Disabling Poetics: Bodily Otherness and the Saying of Poetry

Abstract

This thesis – entitled, “Disabling Poetics: Bodily Otherness and the Saying of Poetry” – consists of a four-chapter exegesis and a major creative work consisting of eighty poems. Together, they examine the intimate connections between bodily otherness and poetry, both forms of encounter and disruption. The exegesis begins by establishing a philosophical framework on otherness and on poetry. It elaborates on Emmanuel Levinas's writings on the Other, and brings them into conversation with critical disability theory. I argue that the Other can only be known through their disfigured embodiment, but also that this disfiguring arises from within the encounter as much as the body itself. I then adapt Levinas's distinction between 'the saying' and 'the said', in order to position poetry as a form of writing which is able to amplify this saying. While Levinas has certain suspicions regarding poetry, I argue that these are disabled by the voice of the Other within his own writing, and that poetry is premised on interruption and deformity. The exegesis goes on to discuss a series of recent poems, most of them by Australian poets – both in terms of the dynamic of their encounters with the Other and the detail of their poetic techniques. Chapter three examines poems that depict public encounters with disabled people. These poems uncomfortably acknowledge our impulse to stare, while to varying degrees turning that gaze back upon the reader, thus emphasising the defects in our ability to genuinely see the Other. Chapter four examines how caesurae can open up a space for the Other to appear. By defining the caesura expansively, I show how the ruptures or silences of these poems are not empty, but are in fact reflections and amplifications of the disruptiveness of our encounter with the Other. The poems written for the thesis, titled Defecting, engage with bodily otherness in a variety of ways, both in terms of content, voice and formal approach. While some poems engage with aspects of bodily otherness from various eras and religious traditions, others explore the contemporary milieu – including medical technology, online media and increased financial precarity. There are a number of poems that deal with unsettling extremes of embodiment and with violence against disabled people. However, many poems also emerge out of quotidian experience – illness, social encounters, ageing and love. Finally, there are many ekphrastic poems, which reflect on how bodily otherness has been treated in the visual arts, photography, theatre, the internet, as well as in other poems. These poems are arranged into four sections, which correlate with the focus of the four exegetical chapters. Broadly speaking, the poems are direct and lyrical, yet with an overt attentiveness towards the disturbances of language. The order of the poems is more associative than thematic, adding another layer of subtle disruption to the reading experience. In this way, they generate a sense of both intimacy and distance – a disabling poetics.