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Writing the Body
• You can learn more about somatic poetry here.
Disability Studies and Poetics
• To become more familiar with the work of disabled poets and the ways critical writings in the field of disabilities studies, as well as activism by disabled people and their allies has influenced poetry, we recommend starting with the anthology, Beauty Is a Verb, edited by Jennifer Bartlett, Michael Northern, and Sheila Black. You can read the introduction and see the table of contents here.
• A great round table discussion on poetics and disability from the Split This Rock literary festival can be seen here.
• A conversation between Ilya Kaminsky and Sheila Black can also be found at Poetry International.
• Another great conversation at Poetry International is this one between Ilya Kaminsky and Raymond Antrobus.
• You can read poems by Sandra Beasley here, and read her essay “The Power of Claiming My Identity as a Disabled Writer” here.
Ilya Kaminsky’s poems can be found here, and his essay “Searching for a Lost Odessa – and a Deaf Childhood” here.
• Gillian Weise’s conversation about her book Cyborg Detective is here.
• Raymond Antrobus has a fascinating conversation on the podcast Between the Covers about many facets of his poetics, including how his experiences with deafness inform his approach to language in his poetry.
Poetry and Poetics from LGBTQ+ Writers
Queer theories, as well as theories from the field of Gender and Sexuality Studies, not to mention lived experiences of LGBTQ+ writers, have had and are having major impacts on contemporary poetry about the body.
Here are just a few of the poets we admire, in addition to those covered in the textbook chapter, who center the body and experiences of embodiment through the lens of gender and sexuality in their poetry.
• Poet Jenny Johnson, in her interview with LitHub, discusses how writing playfully allowed her to examine subjects that were ahead of her own thinking (such as her poem “Tail,” that was “about the phenomenological experience of feeling at odds with one’s material body, but feeling perfectly at home in a figurative one.”)
Poets Writing Fertility
Experiences related to fertility, infertility, childbirth, and nurturing infants often inspire profoundly embodied poetries. Among those poets whose poems convey with visceral understanding how we give birth, when we are able or choose to give birth, astride the grave are:
• Elizabeth Alexander, especially in her collection Antebellum Dream Book. You can read a sample of her work here.
• Mary Szybist, especially the poems from Incarnadine.
• June Jordan, who wrote poems while running a women’s health clinic.
• Dominique Christina, especially her collection Anarcha Speaks, about the enslaved women who were subject to torturous medical experiments by the first practitioners of modern gynecology.
Tending and Attending to the Body
Encounters with illness, one’s own or through caring for others, is another rich source of poetic inspiration. Here are some of the poets we admire who write extensively about vulnerable bodies and caregiving, as well as medicine and the medical system.
• Janice N. Harrington, especially The Hands of Strangers, poems about nursing and nursing homes
You might also check out Perillo’s memoir, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature, in which she discusses the ways her poetic and public identity shifted while she lived with M.S.
• Check out the anthology Vital Signs: Poems of Illness and Healing to discover more poets working in this vein.
Erotic and Sensuous
We opened the chapter “Writing the Body” by discussing the long tradition of erotic poetry. Here we offer some further reading and poets we recommend who are particularly known for writing poems of erotic longing, as well as poems that are sensuous in ways that include, but also reach beyond, erotic longing.
Mia You’s essay “Not Safe for Porn: The Erotic vs. Pornographic” is a great place to start your investigation into the poetics of the erotic.
Audre Lorde. In addition to her poems, we recommend her essay “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”
No exploration of erotic longing in poetry would be complete without Sappho, Ovid, or Catullus.
