View of Constraint Poetry On Disability And Disability As Constraint

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Constraint Poetry on Disability and Disability as Constraint

Leah Levy, University of Windsor

Abstract: This project elevates constraint poetry – a genre with restric ons like metre, as opposed to free verse – as a vessel for sharing disabled experiences. This area of research is especially important for advancing representa ons of the disabled, a stereotyped and underrepresented demographic. Sharing a constraint poem that I wrote about my mul ple sclerosis (MS), the relevance of constraint poetry for disability studies manifests in the wri ng constraint mirroring the occasionally invisible, yet restric ng, nature of MS. This poem catalyzed my research into applying constraint poetry to disability studies, forming the basis of the disserta on that I plan to write in my upcoming master’s in crea ve wri ng. Current scholarship in the field includes applying constrained wri ng to prisoners and the enslaved but lacks inclusion of those with disabili es. My future plans include drawing upon perspec ves of disabled people and medical professionals to depict the spectrum of constraint produced by disability, as well as crea ng new constraints that can be er express specific symptoms. This disserta on would be a collec on of my constraint poetry on different disabili es and would be the first of its kind.

Looking at me, you would not know that I have mul ple sclerosis (MS).

I live in Canada, a country that has one of the highest rates of mul ple sclerosis, with one in every 400 people having the disease – three-quarters of them being women (Mul ple Sclerosis Interna onal Federa on, 2023). Based on the University of Windsor’s student popula on of 16,000, approximately 40 students at the university would have the disease.

Mul ple sclerosis is a neurological disease that can cause severe disability. Its lesions have

“dissemina on in space and me” (Thompson et al., 2018, p. 163) in a poe c phrase for their chaos throughout the central nervous system.

Close to half of Canadians with MS cannot walk without aids (Gilmour et al., 2018). I am lucky to currently not be represented by that sta s c. In the past, I was not as lucky.

Mul ple sclerosis takes many forms and can be progressive. I was diagnosed with relapsing-remi ng mul ple sclerosis, manifes ng in flare-ups with severe symptoms followed by remissions with reduced symptoms. Almost all of those diagnosed with MS are ini ally diagnosed with the relapsing-remi ng form (Mul ple Sclerosis Interna onal Federa on, 2023; Thompson et al., 2018).

During my first flare-up two years ago, I lost feeling and strength in my legs and was unable to walk for weeks. I was diagnosed within two weeks of my first hospital visit, and I was told that there was nothing to be done except wait. I s ll resent that advice.

I did not become disabled overnight.

2 It started as cold feet. Layers of socks, and I could s ll not feel quite right. A residual effect of the

subtlety of my first symptom is that I s ll will not sleep barefoot, because cold feet should never be normal.

S ll-progressing symptoms of my mul ple sclerosis relate to my cogni on. My processing speed is slower than it used to be, and my brain will con nue to atrophy at a rate higher than that of the normal

popula on (Andravizou et al., 2019). All of that is to say, my memory is not great. I retained very li le memory of the onset of my mul ple sclerosis, except for my feet, where it started before crawling upwards.

Reflec ng back on that first flare-up, one of what I consider my most powerful poems is called MS. is Unwell Poem. I wrote it with a year’s distance to the flare-up, and it was the first complete poem that I wrote about it.

This poem was first published in Arc Poetry Magazine No. 102, the Fall 2023 themed issue en tled Disability Desirability.

MS. IS UNWELL POEM: A li le bit horror, bit memoir (A dra by Leah, under umpty words)

I used to be a cripple (in old hospice gowns, spinal taps, cheap blue futons).

I surfed on blea ng wet rills of noise of MRIs and crapped faulty neurons.

In June smoked daily the sick, composing the joints as canes. And numb legs undo

in summer solely all life skills. Hollowing legs, losing my walk (walkers and nurses my buoys).

Inured to the brain, myelin mobs floss my spine on MRIs. Hand spasms pen my abrupt eulogy.

In July the bored ailment is now smoking me. Hoping my jaw can eat suns, then, sunny ODs.

I lunch the whole star in sec ons of bright. They glow in magma envy and sun pyres. Uhthoff’s sign currently governs traffic gyres in my body. My body is defros ng away. Me, a puddle duo.

Following the progression of my symptoms during the flare-up, the poem begins with a focus on the lower limb weakness and numbness that caused me to use a cane, before blending into the hand numbness that affected my dexterity, un l depic ng my temperature dysregula on. The two former symptoms subsided a er the ini al flareup, while the la er symptom remains.

When wri ng this poem, two techniques became important to me: disease-specific language and parentheses. For disease-specific language, “faulty neurons” (line two) and “myelin mobs” (line five) refer to the nature of the disease. The demyelinated neurons characteris c of the disease cannot transmit signals effec vely, produce its range of symptoms, and contribute to disability (Andravizou et al., 2019; Gilmour et al., 2018). During my s nt in the hospital, I had to undergo spinal taps and MRIs and s ll rou nely need MRIs – with contrast, without, of my head, of my spine – to which the poem refers in

3 lines two and five. Uhthoff’s sign (line seven), also known as Uhthoff’s phenomenon, is a temporary exacerba on of symptoms caused by heat (Jain et al., 2019), and it is one symptom that has never relented for me. In the heat I get flushed, dizzy, out of air, and with ngling or numbness in my feet and legs. The final three lines of the poem centre on this symptom with heat-centric imagery.

In the first and fourth lines of the poem, I used parentheses to show how part of my life was now going to be in parentheses. Aspects of my life that should have been ins nc ve, like going outside, were now going to have parentheses. I can go outside in summer (if the temperature is mild, if I bring several water bo les, and if I do not over-exert myself). All these factors of my life that used to be guarantees were now only par ali es and made into parentheses.

In this way, through disease-specific language and parentheses, the poem func ons as informa ve for you and as cathar c for me.

While I have an invisible constraint of mul ple sclerosis, so too does this poem have an invisible

constraint. The poem uses a wri ng constraint called homovocalism, which is the same pa ern of vowels in each line and the tle.

Here I have highlighted the same poem with its vowel pa ern:

MS. IS UNWELL POEM: A li le bit horror, bit memoir (A dra by Leah, under umpty words)

I used to be a cripple (in old hospice gowns, spinal taps, cheap blue futons).

I surfed on blea ng wet rills of noise of MRIs and crapped faulty neurons.

In June smoked daily the sick, composing the joints as canes. And numb legs undo

in summer solely all life skills. Hollowing legs, losing my walk (walkers and nurses my buoys).

Inured to the brain, myelin mobs floss my spine on MRIs. Hand spasms pen my abrupt eulogy.

In July the bored ailment is now smoking me. Hoping my jaw can eat suns, then, sunny ODs.

I lunch the whole star in sec ons of bright. They glow in magma envy and sun pyres. Uhthoff’s sign currently governs traffic gyres in my body. My body is defros ng away. Me, a puddle duo.

With the vowels highlighted, it is revealed that each line follows a vowel pa ern of

“I U E O E A I E I O O I E O I A A E A U E U O.” As the first line has “I U E O” in “I used to,” the second line does too in “I surfed on.”

Because of the mandatory vowel pa ern, this poem fits into the genres of constrained wri ng and constraint poetry, which have restric ons instead of wri ng freely. The constraint is hidden but affects the poem, similar to how my MS and its symptoms are hidden to others but affects me.

Some of the first works in the Western canon of literature are constrained – by metre – such as Homer’s 8^th- or 7^th-century BCE Iliad and Odyssey and their dactylic hexameter, and the 7^th- or 6^th-century BCE

4 Sapphic stanzas of Sappho. Metre is best known through Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter of ten

syllables per line of accentual verse in the 16^th and 17^th centuries CE.

Considering metre as constraint, constraint in the Western canon has evolved through the dactylic hexameter of the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid to accentual Old English verse and so forth to the modern loosening of prosody. As modern poetry moves away from metre amidst free verse, there is an unfurling of the constraint of metre. In its place, new constraints have arisen from the Oulipo movement.

In my poem, the constraint is one adapted from the Oulipo group of writers and mathema cians that formed in the 1960s. Oulipo, or Ouvroir de Li érature Poten elle, transla ng to the Workshop of Poten al Literature, formed to promote crea vity through inven ng wri ng constraints and implemen ng mathema cs (Duncan, 2019).

The first Oulipian work was the 1961 sonnet collec on Cent mille milliards de poèmes, or A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, by Raymond Queneau (Duncan, 2019). The collec on has ten pages of ten sonnets, with each line on its own strip of paper, designed to enable handpicking each line and crea ng 10¹⁴ sonnets (Duncan, 2019). With the collec on came the forma on of Oulipo (Duncan, 2019).

One of the most widely-known constraints that Oulipo created is the lipogram, which excludes a specific le er. They debuted this constraint with Georges Perec’s La Dispara on (1969), a lipogramma c novel without the le er “e” that has since been translated into English as A Void (1995). Its other transla ons exist in Japanese, Russian, and Spanish, though the nuances of each language affect which le er or sound the translator chose to exclude from each respec ve transla on.

Modern works by members of Oulipo include Michèle Audin’s Cent vingt et un jours (2014), or One Hundred Twenty-One Days (2016), and Hervé Le Tellier’s L’Anomalie (2020), or The Anomaly (2021). Non- Oulipian cri cs and poets who con nue experimen ng with literary constraint include Louis Bury, whose Exercises in Cri cism (2015) embodies Oulipo in content and form. Exercises in Cri cism – which alludes in tle to Raymond Queneau’s Exercises de Style (1947) or Exercises in Style (1958), an experimental collec on from before he formed Oulipo with François Le Lionnais – has Bury implement a new wri ng constraint each chapter as he discusses wri ng constraints. In his chapter on the 1999 novel Gold Fools, he writes in ques on marks, as Gilbert Sorren no did in the novel.

Poetry about chronic illness and disability is a growing genre under labels of “chronic poe cs,” “disability poe cs,” and “crip poe cs.” The literary tradi on of this genre is vast. An enduring trait of the genre is the archetype of the “blind bard,” which began in classical an quity with Homer and later expanded into blind and visually-impaired poets like John Milton and Emily Dickinson explicitly wri ng about their vision (Duran, 2013; Guthrie, 1998; Mullaney, 2019).

Theorist Hillary Gravendyk, who coined the term “chronic poe cs,” advocated for poetry as a vessel to share disabled experiences, before her death from complica ons with chronic lung disease. Her posthumously-published “Chronic Poe cs” (2014) examines how Larry Eigner’s cerebral palsy was embodied in his poetry through “the order of composi on and of comprehension as discre onary” and through “the presence of the body among other bodies” (p. 3). Chronic poe cs is inclusive not only of disabled bodies, but of all bodies and their embodiment in poetry.

In Eigner’s poem “there’s/a season,” which Gravendyk uses as a backdrop to introduce chronic poe cs, its form enables mul plicity of interpreta on through colliding columns of lines that erase objec ve

5 percep on. Chronic illness and disability thus become one way of “being-in-a-body” (Gravendyk, 2014, pp. 5, 7) – of “being-in-the-world” (Gravendyk, 2014, p. 9).

Clare Mullaney (2019) too examines the poe c embodiment of disability – through Emily Dickinson’s chronic pain and loss of vision. For Dickinson, who long evaded diagnoses and interven on, her mental health problems stemming from physical illness manifest in “variant words” that enable mul ple meanings and reflect her hesitancy (Mullaney, 2019, p. 78).

Modern disabled poets such as Kenny Fries, Jim Ferris, Jennifer Bartle , and Sheila Black are pioneers of the disability poe cs genre with emphasis on its cathar c and informa ve effect. In 2011, Bartle , Black, and Michael Northen edited a cri cal anthology of disability poetry by physically disabled American poets combining poetry and essays, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Its predecessors include the disability poetry anthologies of Toward Solomon’s Mountain by editors Joseph L. Baird and Deborah S.

Workman, and Staring Back by editor Kenny Fries (Bartle et al., 2011, pp. 18-21).

In the decade since Beauty is a Verb, physical disability poetry con nues to expand with a focus on personal expression and defying stereotypes. Similarly, poetry with mental illness as disabling is prominent, such as Jacob Scheier’s Is This Scary? (2021) on mental and chronic illness, Michael Lee’s The Only Worlds We Know (2019) on addic on, Sabrina Benaim’s Depression & Other Magic Tricks (2017) on depression, and Neil Hilborn’s Our Numbered Days (2015) on obsessive compulsive and bipolar disorders.

MS. is Unwell Poem was intended as an intersec on between constraint poetry and disability poetry, wri en during my crea ve wri ng topic class on constrained wri ng. Since then, it has inspired me and led to a series of other constrained wri ng on my disease. It inspired the proposal that I recently wrote as a requisite for admission to the University of Cambridge. I got in, and I accepted my offer to the University of Edinburgh instead. In the proposal, I outlined my disserta on plans for wri ng a collec on of my own constraint poetry on different disabili es, including MS, with the purpose of showing how constrained wri ng reflects the constraints of disability. This collec on would be the first of its kind.

During my master’s, my research will rely on medical professionals and disabled people for their experiences, through venues such as disability conferences and groups. By portraying a varied level of constraint in the everyday lives of disabled people, I hope to challenge stereotypes that pigeonhole all disabled people. The disserta on would involve rela ng the wri ng constraint to the disability, such as how the hidden vowel pa ern in my poem is ini ally invisible before highlighted – as my MS is currently invisible to others while con nuing to affect me.

The intersec on of constraint poetry and disability studies offers revela ons for advancing

representa ons of disability and for expressing disabled experiences. For the future of constraint poetry and disability studies, constraint poetry can be applied to constrained groups like disabled people to inform the reader and offer catharsis for the writer.

Similar ideas have been executed before, with works such as Andrea Brady’s Poetry and Bondage (2021).

Brady analyzes the metaphor of poetry as bondage in which the chains and shackles are metre and rhyme. Placing the no on of poetry as bondage against the backdrop of verse from enslaved and

imprisoned poets, Poetry and Bondage superimposes poe c freedom and bondage onto the concepts of poli cal freedom and bondage.

6 William Blake, who equated metred and rhymed poetry to slavery, saying that “Poetry Fe er’d, Fe ers the Human Race” (Blake, 1804, as cited in Brady, 2021, p. 14), experienced temporary poli cal bondage that corresponded to fe ered poetry, as he was prosecuted and acqui ed for high treason for

allega ons of cursing the king. Like Milton before him, Blake rebelled against constraint in poetry, abandoning the iambic pentameter of the blank verse that his predecessor Milton used to escape the constraint of rhyme (Brady, 2021).

Successors to Milton and Blake retained this sen ment, including Thomas Jefferson and Richard Aldington, in their arguments for equa ng free verse with poli cal freedom (Brady, 2021). Their opponents – T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and others – argued for no higher form of freedom than metred, rhyming poetry that removes limits on the mind to write crea vely (Brady, 2021).

In Poetry and Bondage (2021), Andrea Brady traces the contribu ons of lyric poetry on incarcera on and slavery from writers including Thomas Wya (who was imprisoned three mes), Rob Halpern (who transcribed the autopsy reports of a Guantanamo Bay detainee), Emily Dickinson (whose confinement to her home was self-imposed), and M. NourbeSe Philip (whose Zong! recounts the slave ship massacre).

The crossroads between constraint poetry and disability studies has, to the best of my knowledge, yet to be realized in a full-length collec on and exists only in bits and pieces in a handful of ar cles.

With important connota ons for disability studies, this project has relevance for crea ng healthy, sustainable futures. In regard to the Conven on on the Rights of Persons with Disabili es (United Na ons, 2006), it is impossible to sa sfy any of the eight guiding principles of the conven on without first having awareness of disability, which is what my work promotes.

For the United Na ons’ Sustainable Development Goals (2015), this project has implica ons for goal three, four, and ten. Goal three includes mental health issues from disability and encompasses chronic illnesses like mul ple sclerosis that create disability. Goal four involves educa on about disability, as I hope to educate the public about the spectrum of constraint found across different disabili es. Goal ten involves reducing inequality for disabled people by teaching about barriers so that they can be

addressed.

In conclusion, constraint poetry has yet to be realized in a full-length collec on to show the constraints of disability to the public. In my graduate work at the University of Edinburgh, I plan to use this genre to do just that to fill this gap.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For Dr. Susan Holbrook, who introduced me to constrained wri ng and constraint poetry in a crea ve wri ng class and who has always been suppor ve.

For Dr. Tim Brunet, who helped me polish my conference presenta on and ar cle and who has been accommoda ng every step of the process.

For my mum and sister who carried me into and out of bed, up and down the stairs, to the bathroom, and to a place where I could begin to confront my diagnosis in poetry.

7 References

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