Sheila Black on Disability Poetics as Negative Capability

Poetry International's interview series centering Deaf and disability poetics featured poet Sheila Black last week. "In addition to her own important work, she is a passionate advocate of disability poetics, and is the co-editor of the landmark anthology, Beauty Is A Verb: The New Poetry of Disability which she compiled together with Jennifer Bartlett and Mike Northen," writes Ilya Kaminsky. From their conversation:

[Black:] ...[D]isability poetics is for me a poetics of “negative capability” in all the ways John Keats may have intended it—an upheaval, a defamiliarization, an ability to remain open—and, because—at least for me personally—disability poetics is inextricably bound up with the trauma of having been categorized and mistreated by an ableist world—it is profoundly a poetry of vulnerability.  I mean by that a kind of praise of vulnerability.

How did this change your own work, your process, your view of what is possible in written English?

The short answer to this question is: my process was changed completely.  I was almost forty before I sort of “came out” as a person with a disability—and (I was a slow learner, a late bloomer) I think that is also when I began to write with some degree of authenticity. Before that I think I was very hampered by the ideas I had internalized that 1. Art was about universal topics and universal did not include disability; 2. My disability had nothing to do with my life as an artist or would-be artist. I am honestly pretty shocked looking back that I believed these things, but I did, and I don’t think that was an unusual reaction because—and I don’t know how to adequately convey this—the attitude toward disability in the 1960s, 1970s when I grew up was so overwhelmingly negative, erasing, silencing. In her review of Jillian Weise’s amazing new collection Cyborg Detective, Cate Marvin says: “With a thrilling lack of remorse, Weise targets the mundane viciousness of everyday hypocrisy like a heat-seeking missile.”  I loved reading that sentence so much...

Find the full interview at Poetry International.