By KATHI WOLFE
Twenty-five years ago, on July 26,
1990, a new era began for the nearly one in five Americans who have
disabilities. On that day, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a federal
law that protects our civil rights, was passed.
BIG LOVE to Split This Rock – for
marking this milestone with a reading on July 19 at Busboys & Poets and a
month of Poems of the Week by poets with disabilities.
Ableism – disability-based prejudice
and discrimination – is so intricately woven into our culture that we often
aren’t aware of it. Because of this lack of awareness, as poets, we often fail
to include ableism in our “poetry of witness.”
Let’s witness ableism:
In 1989, I folded my white cane and sat
down at a deli in New York City. “You can’t eat here,” the man behind the
counter said, “Blind people will depress people trying to eat.”
Decades earlier, my (late) mother was a
lab technician in Philadelphia. Then, she knew she’d have been fired if her
boss knew she had diabetes.
Historically, some states denied
disabled people the right to marry or forced them to be sterilized.
Progressives have been no less ableist
than conservatives. In the 1930s, disabled people staged sit-ins because they
were left out of New Deal job programs.
Whether we’re HIV positive, recovering
alcoholics, cancer survivors, wheelchair users, have epilepsy, mental illness,
attention deficit disorder or rheumatoid arthritis – to name just a few of the
people covered by the ADA – we have civil rights.
“Has the ADA ever truly been enforced? No and
no again; yet how lucky we are to have a standard in the books we can fight
towards,” Sheila Black, a poet and co-editor of the groundbreaking anthology Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, emailed me.
Beauty Is a
Verb is one of the first collections of poetry in the genre of disability
poetics. The anthology’s more than 30 contributors have varied styles and
sensibilities. Yet, they share in common a desire to authentically represent
disability – to go beyond the ableism that historically has permeated so much
of poetry.
“I love that I have the right to
protest when I can’t enter a building...that we think about interpretation and
sign language,” Black, who has x-hypophosphotemia (formerly known as Vitamin D
Resistant Rickets), added.
As a lesbian, well aware that there’s
no federal LGBT civil rights law, I, too, love the ADA. Yet, in great part due
to lax enforcement, ableism persists. Only 18 of Amtrak’s over 400 train
stations are accessible to anyone using a wheelchair, crutches, walker, braces
– or even a woman pushing a stroller.
Many employers still won’t consider hiring qualified people with
disabilities. The ADA’s quarter century
mark is a time not only for celebration but for poetry of witness.
More people in the poetry world than
space permits me to name have been respectful toward myself and others with
disabilities – from poet and Pulitzer Prize finalist Cornelius Eady to Gargoyle publisher Richard Peabody to
Grace Cavalieri, producer/host of “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress” to Clarinda Harriss, director, of my publisher BrickHouse Books.
Yet, ableism runs deep in poetry circles. Poetry festivals
and reading series are often not wheelchair accessible to poetry readers or
audiences. Software programs used by poets to submit their work and
publications’ websites are often inaccessible to blind and visually impaired
poets. Frequently, poets with disabilities are excluded when the talk turns to
diversity.
Props to Poetry Magazine for its on-going efforts to be inclusive toward
people with disabilities. “Change is not just overdue in terms of the reception
of work by poets with disabilities,” Don Share, editor of Poetry Magazine emailed me, “but in the very infrastructure of
literary publishing.” That said, “we live in a time now when dangerous
condescension toward people thought not to matter is eliciting action,” Share
added, “...our poets are up to the task of rectifying injustice...”
Diversity isn’t tokenism, deaf-blind
poet and Freedom Plow Award finalist John Lee Clark reminded me. “Just one or
two of us isn’t diversity,” Clark emailed me, “...We need to see poets with
disability in EVERY facet of the literary landscape, top to bottom, sea to
shining sea, in all the hidden places and all of the public spaces.”
Happy 25th, ADA!
Kathi Wolfe is a writer and poet. Her most recent
collection The Uppity Blind Girl Poems,
winner of the 2014 Stonewall Chapbook Competition, was published in 2015 by
BrickHouse Books. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gargoyle, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Poetry
Magazine and other publications. She is a contribution to the anthology Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of
Disability.
