Title

Lyric Bodies: Poets on Disability and Masculinity

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2012

Published In

PMLA

Volume

127

Issue

2

Pages

248-263

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2012.127.2.248

Abstract

This essay extends the study of disability and masculinity representations by exploring the transformational possibilities of poetry as exemplified in the work of Tom Andrews, Floyd Skloot, and Kenny Fries. It argues that lyricism as a process of invention and play enacts both disability and male identity as equally unfixed and that through an “accidental poetics” each author engages with maleness as a continually renegotiated experience necessitated in part by the conditions of disability. Challenging norms that pertain to them as men with disabilities, resisting the imposition of controlling ideological narratives, Skloot, Fries, and Andrews revise themselves as textual bodies whose unruliness is instantiated and celebrated in the unique structural and figurative moves of verse.

Keywords

American literature, 1900-1999, twentieth century; Tom Andrews, the Hemophiliac's Motorcycle, poetry, lyric poetry, disabled men poets, masculinity, identity, human body, accident, Floyd Skloot, music appreciation, Kenny Fries, Anesthesia

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