“I am/in pain”: The Form of Suffering in David Wolach’s Hospitalogy and Amber DiPietra and Denise Leto’s Waveform

Gould, Declan

doi:https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2017.13

Gould, Declan

Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies (2017), 11, (2), 169–185.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2017.13
Language: English
Pages: 17

Abstract

The article focuses on David Wolach’s Hospitalogy and Amber DiPietra and Denise Leto’s Waveform in order to examine how experimental poetry allows them to write through and with the pain that is a part of their disabilities. Instead of responding to the stereotype that disability is reducible to suffering by writing around or writing off this pain, they re-envision their ongoing suffering as a productive constraint that leads them to collaboration and formal innovation. For all three poets, this formal innovation coheres into a prosody of disability that includes indeterminacy, unstable analogy, and dysfluency. However, while Wolach focuses on making a space for revolution via the critique from inside the “hospital-industrial complex,” DiPietra and Leto focus on producing alternative concepts of time and the disabled body (Hospitalogy 123). Despite their differences, Hospitalogy and Waveform are testaments to the ethical necessity of both maintaining the avant-garde as a site where linguistic openness and experimentation are encouraged, and of maintaining disability poetry as a site where aesthetic innovation can be deployed in order to initiate critique, meaning-making, and world remaking.

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