Written By: Madison Bigelow
As a certified poetry nerd (or, at least someone who considers themselves to be such), there’s nothing I enjoy more than a classic poetry reading. Whether you’re familiar with the hypothetical writer or not, it’s a gift to be able to experience a piece of art surrounded by others who are similarly passionate about writing, guided by the creator in question. There’s something to be said about the energy in the room, the voice of an author, and the hum of the crowd.
However, this common understanding of how we experience poetry – sitting, being read aloud to, and separated by a podium – greatly undercuts the inventive quality of the poetry genre as a whole.
A 2023 finalist for the National Book Award, DeafBlind writer John Lee Clark challenges traditional notions of what poetry ‘is’ or ‘ought to be’ as a means to honor the ways in which he navigates the world with limited sight and hearing. Born deaf, his first language was American Sign Language. While he eventually acquired English as a second language, he also began to lose his vision. Greatly impacting his relationship with language itself, Clark identifies and transforms his ways of experiencing the world as art in and of itself.
While he is also an essayist, I am primarily interested in his poetry. Most recently published, his collection How to Communicate addresses universal components of the human condition like grief, language, community, and identity, but also prosody of Braille, expressive nature of American Sign Language, and how his understanding of literature was limited to that of the nineteenth century classics as a child (because those were the only audiobooks available at his public library).
Additionally, John Lee Clark is also a main figure in the Protactile poetry movement. Primarily used by DeafBlind individuals, Protactile is a touch-oriented language that is physically practiced on the body as opposed to reliant on visual cues. This quite literally means that Protactile poems must be physically experienced; hearing is not a prerequisite to understanding these works, but rather they hinge on experiential sensation.
Here is a video of one of his most popular Protactile poems, titled “The Rebuttal.”
All in all, I think that poets like John Lee Clark are completely changing the genre of poetry– and they should be more highly recognized because of it. Work like this is so transformative (and so important!) due to the many barriers to access that individuals oftentimes face when trying to experience art. Whether it be the absence of an interpreter, the refusal to provide an audio alternative, or another failure to meet accommodations, disabled individuals are often left out of artistic spaces.
Clearly, his work proves that poetry does not have to exist in the forms it has. That there is room for innovation and transformation and identities that are not normally represented at such a large scale.
John Lee Clark not only addresses these issues of accessibility, but makes disability highly visible in the process. And, as a result, the poetry that has resulted from Clark’s tackling of adversity provides immense (and much needed) innovation for poetry at large.