The materiality of disability in American poetry: a case study of "Beauty is a Verb THE NEW POETRY OF DISABILITY”

Abstract

Critical disability studies offers a heightened understanding of how the material body, poetry, and culture are intriguing. This paper explores the materiality of disability poetics in a poetry anthology by American poets with disabilities: Beauty is a Verb THE NEW POETRY OF DISABILITY (2011). Hence, I argue that a reconstruction of disability is realizable through the restructuring of the underlying cultural assumptions and traditional poetics. Theoretically, I applied the existential and embodied phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Judith Butler to substantiate my argument. The paper found that applying phenomenological approaches to disability poetics could contribute to a delicate understanding of ‘differing’ conditions of human life and provide a critical tool to defamiliarize the traditional poetic texts and produce alternative poetic artisanship and poetic philosophy. This study is likely to contribute to a better understanding of critical interrelations among three factors: the phenomenological aspect of disability, poetic narrative arch on disability, and disability aesthetics. Hence, the introductory chapter briefly introduces disability poetics, selected text Beauty is a Verb THE NEW POETRY OF DISABILITY, and orients the background of the thesis, identifies research questions, and the pertinency of the chosen topic. The second chapter critically reviews the prevailing literature on disability poetry to find out new avenues of literary inquiry. The third chapter analyzes the research methodology. The fourth chapter discusses the materiality of disability in poetic practices: interplay between body, perception, and poetry. The following chapter explores the gendered body in disability poetics: from the theatre of reasoning to alternative poetics. And the final chapter succinctly reflects the key findings of this thesis.