Post-Language Poetries and Post-Ableist Poetics

This essay brings together the discourses of contemporary disability studies and radical modernist poetics. Reading the textures of subjectivity in the recent work of post-language poet Laura Moriarty, I elaborate on a tradition in U.S. American poetries whose tenets were pivotally formulated in and by language poetry. My central argument is that such poetries contribute methods and materials key to furthering debates within disability studies concerning “dependency theory.” With regard to the latter, special reference is made to Bradley Lewis’s work on “post-psychiatry,” contemporary articulations of “crip” poetics, and the hermeneutic ramifications of “psycho-social disability.” It is post-language poetries that I find first disclose the promise of post-ableist poetics.