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closed off world of the hospital juxtaposed with exposure to life outside. In what ways do you consider your poetry helps us to understand how we exist in public and private spaces? How do you use poetry to challenge our thinking about how spaces operate and are designed? JF: Thanks for nudging me to reread “Return to the Ward.” I wonder what has become of the guys I came to know well during my many stays on the ward. I also find myself thinking about the distancing we experienced, that was a central part of that experience – especially in light of the direction for social distancing as I write this in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. And I wonder how different they are. Distancing at the charity hospital was in part about infection control, ostensibly, but it may also have been about sheltering us or quarantining us away from a society that was afraid of us, even though it might not want to realize let alone admit it. And now social distancing to control the spread of the contagion. I don’t resist that distancing, because it seems like an important part of controlling the viral menace. And yet we are once again being taught to fear our fellows, carriers may not even know they are infected. You may already have won—or lost. The way poems lay out on the page can be a challenge to the conventional ways spaces are designed and operate, not unlike the exciting dance that Alice Sheppard and her collaborators are doing. What else can we do with this space, with this page? It can be fun to find out. Generic expectations give us boundaries to lean on as well as to push against. When does a piece of writing cross from poem to prose or monologue? Or visual art, painting, sculpture? Interesting question, even if it is ultimately constricting. But constriction is how the boa eats. Feed me. TF: The poems in your second collection Slouching Towards Guantanamo (2011) can be interpreted as documenting the establishment of an imagined disabled nation space. 30 years after the ADA, in what ways do you still think the accessible nation is an achievable reality or a distant utopia? How do you think your own crip poetry has to evolve in the next two decades in order to continue to help make the case for society to be made more accessible for disabled people? JF: I think the accessible nation is achievable, but I think continuing to that goal will require something akin to a change in paradigm: the recognition that access is not about some of us but about all of us. This feels comparable to me to the people who may recognize that climate change is happening but who think that it’s really somebody else’s problem. It’s really all of our problem, and access is all our problem and opportunity as well. How does my own poetry have to evolve? I’m not sure evolution is best planned; and I am leery of attempts to engineer a better poem—or poetics. Progressive ideals gave us eugenics and prohibition along with woman suffrage and educational reforms. Greater access and opportunity for disabled people is a crucial goal, but for poems to work they can’t be propaganda. And we have to be careful about being too directive with these delicate but powerful things. TF: Your poem, “Manifest Destiny,” for example, cites many political and cultural references from various people and periods of American history. I was wondering if you could share your thoughts on representing the shift in societal representation of embodiment through historical citation? JF: I wrote “Manifest Destiny” in response to an unvoiced challenge from the Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef. I was reading Khaled Mattawa’s translation of Youssef’s poem “America, America” on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq. I had joined thousands in marching to the state capitol in Madison to tell the US government not to start another war, not to indulge the blood lust that we too often are pulled by. While reading Youssef’s poem I was struck by his embrace of my country and its ideals while not holding back for a moment from his clear-eyed critique of our failures to live up to those ideals. I was also struck by his use of a refrain drawn from patriotic song, which led me to the idea of drawing upon American commonplaces, images and phrases so central to the American mythos that they would require no citation. I think I was wrong about the 1968 quotation from Chicago Mayor Daley, by the way (“the policeman isn’t there to create disorder, he’s there to preserve disorder”). But the power of those commonplaces, at least for those of us who grew up on them—and maybe for Youssef—is compelling. I read that poem at a poetry reading at a university in the American South just a couple weeks ago, and it still has power for me: at one point toward the end of the poem, I always feel like crying. Recognizing both our recurrent, deep, pervasive failures to live up to our ideals, while still asserting the hope in the ideals—that was the challenge from Youssef. Maybe someday I will get to show him the poem. TF: Are there any particular philosophers, disability studies theorists or perception phenomenologists who have consciously influenced your work; and how have they influenced your thinking? JF: Consciously? No, not really. I find myself using ideas and language from existential phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty, but I’m leery of too explicitly committing to any theorist’s ideas—I think I’m afraid that will inhibit the poem from jumping wherever the hell it needs to go. Disability studies theorists present another question, I think. Disability studies is still something of a cottage industry. The field has grown by leaps and bounds (running with the jumping metaphor in the paragraph above), but it is still relatively small. It was never quite true that we all know each other, and less true now, but the ideas that constitute disability studies theory developed in community and collaboration among a bunch of people trying to puzzle our ways through thorny questions. I think it’s fair to say that most everybody who might qualify as a disability studies theorist has helped to shape and enrich my thinking; I hope I’ve given as good as I’ve gotten. TF: Can you comment on the ways your recent poetry engages with issues of disability, race/ethnicity and social justice in America today? JF: I was raised to think of myself and my family as white, which at that time meant to think of ourselves as not really even having a race: race was something other people had. Trying to learn how to be a good parent to my African-American stepdaughters made me start to confront some of the ways their experience would be contextualized by the usually implicit but seldom if ever absent racializing that is standard in U.S. society. I wish I had been quicker off the mark to recognize how my own experience had been no less contextualized by race—contextualized very differently, but race was no less part of my experience than of theirs. As we were trying to be a multiracial family, as I was learning far too slowly to think about what I had only partially glimpsed before, I learned something else: that my maternal grandparents, who I thought I knew well, were categorized black and only began passing for white less than a hundred years ago. Much of what I have written the last several years has been in part probing the fabrication of race in actual lives, thinking about how I have been implicated in this system, pondering the interleavings of race with disability, and wondering how my family’s hidden black history shaped our experience for all its unspoken-ness. The past few years I have been working on a performance project around these questions. It’s called “Is Your Mama White?”, which comes from a question one of my ex-wife’s young cousins asked me as she was trying to figure out where I fit in the larger and more clearly black family. It was a good question; still is. Where did my mother fit in the nation’s race scheme? Where do I? How did my family’s particular racialized standing influence my disability experience? How do we talk about charged topics in productive ways? The performance asks more questions than it answers, and it changes every time I do it, but it always includes at least a few of these poems. At an artists’ residency some years ago I met a painter whose project during the residency was a series of self-portraits. That series, in particular one close-up of him peering at his face in a mirror, has stuck with me for years. As the pandemic lockdown was having its way this spring, it occurred to me that it might be an interesting project to write a series of self-portraits, myself. A conversation with the dancer and choreographer Alice Sheppard got me thinking about how the self-portrait poems could continue to probe my occluded family history and the ways that I and my family have been racialized— and have participated in racializing—in a profoundly racist society. Portraits, including Riva Lehrer’s compelling portrait of Alice, have played an important role in the development of disability culture in the U.S.; disabled bodies, however they are racialized, have seldom been considered fit subjects for portraiture. And portraits, whether they are made with paint or words, are always about society at least as much as they are about a person. Audience is an essential element of a poem or any work of art—the circuit is incomplete without that connection, even if the initial audience is conceptualized to be the self, a seemingly inanimate object, or the void of the universe. I think this is true: there is no art without an other. As I work to educate myself and to oppose racist structures and practices in the community where I live, I hope my poems reflect what I learn and what I perceive in the complex and uneven world around me. A poem is not propaganda, but it can make a claim in and on a tough world. I hope my poems do that. Page 13

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