above: “Homer was blind. You probably know about Milton, Byron and Barrett Browning. Jonathan Swift had vertigo his entire life. Paul Laurence Dunbar was chronically ill. EmilyDickinson, Jorge Borges, Robert Creeley, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton were all disabled. How about Sylvia Plath? And this is just a tiny fraction of our lineage. We havebeenwithyou, inyour textbooks, your bookshelves, all along. It’s also possible that you think poetry is not accessible—too hard, too obscure or too subjective. We also think poetry is inaccessible, but in amore literal sense. Poetry books are rarely available in Braille; poetry podcasts are rarely transcribed. To be at a poetry reading, we often have to climb a flight of stairs, forget the bathroom, read lips when there’s no interpreter, andbe prepared for the poems tousemetaphors that traffic in our lives. And yet, we show up. We’re here.” Underscoring the growth ofpoetry by and interest in the work of disabled writers, the June 20, 2019 posting, “New Books by Disabled Writers” on the Disability Literature Consortium site begins, “It is definitely one ofthose nice problems to have that somany newbooks are coming out from disabled writers and/or about disability related topics that it is hard to keep up with them all.” The list includes Kara Dorris andEmilyK.Michael, whosework appears in this issue ofNine Mile, as does Sean J. Mahoney’s; notably, Mahoney helped create the Disability Literature Consortium. In May, 2019, Zoeglossia, a nonprofit literary organization for disabledpoets, hosted its inaugural retreat. An intentional community, Zoeglossia is sometimes referred to as a fellowship. Zoeglossia Fellows collaborated to edit and publish the volume,WeAreNotYour Metaphor: A Disability Poetry Anthology (Squares & Rebels, 2019). One of the fellows, Raymond Luczak, has work in this Nine Mile issue. A few months earlier, in October, 2018, a group of disabled poets gathered at the University ofPennsylvania to host “ANewDisability Poetics.” Other journals focused on disability poetry and creative writing have appeared over the years, including Breath &Shadow, Kaleidoscope, Wordgathering: A Journal ofDisability Poetry andLiterature, The DeafPoets Society, Open Minds Quarterly, Queerly, and Sick Magazine. Westerly, an Australian journal, recently released DisAbility, a Special Issue including creative non-fiction, essays, and poetry. The Modern Page 24 - Nine Mile Magazine
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