Poetics and Disablement

As a way of introducing tomorrow nite's talk/discussion, "Allegories of Disablement" [see events], as well as being in the general interest of the emerging curriculum around disability and poetics, I'm posting this excerpt from a recent exchange between Robert Kocik and Thom Donovan (the whole text of which will be posted here soon):

<<Every kind of work I do deals in disability. To make matters worse (even richer) I went to the collective’s site and re-traced the history of the disability discourse—combining Amber DiPietra’s “How can we have a dialogue around disability and poetics, not just at the political or social level, but at a generative level--one that begets new experiments in writing? To live with or study disability is to be constantly questioning form and constantly working toward formal innovation—whether that is through accessible architecture or the far reaches of cyber humanity. How can this be translated to syntax and the raw stuff of poetry?” with Eleni’s: “disability founds aesthetics— for all persons, not just those with disabilities. If we became conscious of that, perhaps we might start to see how all our conditions determine our forms...”, and the demand becomes a pan-demand—wanting a way of working in which there’s no discrepancy between activism and formal poetry innovation (which is an age-old imperative) by means of embracing disability (which is almost entirely unheard of).>>

--Robert Kocik

See also the discussion thread beginning with a post by Amber DiPietra:

http://www.nonsitecollective.org/node/397