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  • Editor’s Introduction:Disability and Generative Form
  • Janet Lyon

DEDICATION

This special issue of jml is dedicated to the memory of poet and scholar Hillary Gravendyk.

Two years ago I was the first reader of a submission titled “Chronic Poetics.” I knew right away that I would recommend publication of the essay, which broke important new ground in a subfield often referred to as literary disability studies. With the coinage of the term “chronic poetics” the author brought two aspects of disability studies into conceptual confluence. The activist ethos that drives many of the critiques leveled by disability scholars was pulled into alignment with an understanding of poetics as a dynamic register of the embodiment that grounds our (and by “our” I mean “everyone’s”) being in the world. To approach poetry from the perspective of “chronic poetics,” the author proposed, was to emphasize the phenomenological states entailed in both the writing and the reading of poems. Especially important to the argument were temporal states — among them simultaneity, duration, and, of course, chronicity — which the author explored through a sustained reading of Larry Eigner’s poem “there’s/a season.” Eigner (1927–1996) had cerebral palsy, the physical effects of which conditioned his activities of poetic composition, just as any writer’s state of embodiment at any given time determines at least in part the cluster of perceptual and expressive processes known as composition. And this was part of the essay’s larger point: that disability is one of innumerable generalizable features of embodied experience because it is a way of being-in-a-body, being-in-the-world. The universal fact of embodiment is characterized by particularity, that is, not by homogeneity, and “it is only by recognizing that particularity that we can talk about a shared condition of embodied perception. What is shared is the heterogeneity of bodily experience.” On this reading, Eigner “asks us not to register his physical situation, but to pay attention to our own.”

We sent our enthusiastic comments to the still-anonymous author and asked for a few clarifications and editorial adjustments. On the strength of the essay’s central argument, I felt that it should ground a special issue that I would edit [End Page v] on disability/embodiment/bio-life — we had some accepted essays that would fit nicely into that format — and while we waited for the revisions on “Chronic Poetics,” the issue took shape. When we didn’t hear from the author for many months, we sent a few nudges and held back the issue. Finally we received a brief message about some health problems that were now in abatement, and on April 9, the revised essay was in our hands. Only after we voted to accept the piece did I learn that the author was a young poet and assistant professor of English at Pomona College named Hillary Gravendyk. I looked at her online profile, learned of her poetry awards and her vibrant presence on the West Coast poetry scene, and read parts of her stunning collection of poems titled Harm (Omnidawn, 2011). A month later, on May 10, 2014, Gravendyk died at the age of 35 of complications from a double lung transplant that she had undergone in her twenties.

Her death is shocking. We at jml extend our sincerest sympathies to her loved ones, and to the community of poets, scholars and friends who must feel her loss keenly.

One needn’t know about Gravendyk’s own chronic illness in order to register the profundity of her insights into disability and poetics — and, above all, human embodiment:

Though the length of time over which an experience extends is often the definitional aspect of a “chronic” feature of life, it is a poor descriptor of chronic experience, such as illness, for which the idea of an experiential timeline of onsets and closures is too narrow. Chronicity describes a feature of life that is so persistent that it exceeds conventional markers of time and becomes, along with human sensory capacity more generally, the grounds for one’s perception of the world and of “durations.”

We have lost a voice full of wisdom and beauty. jml is privileged to...

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