Acts Of Naming Disabilities

Acts of Naming

In Jo Shapcott and Susan Wicks poems, the act of naming their illnesses or disabilities is something that causes tension between the reality of what the illness is called and the ways in which they refer to it in the poems. Gareth Williams notes disability is fundamentally a problem of representation. It is a problem of representation in the sense that there is no language to talk about it that is untainted. [1] Further language must be found to talk about illness or disability. This is especially important for Shapcott and Wicks as it changes how they represent their own disabilities. Often they represent their disabilities as allusions to something else. These poets also deal with their poetry in the context of their illnesses as places of ownership, places to reclaim their stories, rename illnesses, or to merely tell their narratives. The act of naming illnesses is so problematic because it causes a real separation between the reality of the language of what an illness is called or named, and other medical language like cell or other imagery that surround illnesses but do not name them. This separation can reiterate the naming of an illness or hide diagnostic terms further.

Shapcott never mentions her diagnosis of breast cancer in her collection Of Mutability, despite this collection being infused with cells and surgery. Shapcott does not illustrate her illness or disability as something that is easily explained away in a diagnostic term, which additionally can be usurped by those outside her poetry in the medical profession. Instead Shapcott focuses on the effects of her illness, the trouble with blood tests, [2] which maintains the ownership of her illness with her own body. This also refuses to name the illness affecting her, again allowing Shapcott s sense of identity to be entwined with the embodiment of the illness not the naming of it. Williams argues that Shapcott has always constructed herself with a sense of rootlessness and loss of identity [3] and this is also clear in her illness poems in Of Mutability which demonstrate a disconnection between her sense of her own body and that of how others see her body, and additionally how they name this body as ill. In the poem Stargazer this is apparent when she states:

my audience,

forgive, and forget what s

happening in my cells.[4]

This is a poem about death and Shapcott is yearning to stay beyond this moment, [5] but she is also addressing the audience [6] which is the other who see her as ill. Shapcott s need to been seen as different from what her body demonstrates a dichotomy that will continue throughout her collection. Her difficulty with being able to name her illness stops the reader from being able to definitively follow her narrative and pin down her identity as a disabled person. Shapcott also juxtaposes additional imagery next to her cancer. Medical imagery is impacted by nature for example, we are told: my body s / a drop of water [7] in Deft, a poem that focuses on mixing liquid and medicine together. Cancer for Shapcott is a difficult, transient thing, unable to be grasped or named. Shapcott s collection grapples with the impossibility of naming or narrating illness within poetry.

Part of Shapcott s difficulty with talking about her own illness in her poetry is due to that fact that she believes and has said readers like to assume that the I in a poem is the author. [8] She does not want readers to confuse the author and the I together and therefore read her poems as autobiographical. Of Mutability is a collection that focuses on objects such as music, trees, the city and medicine. It draws inspiration from Helen Chadwick s artwork, which is also occupied with medicine and the body. The poems of Shapcott s collection leave emotional impressions about illness, or what Shapcott herself has referred as meditations about mortality. [9]

One way to consider this approach is through Arthur Frank s ideas. Frank suggests ways to read different illness narratives and one of these is the chaos narrative which Frank describes as its plot never imagines life getting better. Stories are chaotic in their absence of narrative order. [10] This type of theory imagines a world where illness is told in a non-linear fashion and without restoration of order. Shapcott s poetry reads like part of a chaos narrative. There is rarely a resolution to her poems, many instead end with an ambiguity of some kind, such as the poem The Deaths which final line states I was gone and still I didn t know. [11] Crucially, in her poems there is both a precision to the images, but also an ambiguity in the narrative. The title poem Of Mutability is a good example of Shapcott s elusive narrative.

Too many of the best cells in my body

are itching, feeling jagged, turning raw

in this spring chill. It s two thousand and four

and I don t know a soul who doesn t feel small

among the numbers. Razor small.

Look down these days to see your feet

mistrust the pavement and your blood tests

turn the doctor s expression grave.

Look up to catch eclipses, gold leaf, comets

angels, chandeliers, out of the corner of your eye,

join them if you like, learn astrophysics, or

learn folksong, human sacrifice, mortality,

flying, fishing, sex without touching much.

Don t trouble, though, to head anywhere but the sky.

This sonnet plays with many of the expectations of the form. The octave works against the idea of a love poem, where medicine is involved in the body. However, at the turn, we find love in nature and life. Shapcott s elusive narrative is demonstrated by how she presents no biographical details and we only get glimpses of a linear narrative of her illness. We are only given a date and she says the doctor s expression grave. [12] This does allow us to gleam some details of what is happening to Shapcott, but we have little to go on. In the sestet we are presented with the juxtaposition of images that are tightly packed together, we are told to Look up to catch eclipses, gold leaf, comets / angels. [13] The constant impact of images after such important imagery related to medicine means we grasp an impression that this is all about illness, even the parts that are reaching out into nature. Crucially we are not clearly told what the illness is. Without naming her illness, Shapcott leaves the reader sensitive to the multiple impact of illness across different parts of her world.

Shapcott has even said my quest has been to discover how to be a different kind of writer, for whom place and language are less certain, and for whom shifting territories are the norm. [14] Shapcott s illness poems in Of Mutability operate on just this idea. Illness is a good subject for shifting territories. Through Shapcott s assertion to write with a type of difference, we find poems that are less grounded in narrative. Naming a decisive diagnosis in her collection would frustrate her goal to be less certain in her writing. Instead we find an unsettled world that illness navigates around. Shapcott continues to use shifting images to stand in for her illness through her poetry and utilises her chaotic narrative of illness. She creates new spaces for cancer to exist within.

In an earlier collection: Electroplate my Baby, Shapcott also uses images of the body that shift around the book so that things are never certain. In the poem Robert Watches Elizabeth Knitting the reader is given the epigraph: It will be found that DNA mentions nothing but relations ... The relata, the end components of the relationships in the corporeal world, are perhaps never mentioned [15] (Gregory Bateson). The reader knows the knitting in this poem is more than for love, but instead it relates to science and DNA in a real way. Part of Shapcott s poem reads:

Strange to see these youngish hands,

with no puffiness or obvious veins,

repeat the banal and tiny motions

over days over weeks over months.

I ask too much and am too hasty

this knitting is an exercise in trust.[16]

This demonstrates not only the themes of how knitting brings Elizabeth and Robert closer together, but also how the body functions even in Shapcott s early poetry. The body is not a stable thing, instead she is trying to create DNA which we as humans are built from. The exercise in trust means that there is a measure of trust in this only stable bit of our lives, even when the other parts are complex or wrong. Shapcott reveals the hands that DNA are made from, as well as the mind that is making them, because they can both be flawed, she hides behind this scattering and chaotic version of the body so she can produce some kind of truth/

Wicks is instead a poet who is very upfront about her diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis in her collection Open Diagnosis. She uses language such as cripple and wheelchair throughout as well as naming her diagnosis. This demonstrates to the reader clarity, by using definitive nouns that centre on medicine. The reader knows explicitly what Wicks illness is, as well as the medical procedures she goes through. She describes: my brain imaged on a screen behind me. [17] She uses medical language of disability and illness as well as proprietary language like cripple that is seen to belong to disabled people politically, to explain her illness. For some critics this language is difficult, John Lyon notes:

For we re all naturists now, and every pimple, secretion, haemorrhoid, emission, blemish, slit and scar is a thing of beauty and joy for verse. Everything is significant, profound, precious life (and death), once versified, one long epiphany. And so it is unfashionable to enter a plea for embarrassment as a valuable inhibitor of versifying and a meaningful and discriminating term in criticism. And this reader is embarrassed to have to confess that the work of Susan Wicks makes him cringe.[18]

This is partly the point in using language which discomforts the reader. In Wicks case many of her poems are also using disability in a wry or ironic way, to point out major double standards in her life, or the language attached. This feeling of embarrassment that Lyon s talks about, suggests more about his own discomfort at understanding Wicks poetry than what Wicks is trying to communicate: how Pollyanna / spilt sun miraculously [19] the symbol of an ironic cure, not available here.

Elsewhere, she continues similar themes with the lines: in sequence on blank paper: cholinesterase, / multiple sclerosis, poison oak, [20] which is also an act of naming her own illness in comparison to other scientific terms, but also uses unnatural events and poisons in contrast to more natural items which are able to kill or injure the subject of the poem. Cholinesterase can be used in biochemical warfare as a nerve gas, and poison oak causes a contact rash, both of which are important as comparisons to multiple sclerosis as they cause a divergence between what the speaker s body is doing to her and what the destruction of the world causes to itself, through war or natural defences. Multiple sclerosis is also a disease where the natural defences of the nerves are gone. Wicks has the ability in her poems to use metaphor to contrast the conclusive things in her life like multiple sclerosis, with more natural events.

There are disruptions in every illness narrative that make the naming of illness or disabilities difficult. Michael Bury says that: Chronic illness can be understood as a biographical disruption in that it disturbs not only one s physical body, but the trajectory of one s whole life at a number of levels [21] and this is demonstrated through the major and minor disruptions that are found within Wicks poetry. We find minor disruptions despite Wicks strong narrative about illness. In the poem Caul, Wicks presents a poem where she narrates a memory about her father being born in a Caul, she says: Now his only daughter / has M.S. [22] This is a disruption, where she plays with memory. She also openly declares the name of her diagnosis in the middle of the poem, so it becomes the most important thing, as the memories centre around it. Through declaring her diagnosis, Wicks disrupts the way she narrates how illness has impacted her life. She announces it through how a definitive diagnosis changes her memories and relationships and finds echoes in other medical images. [BIO AND ILLNESS?]

For Wicks language also illustrates how willing she is able to allude to the political implications that writing about a disability can have, such as in the poem Communion where, she includes proprietary language and says:

We ate our last celebratory

supper with a cripple

drawn up to the table

in a wheelchair, his little legs

tucked under, pigeon feet

strung inwards as if to touch

each other.[23]

Wicks uses both shocking and definitive language in the word cripple. A word that provides even more impact through the rhyme with table. This is another way to reiterate that she is using the word cripple , and renaming her disability. The use of language like the word cripple is incredibly important to the disabled community, and is used by Wicks often in her series of illness poems to point out the space between health and illness. For many, the word cripple is a loaded and political word, as Kuppers says: reclaiming the word cripple is hard, and best done in the poetic genre, [24] and this is an understanding that there is work that needs to be done to regain the word from its most recent use as a derogatory term. For Wicks, using the word cripple becomes part of her vocabulary that helps her to describe her state of disability with accuracy, because she writes herself into the political reclaiming of the word.

When Wicks states be ill or crippled [25] in the poem How to Become Invisible she is not saying that these are the same thing, but instead that being crippled means something additional to her, which in the context of the poem is the fact that being crippled often means you are both invisible, because people can ignore those with disabilities due to their marginalised status, and highly visible at the same time, because people with disabilities are different to the norm. This reclaiming of the word cripple within her poetry, has echoes of crip poetics which are largely centred within American poetry about disability.

Explicitness is a conscious choice for these poets. Whether Shapcott and Wicks want to declare themselves as disabled is part of how they write themselves into the narrative discourse of disability poetry. For some critics such as Mitchell and Snyder, disability must be a status that is written about, and they describe: in order to be disabled, one must narrate one s disability for others in sweeping strokes or hushed private tones. And this narrative must inevitably show how we conquer our disabilities or how they eventually conquer us. [26] Wicks narrates her disability with definite terms. She is willing to share the nature of her illness using explicit language and diagnostic terms. Wicks renames and uses echoes of other scientific language to impact on the naming of her illness. We hear the name of her illness in the echoes of other things in her collection. For Shapcott, by withholding her diagnosis she is distributing the power of the words that are missing throughout the rest of her collection and creating a tension with the rest of her work. Wicks creates this same tension by using terms that she is claiming as her own. Terms that are only just available to her, such as cripple and MRI and then comparing them to other language. These are the places that these poets diverge when creating collections that focus on illness and disability that then both name and refuse to name what they are suffering from.

Works Cited

ADDIN EN.REFLIST Frank, Arthur W., The Wounded Storyteller : Body, Illness, and Ethics. Pbk. ed edn (Chicago, Ill., London: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Kuppers, Petra, `Performing Determinism: Disability Culture Poetry`, Text and Performance Quarterly, 27 (2007), 89-106.

Lyon, John, `The Faber Book of Embarrassment`, Thumbscrew 1997, p. np.

McKay, Sinclar, `Jo Shapcott: A Page in the Life`, Telegraph Media Group Ltd., (2011) [Accessed 09/04/14 2014].

Mitchell, David, and Sharon Snyder, The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).

Nettleton, Sarah, The Sociology of Health and Illness (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).

Shapcott, Jo, `Confounding Geography`, in Contemporary Women`s Poetry, ed. by Alison Mark and Deryn Rees-Jones (New York: St. Martin`s Press, 2000), pp. 40-46.

, `The Deaths`, in Of Mutability (Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 12.

, `Deft`, in Of Mutability (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 6.

, `Of Mutability`, in Of Mutability (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 3.

, `Procedure`, in Of Mutability (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 53.

, `Robert Watches Elizabeth Knitting`, in Electroplating the Baby (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1988), pp. 60-61.

, `Stargazer`, in Of Mutability (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 52.

Wicks, Susan, `Caul`, in Open Diagnosis (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 31.

, `Communion`, in Open Diagnosis (London Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 23.

, `Glad Came`, in Open Diagnosis (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 35.

, `How to Become Invisible`, in Open Diagnosis (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 36.

, `Imaging`, in Open Diagnosis (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), pp. 28-29.

, `Vocabulary`, in Open Diagnosis (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 25.

Williams, David G, `Responses to Elizabeth Bishop: Anne Stevenson, Eavan Boland and Jo Shapcott`, English, 44 (1995), 229-45.

Williams, Gareth, `Representing Disability: Some Questions of Phenomenology and Politics`, in Exploring the Divide: Illness and Disability, ed. by Colin Barnes and Geof Mercer (Leeds: The Disability Press, 1996), pp. 194-212.

[1] ADDIN EN.CITE Williams199682194Gareth Williams, &aposRepresenting Disability: Some Questions of Phenomenology and Politics&apos, in (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 53.111Shapcott, JoOf Mutability532010LondonFaber and FaberJo Shapcott, `Procedure`, in Of Mutability, (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 53.

[3] ADDIN EN.CITE Williams199593239David G Williams, &aposResponses to Elizabeth Bishop: Anne Stevenson, Eavan Boland and Jo Shapcott&apos, (The Telegraph: Telegraph Media Group Ltd., 2011), (p. np).138McKay, Sinclar201409/04/142011The TelegraphTelegraph Media Group Ltd.NewspaperSinclar McKay, `Jo Shapcott: A Page in the Life`, (The Telegraph: Telegraph Media Group Ltd., 2011), (p. np).

ADDIN EN.CITE McKay2011138npIbid.138McKay, Sinclar201409/04/142011The TelegraphTelegraph Media Group Ltd.NewspaperIbid.

ADDIN EN.CITE Frank19972097Arthur W. Frank, ed. by Alison Mark and Deryn Rees-Jones (New York: St. Martin&aposs Press, 2000), pp. 40-46 (p. 42).147Shapcott, JoMark, AlisonRees-Jones, DerynContemporary Women&aposs Poetry40-462000New YorkSt. Martin&aposs PressJo Shapcott, `Confounding Geography`, in Contemporary Women`s Poetry, ed. by Alison Mark and Deryn Rees-Jones (New York: St. Martin`s Press, 2000), pp. 40-46 (p. 42).

ADDIN EN.CITE Shapcott198816760Jo Shapcott, &aposRobert Watches Elizabeth Knitting&apos, in (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), pp. 28-29.128Wicks, SusanOpen Diagnosis28-291994LondonFaber and FaberSusan Wicks, `Imaging`, in Open Diagnosis, (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), pp. 28-29.

ADDIN EN.CITE Lyon1997194John Lyon, &aposThe Faber Book of Embarrassment&apos, in , (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), p. 88.73Nettleton, SarahSocial medicine __ Great Britain.1995CambridgePolity Press0745608930� (pbk)CopacCopacEnglishBury Cited in:Sarah Nettleton, The Sociology of Health and Illness, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), p. 88.

ADDIN EN.CITE Wicks199414931Wicks, p. 31.149Wicks, SusanOpen Diagnosis311994LondonFaber and FaberWicks, p. 31.

ADDIN EN.CITE Wicks199419223Wicks, p. 23.192Wicks, SusanOpen Diagnosis231994London Faber and FaberWicks, p. 23.

ADDIN EN.CITE Kuppers20072694Petra Kuppers, &aposPerforming Determinism: Disability Culture Poetry&apos, , (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. xii.10Mitchell, DavidSnyder, Sharon

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Eugenics.Human Body.Disability.Social aspects.Sociology of disability.Humanities __ Social aspects __ Methodology.Disabled Persons __ in literature.1997Ann ArborUniversity of Michigan Press0472066595 (pbk. : acid-free paper hardcover : acid-free paper)�CopacCopacEnglishDavid Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. xii.