in Milkweed Editions’ new Multiverse series edited by Chris Martin—Emerson’s use of subject-object blurrings language the world, and us in it, into ever-unfolding possibilities for how we might free our individual and collective becoming. In that blurring, possession (of self and other) as the measure of being’s value is replaced with critical interdependencies. Her non-speaking autistic poetics invigorate crip grammars for metaphysical and material transformation: epiphora elicits epiphany (coming to light), anaphora and epistrophe invite ecstasy, as repetition itself is a growing into and toward a world re-imagined and remade against and away from the individuating, reductive, and deadened structures of normative prose. In “Try Try Try Really Tree”, tree verbs its way through our bodies (our bodies, selves, in reverb as we tree); a way of knowing and becoming, as well as a source of genius and verve—the tree already knows that human and more-than-human life are never separate. The cartesian world silences the tree, refuses to listen to the tree. (You can’t hear me, but I’m there.) The title, “Try Try Try Really Tree” itself I read as simultaneous appeal to the tree, and invitation to us as readers to tree. In the trying-yearning the poem beckons us toward, our collective labor is always-already desire for the free thought and the free cause: a politics of liberation emerging from our entanglement with others through de-centering the liberal human and its imperatives of speech. In this, we kiss / the beauty that is trying / to become the beauty itself yes. Yes yes yes yes yes.
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Across Tala Khanmalek’s work, including in their recent podcast interview at It’s Lit with PhDJ, they explore how unjust imperialist conditions shape life chances and premature death, as well as the vital role storytelling and language play in anti-imperialist struggle. These themes thread through their prose-poem, “Shir, Milk, Lion”, where Iranian diasporic and militarized erasures of history and language bear upon the body and its emergence as sick. Crip grammars are shaped in and through intergenerational traumas of gendered violence and state violence, their impacts on imagination, speech, silence, and bodily autonomy; their losses and adaptations. Farsi’s right-to-left transliteration contours the crip diasporic imagination as fluidities of body meet fluidities of culture and idiom. And yet, as Khanmalek wrote in a note to me, “all these languages and still no words for the dis-ease and the scope of its origins: maybe that's part of crip grammars.” The idiopathic and idiomatic blur. In the poem, the Farsi word shir holds multiple meanings, including that of milk and lion, bringing ever-shifting signification to the place and loss of mothers through the loss of place, language, and speech—through war as well as illness. Khanmalek’s exploration of shir brings into the fore proximities between gender and illness, and the ways that through both we are often treated as animal and too fluid. Too lion, too milk. Not human enough, not life enough. Shir is carried through the poem as a word that disarticulates individuated corporeal selfhood through what Erin Manning has called a “leaky sense of self” in which we do not begin and end with containment. For Khanmalek, shir, milk, lion, engender the intimacies of the body and language in their (ana-/ani-) morphological refusals to be contained, despite and through violent measures of containment, making claim to the uncontainable possibilities in history’s pain and pleasure. It strikes me that when chronic illness flares and we are rendered non-speaking by it, curled up speechless in the stillness of bedlife, crip grammars of silence become overlaid with state histories of enforced silence, flooding and permeating the body and sense of self. (You can’t hear me, but I’m there.) The poem insists that in the silences and inadequacies of words, entire worlds live: milk, lion, mother, loss, life uncontained.