A FEW YEARS ago, when US writer and disability community activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha published their book The Future is Disabled, the title already seemed like an embodiment of humanity’s collective anxiety and intuitive need for mutual support. Since then, the social, political and ecological fractures we face have only deepened. Regular (un)natural disasters, a biosphere infested with microplastics, human institutions of care neglected or actively dismantled. All these phenomena disable us – more and more of us – and act as reminders of our need for interdependence.

While we might see traditional notions of disability as prescriptive – as in, someone’s impairment is diagnosed, deemed or positioned as disabled by the constructs of an ableist society – this way of thinking, the product of the social model of disability, has been complicated and expanded by disability justice movements, which have reclaimed and reimagined the term disability as both impressed upon and embodied.

In Latin, vates means both prophet and poet. To our minds, what poetry embodies, deliberately or inadvertently, fiercely or with great subtlety, is a kind of seismic registry of the zeitgeist, what’s coming and what’s possible. So it should be no surprise to notice that contemporary poetry, increasingly, registers our proximity to disability. We’re not suggesting that disability is the pre-eminent theme of contemporary poetry, that bodily or psychosocial predicaments are the key lens through which poetry ought to be apprehended. There’s a lot more going on. When we say disability, we don’t mean particular disabilities per se, but what those disabilities imply about the way the systems of the world are organised: how wheelchair users reveal the arrogance of stairs, how ME/CFS shows up the narrowness of the medical system, how autistic people remind us what a sensory onslaught most public spaces are. The bulk of innovative poetry being written in recent years is politically alert, prophetically, to the absurd and precipitous impacts of these systems on all of us.

In poetry’s capacity to self-define, to reject conventionality, to be in a constant state of flux and to hold the contradictory together in its granularity, it subverts formal systems of designation time and again. Poetry then avoids simple diagnosis, at least pre-emptively. As such, it holds within it the capacity for new ways of seeing, knowing and doing; and here, it has many similarities with contemporary disability aesthetics and the disabled experience, broad as it is. Poetry, like disability, is charged with response in real time. Poetry’s material adaptation should not be underestimated. 

PERHAPS THE EASIEST way to begin talking about this is to think of those poets who are themselves disabled and the aesthetics that infuse their work. We could start with some of the poets included in the recently published anthology of collaborative writing Raging Grace (Andy Jackson was an editor of this anthology, along with Esther Ottaway and Kerri Shying). There’s the rousing, historically informed defiance of queercrip writer Robin M Eames, whose poems regularly invoke the collective first person, using lowercase, caesura and forward slashes to sharpen our attention on an interconnected world, one of political struggle, prejudice, fractures and love. Their poems ‘Good crips go to heaven but get stuck at the stairway’ and ‘Song of the biped’ turn the tables on ableism with anaphora, irony and pitch-black humour.

There’s Alex Creece and Esther Ottaway, who are both autistic but have radically different aesthetics. Creece’s recent book, Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth,is fierce, sensorily rich, linguistically and typographically experimental. Memes collide with trauma, pop culture with literature, and concrete poems literally raise the middle finger. What seems a thematic swerve is quickly revealed as mutual implication. Check out ‘i ain’t reading all that / i’m happy for you tho / or sorry that happened’, one of the best prose poems of recent years, which includes the lines ‘My coming out story is the ballad of Earring Magic Ken. I don’t want to perform wellness but I don’t want to perform sickness either.’  

Meanwhile, Ottaway’s book She Doesn’t Seem Autistic articulates the under-represented world of neurodivergent women through a meticulous lyricism, where the pressure of experience is heightened through the compression and patterning of established and invented forms. ‘Neurodiverse’ is a bravura anagram poem, and ‘Night vision: apology to a late diagnosed Daughter’ harnesses the claustrophobia of the prose poem to devastating effect.

Then there’s Kerri Shying, whose poetry is rarely explicitly ‘about’ disability but is infused with a sensibility wrought from a life spent navigating illness, carers, solidarity and community. In poems such as ‘Neonate’, published in Cordite, the impressionistic voice is nimble and immediate, gathering fragments from the everyday. It’s working class, or underclass, but unselfconsciously, in laconic affirmation of getting on, while letting no inhumanity off the hook.

Likewise, there are those poets in Australia who, though not necessarily identifying as disabled themselves, turn to language in order to speak to those instruments of human greed and violence that disable us. This is sometimes done with humorous and satirical effect – in the case of poets such as Harry Reid, Elena Gomez, Evelyn Araluen, Eloise Grills and Gareth Morgan, to name a select few – allowing the poems to illuminate the rather precarious and absurd structures on which these instruments and systems are predicated.

The poem ‘Algorithm’ from Dominic Symes’ 2023 collection I Saw the Best Memes of My Generation is a particularly pertinent example of this. It opens with the following line:

stood before an automated door
that refused to acknowledge my existence
I thought
but I’m here.

The poem proceeds to unpack the intimacies – or lack thereof – of encroaching technocracy, where our interactions with machines overproduce experience but underproduce personability, reducing us to algorithms either aligned with or against the system. This experience of alienation, accelerated by our digital identities and exploited for profit by media conglomerates, have a particular resonance when it comes to disabled encounters with medical and administrative institutions, and therefore call us towards a poetry of connection, mutuality and simultaneous recognition.

Then there’s Dan Hogan’s work, which might be understood as a continuance of Marxist language poetics, much the same as many of the works by the poets named above. In Hogan’s poem ‘Workarounds’, which features in their collection Secret Third Thing, they satirise the lingo-gymnastics of corporate-speak in a way that appears to be, but isn’t, the incoherent gibberish of a machine. The embedded puns and sleights then reveal the patent classism of this language type and the ostracising and distancing effect it has in terms of our encounters with actual labour. The poem highlights how the normalisation of a machine language, of corporate-speak, fractures our relationships with one another and disrupts our capacities for an interdependence, or class solidarity, that can counteract neo-feudalist class oppression.

THERE’S SOME IRONY here in singling out poets such as these within the framework of a disabled poetry that speaks to us all. It may even seem counter to the important project of building a community of shared lived experience within disability communities. Yet when we think of contemporary poetry, we think of writing that’s premised on interdependence, precarity and solidarity in a world on the brink of human-induced collapse. Disabled people are always open to thoughtful allyship, and they know well that anyone can suddenly become disabled, particularly under current systems.

Exploring the resonance – aesthetic and political – between all these poets is not only enlightening but useful. How do they talk to each other when we place them together, here in this essay, but also literally in collaboration? We hope for more collaborative works in Australian poetics, those that centre interdependence in their very formations – more works like the much-celebrated collaborative First Nations anthology Woven, commissioned by Red Room Poetry and edited by Anne-Marie Te Whiu, and the above-mentioned Raging Grace. We hope, too, that our own ‘Poets Correspond’ series of review conversations, this being our sixth iteration, is part of a broader collaborative movement that recognises and sides with a disabled poetry. 

In a speech given on Friday 13 December for Overland’s seventieth birthday, the outgoing poetry editor, Toby Fitch, said the journal is ‘committed to the political project that is poetry, a project that must go beyond diversity quotas, empty acknowledgements and pat didacticism. And it must decry the kind of depoliticised lyric poem that dominates Australian poetry.’ We reiterate, support and celebrate this mission statement, along with the ongoing need for a disabled poetry that engages not only symbolically but materially with the sort of mutual support and action that we all need to survive.

Image by Tima Miroshnichenko via Canva.com