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Interview with Jim Ferris Interviewed by Tom Fletcher Jim Ferris is the author of two poetry collections The Hospital Poems (2004), and Slouching Towards Guantanamo (2011). Ferris’s first poetry collection was winner of the International Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, and its subsequent success made him widely known as a so-called “poet of cripples.” His articles “The Enjambed Body: A Step Towards a Crippled Poetics” (2004), and his 2007 essay “Crip Poetry, Or How I learned to Love the Limp,” are recognised as seminal works in developing a critical theory of disability poetry. Ferris is employed as a Professor and Ability Center Endowed Chair in Disability Studies at University of Toledo. In this interview, Ferris outlines the progress made since he first wrote these essays. He also considers how the COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic shows disabled people are still all too easily marginalised by government policies and societal attitudes. TF: Your landmark essay “Crip Poetry, or How I Learned to Love the Limp” (2006) has been widely acclaimed for its initiation of the debate on the function of disability poetry and its potential agency in challenging conceptions of disabled individuals. What progress do you see having been made 14 years on from the original points made on how disabled individuals are perceived by society? JF: Some progress has been made, to be sure, though disabled people around the world continue to be subjected to oppression, ranging from violence and abuse to the “softer” oppression of low expectations and limited opportunities. Disabled people have been able to claim more of a place in many societies: more than a hundred countries now have national organizations of disabled people, disabled people are somewhat less likely to be restricted to back rooms and institutions, and somewhat more opportunities for education are available. Real progress has been made; at the same time, there is so much more to be done. Disability culture is ignored at best, misunderstood or maligned. If we just look at how people are being positioned during the current coronavirus pandemic, disabled people are again among the last to be considered. The current reassurances that are being offered: “Be careful but don’t worry, old and sick people are at most risk.” Disabled people is what they mean. “Don’t worry, it is most likely to kill the people we are least interested in saving anyway.” This is not to overlook the work that many nondisabled as well as disabled people are doing to safeguard vulnerable disabled and chronically ill people, but to the society at large we Page 12 are still easily overlooked, a nuisance or worse. I told my Disability Studies students this week “This is not a drill. Situations like this—life and death situations like this—are all about disability, and they are exactly why the work we do in Disability Studies is so important. I was speaking with a friend yesterday who suspects that with her compromised immune system she will not survive this pandemic. I know that when it comes to deploying resources (like who gets to use a ventilator and who doesn’t), I don’t want those decisions made by people who think that the lives of people with disabilities are not worth living. I want those decisions made by people like you, people who are committed to recognizing the value of every life, who are committed to learning and doing the work to maintain the systems that disabled people and everyone else need to live a full life.” As I noted above, I do think we’ve made some progress, but there is so much more that is needed. Maybe this is the heart of the problem: nondisabled people don’t recognize that disabled people are the most creative people on the planet, because we have to be. When the water rises, when the electricity goes off, disabled people have to be creative and determined and imaginative and help each other out, and then do it again tomorrow, because we live in an ableist world that isn’t even perceptive and imaginative enough to recognize the huge contributions disabled people make just by living every day. If you want to figure out how to get something done, how to solve a problem, how to work around barriers, ask a crip. They think the blind leading the blind is a bad idea, but who knows better how to negotiate the world as a blind person? To quote the great Mr. T from “The A Team,” “I pity the fools”—but I also know to be wary around them. TF: In the essay you add that crip poetry has “the potential to transform the world, to make the world in which we live roomier.” Can you indicate the different ways you consider your poetry achieves this aim and/or communicate this process? JF: I hope that my poems help to create a space in the social consciousness for disabled people to be—and be recognized— as full, whole human beings. I hope my poems assert the rich and fruitful presence of a wide range of ways of moving through the world. Some of my poems advance an explicitly disabled persona using language to engage with complex world. An example is “How We Swim,” which is on one level an elegy for the late scholar and activist Paul Longmore, while on another level it is about disability activism and the disability rights movement—about crips insisting that we belong in the world. Other poems may seek to poke holes in the tissue of attitudes, assumptions and practices that serve to otherize and impinge on the humanity of disabled people. Still other poems are not “about disability” in any overt external sense, but the simple presence of poems by a disabled poet helps to claim space in the world for disabled people and their rich and varied perspectives. I also recognize that my disability experience deeply informs how I encounter the world, how I think and feel as I inhabit each day in whatever place I am in on this complex planet. I am using that disability experience whether I write “about disability” overtly or not. TF: Your essay also discusses how your writing aims to “validate the lived experience of moving through the world with a disability.” Can you elaborate on your choice of imagery and your use of spatial motifs in general? Perhaps you can also touch on how the typography and verse form of your poetry is used to replicate the negotiation of different types of real and imagined spaces? JF: What the poem looks like on the page, and what it feels like in the speaking, hearing, and reading are all part of the music of the poem. And music is always different from space to space, from the shower to the living room to the concert stage to the recording studio. I hope my poems create the opportunity for some space in the reader’s or listener’s mind, which is not separate from the body. Opening space for experience, making a bit of space for this moment, as fleeting and precious and irreplaceable as it is. I think more consciously about voice than about space in a poem, usually, but sometimes a poem just has to have room for the air to get under its wings. Typography, line breaks, stanza breaks, indentations, columns—I try to make use of all the tools available to create—to open, to allow, to engender—the effect I seek. Or some effect. The word is not the thing, the map is not the territory—but each word is a thing, the words together are both things and a thing, each poem is a territory. I hope my poems create or allow room for people to move around in. Everything is a happy accident; nothing is by mistake. Except for mistakes, which I will realize later. TF: So, for example, the poem “Exercise of Power” describes how visible forms of “God’s mistakes” need to be fixed. Which poetic techniques do you most consciously employ to convey the visibility of your disability? JF: Line lengths and the deployment of white space on the page are the chief techniques I use to reflect something of my atypical perspective. There is an interesting conflict between conforming to the generic expectations of what a poem should look like and trying to create for the reader and listener an experience that reflects what I’m seeking to engender. In a real way the poems are not about me. They may draw heavily on my lived experience; they are certainly shaped by my thinking and feeling and sense of language; but for a poem to really work, it has to in some way not only be accessible to the audience but also to be in some unexpected way about the audience. I hope my poems create an experience for the audience. And when my poems are really working, they stop being mine and they become yours and ours. There may be times when I need the audience to read a poem with my impaired body in mind, but mostly I hope to push past that, maybe, ideally, somehow with their own once and future impaired body in mind. Or in bodymind. It’s always good to remember that bodies and minds are not separate things, however much we yearn to give in to the restrictions and narrownesses we have been taught. TF: Your wonderful poem “Poet of Cripples,” refers to how crip poetry enables readers to reconsider the “space to grow in ways/unimaginable to the straight/ and the narrow, the small and similar.” Can you indicate more about how you see poetry as an aid to this process? How might your poetry be thought to be an expression of embodiment as a varied, fluid shape, allowing individuals to expand their notion of different bodies? JF: Poetry offers readers and listeners new opportunities to feel, think, experience something in this world that we share. When we’re lucky, poems give us not only new opportunities but new ways of feeling/thinking/experiencing. It’s impossible to truly engage with a good poem and not be changed a little, and not have a new sense of how someone else feels in the world. And each of those experiences add to our sense of what is possible in this world of pain and promise. I’m probably mangling someone else’s concept, but I think of the cultural imaginary as this giant storehouse of all the images and associations that are available within a particular culture. Each poem, as well as each other form of art, has the potential to contribute to that great cultural storehouse of possible images—which includes possible ways of being in the world. Each time we contribute to that great storehouse, we have the potential to enlarge the range of what is possible to imagine in that culture. Poems can help make the world more possible. What could be a greater gift than that? TF: I love your poem “Return to the Ward” where the persona experiences a sense of dislocation: patients navigate the

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