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Writing is masochistic. Or, for me it is. “My brain must be diametrically opposed to writing,” I once wrote in a lyric essay. “They call what I have brain fog. This implies that there is something to see inside my brain, but the line of vision to that something is too clouded to make any sense.”
When I first decided to take writing seriously, I think I wanted to make sense. I wanted to write a clear sentence. But my body doesn’t make that easy. With a complex disability, my symptoms express throughout all the systems of my body. I’m stuck in a never-ending loop of sick. It’s not even that my frequent flare ups, bursts of pain, and sometimes months-long periods of being bedbound disrupt my writing practice, which they of course do. But worse, with chronic fatigue, I’m mostly too tired to think deeply—even when I’m my healthiest.
Unlike my physical fatigue, which I can sometimes brute force my way through, I can’t force my way through cognitive fatigue. When I would try to write in my early writing days, nothing good would come out. So I spent my time waiting for the rare moments when language could break through. I decided to get an MFA to up my chances by upping my free time. I spent the first year of my MFA program waiting, and waiting, and waiting. But I didn’t write much all year.
I refused to get discouraged. I accommodated, reframed my approach. My first summer break, I decided, would be my time to write. But when summer came, I became bedbound. I had to acknowledge what I had always feared: I was waiting for conditions that may never come. If I wanted to be a writer, I had to try to write anyway, open to whatever came out. Making this shift in approach, I realized that despite giving myself endless physical accommodations, I hadn’t been as accommodating of my brain. I’d been trying to make it write neurotypically, logical and coherent. So instead, I let my brain—neurodivergent, fatigued, and on a cocktail of medications—write from my sickbed in whatever way it wanted to write. And for the first time, I was writing not despite my disability, but because of it.
From these bed sessions, I wrote my first poetry collection, I Feel Fine. A collection of very short prose-ish poems, its lines are continually interrupted mid-sentence by a period, acting as both a fulcrum and disruptor. My neurodivergence and other cognitive symptoms became rendered in this form, moving associatively rather than linearly, lines stopping short, trailing off, forgetting where they came from or where they were headed. With the period as the sole punctuation mark, questions became declarative. Exclamations became affectless.
I Feel Fine doesn’t isolate and purely express my cognitive symptoms alone. Instead, it contains my full spread of illness and disability, smudging all boundaries—physical and mental, well and unwell, interior and exterior, self and other, reality and unreality. Working on this project made me consider the textbody as a true body with its own somatics, and the possibilities in rendering the divergences of the body—especially disabled and trans bodies—not just in language but in form. I became less interested in explaining my body and more interested in translating it.
Translation—“exact” and “pure”—is impossible. It’s impossible to translate a poem from one language to another language perfectly. Some parts must be cut off and re-made differently, a kind of prosthesis, the poem becoming its own cyborg. The translator as interlocutor is tasked with re-making the poem with new parts, understanding what the poem really is rather than what it’s saying or doing. In Transgressive Circulation, Johannes Göransson writes about translating Aase Berg’s Forsla Fett from Swedish to English:
I translated “forsla”—which other translators have translated as “carry” or “haul”—as “transfer” to bring the f-consonance into the title, emphasizing the sound of the title. The sonic play and puns of the book—the fattening up of language, its transfer without origin or destination—undoes the communication ideal and the Christian binary of body and spirit. . . . “Forsla” suggests transferring, but it doesn’t tell us where. It might be a command (“Transfer this fat!”) or it might be a part of a larger sentence (“I want to transfer this fat”). Unlike the Lockean thinking about communication—where meaning gives currency to language, redeeming the sounds—the foregrounding of the physical feeling of the f-sound in one’s mouth is word without currency. An unredeemed proliferation of language, an inflation of sounds and letters. But it is precisely in that unredeemed physical transfer that it affects me.
Göransson’s approach to translation here, preserving the embodied experience of the reader as inherent to the poem itself, rejecting communication as meaning-based, is necessary for crip poetics. “I write a poem from my sickbed in the shape of a bed,” I write later in the same lyric essay. “My gleaning feels like a lie. If I were more interested in the truth, I would invite readers to stand over me and tuck me in.” The experience of disability and other body divergences can be best shared not in their linguistic communication, but in creating other avenues of feeling and embodiment—making readers flick an “f” in their mouth, making readers tuck me into my sickbed.
The disabled body and medically transitioning body are already forced into linguistic translation in the medical setting. Medical records—doctor’s notes, imaging reports, clinical summaries—serve as a narrative summary of the patient’s body. But instead of the self acting as filter, the authority of the body’s narrative is involuntarily relinquished to doctors and other medical professionals, the language of the body determined by the medical system. The individuated voice of self becomes flattened by the standardization of medicine and made clinical, devoid of feeling.
Practically, a patient needs to translate their embodied experiences into language to a medical professional to receive care. But how do we name not only one sensation, but a cluster of enmeshed sensations expressed in an opaque syndrome like migraine? How do we detangle and demarcate expressions of the body to communicate them when they exist in one body that’s made up of systems all tied to one another, unable to separate itself from itself?
From doctor to patient, we are given shorthand of the body. Language like tingling, stabbing, and burning to ascribe to singular sensations. The pain scale, a 1–10 scale of pain with 1 being no pain and 10 being the worst pain imaginable, to label the general state of pain. The latter is especially useless because of its dependency on the subjectivity of and relativity within the individual—patients in chronic, severe pain are much more likely to rate their pain lower than those without chronic pain—and even more so on its dependency on the quantitative for something inherently qualitative. In “The Pain Scale,” Eula Biss writes:
Once, for a study of chronic pain, I was asked to rate not just my pain, but also my suffering. I rated my pain as a three. Having been sleepless for nearly a week, I rated my suffering as a seven. “Pain is the hurt, either physical or emotional, that we experience,” writes the Reverend James Chase. “Suffering is the story we tell ourselves of our pain.” Yes, suffering is the story we tell ourselves.
Biss suggests an incompleteness in the translation of the body in pain as one of purely physical sensation, and instead reifies the full-bodied, nuanced, and uncontainable expression of impairment as an experience of disability, integrated with the self. While medical records chop, reduce, and make-orderly an inherently disorderly body, literature offers a means of more wholly recreating the complex divergences of the body not only by moving beyond mere exposition and allowing the rendering of the body in form, but also by integrating fully with the self.
Disability scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomas created the concept of the “Normate,” the most idealized, perfect body, which is a fallacy as there is no body without its own divergences. Yet this impossible body is what we’ve used both inside and outside the medical system to regulate bodies. One of the most common instances is the BMI, which uses aggregate data in a bell curve to determine the proper weight of an individual instead of using the individual data of a body over time to determine its own normal.
Each body is anti-normative, operating within its own singular paradigm. And when translated to language, it must create that same anti-normative paradigm in language. It understands words, like molecules, are vibrational—not two-dimensional symbols stuck on a page signifying life elsewhere, but alive on their own, right here. It moves, functions and dysfunctions. And with the textbody alive, the constellation of expressions of self that define the experience of identity become part of the textbody’s organ systems.
“For most of my life, my relationship to my stutter was rooted in shame, anger, and despair,” writes JJJJJerome Ellis in Aster of Ceremonies. “I responded to these emotions by trying, and failing, to master my stutter through various means. . . . Failure has led me to a grove of unknowing. If I can’t master the Stutter, what can I do? What might it mean to try to Aster my stutter?”
In the same way that writing I Feel Fine forced me to stop working against and instead work with my disability, transforming it from a site of limitation for my writing to a vector of possibility, Ellis cites writing Aster of Ceremonies, which includes phrases like “stutters are vessels,” as a means of creating “a more plural” relationship to his stutter—and by extension to himself.
The book pairs two seemingly distinct archives: Black dysfluency (i.e. stutters, stammers) in the form of “runaway slave” advertisements (for those described as having dysfluency) and the book The Flora of North America, whose lists of plant names Ellis moves through to uncover what plants may have offered some kind of salvation—whether food, medicine, or company—to these “enslaved Ancestors,” as he names them, as they “ran away,” while also being drawn to the musicality of the plant names in Latin.
In “Benediction, Movement 2 (Octave)” (which means “to speak well” in Latin), Ellis lists the names of plants native to Charleston using the names he created for them (“Elder Toothache Grass,” “Elder Arrowleaf”) and their original Latin names, preceded by an address (like “We belong to you” or “We revere you”). He renders his stutter on the page by reading the list aloud and holding down the letter on the keyboard whenever he stutters for as long as he stutters. Beyond being a textual translation of this kind of disabled speech, it also recreates the embodied experience of crip time. The language of the poem becomes subject to the temporality created and experienced by Ellis’s body. While a stutter could be textually signaled by a letter repeated only a few times, the actual experience of the stutter, which is singularly durational, is better captured by a letter repeated much more not only in terms of sound, but also in the way it makes the reader a time traveler to Ellis’s crip time.
Interspersed throughout the thirty-five-page list are musical scores, which are text fragments from the “runaway slave” advertisements set to music. The scores have no time signature and no measures and are composed of only whole notes—notating music that is essentially devoid of the regimentation and artificial orderliness of time. Aside from the obvious relationship to crip time, music itself is integral to stutters. Stutters themselves are aural, a kind of music. And those that stutter do so when speaking, but not when singing. In one score in “Benediction, Movement 1,” Ellis disrupts the notation of the score with pure text in the middle of the page, reading: “with a speech Impediment, the Instant can flower.”
Without capitalizing the first word and eliminating the period, Ellis textually removes the same kind of regimentation he eliminates in the musical score. With the comma as the only punctuation mark, there’s no clear beginning and end to the line, only a pause of an uncertain length indicated by the caesura. By retaining the capitalization of “Impairment” and “Instant,” suggesting equal power and importance, Ellis reclaims the possibilities rather than the impossibilities inherent to disability, in this case especially as it relates to crip time. The embodied experience of the stutter, textually rendered and translated into sound that is also translated into another form of notation (the musical score), is both put onto the page and into the mouth of the reader.
Critically, Aster of Ceremonies doesn’t divorce Ellis from his disability. “When someone asks you your name, we come out of your mouth first,” he writes from the perspective of his stutter. The “we” makes his stutter both other and integrated as Ellis becomes pluralized, much like the Aster plant family, which “appears to be a single flower [but] is actually a composite of much smaller flowers.” And by placing the stutter within the lists of plants and alongside text fragments from his “Black dysfluent Ancestors,” it presents disability as part of nature, rejecting disability as something “wrong” but rather a natural point of difference.
Likewise, rather than artificially divorce his stutter from his Blackness, Ellis acknowledges that they are inextricably linked, not only historically in the advertisements and in his inheritance of his stutter from his Jamaican mother, but also starkly in the present as Ellis recounts being stopped by a police officer and wonders if his Black dysfluency will be interpreted as a threat. It situates both disability and Blackness as subject to normative structures that find their own agency and points of possibility by existing in anti-normative language and form.
As Ellis demonstrates, the experience of disability, especially in terms of impairment, begins in the body but immediately spreads outward and inward. It defines the self, which is equally defined by its other identities that become inextricable from one another. And that singular self exists in its body which exists in the world, bumping up against other selfbodies, systems, and structures. Disability is created not by the body alone, but by social encounters that make its natural divergences impossible to withstand.
The divergent selfbody is inherently porous. And when translated to language, it must be allowed to exist in its own natural monstrosity, resisting order-making, containment, clean boundaries, and even decipherability. It’s the reason the “I” and the “you” in I Feel Fine are not singular and static, but volatile vessels that are interchangeable. But unlike an author translating a poem from one language to another, the selfbody is both the translator and the poem being translated.
As a translator, Göransson describes his work as a mimic “lack[ing] authority.” He allows himself to be “infected by what [he] translates.” The divergent selfbody is already always infecting itself. It is both lacking authority and its own sole authority. The disabled body dictates its own needs and its own normal. The disabled self has no real authority over its body, and no real self outside of its body. It defers to its body’s wisdom, recognizing that they are conjoined as one selfbody. Transforming the selfbody to textbody mirrors these pluralities and contradictions.
Trans poet Ava Hofmann upholds this necessary plurality and porousness by mimicking her transition in the revision of the textbody in that i want. At the center of each poem is one line in a slightly larger font than the rest of the poem, signaling these lines as the origins of the poems. Each line relates to Hofmann’s transition as either expressions spoken or thought by her or expressions spoken or thought by an other: “i can feel my body changing,” “i started my hormone replacement therapy,” “what’s in your pants.” With the body as a sentence, its composite parts—words—slowly morph as a transitioning body’s composite parts change, becoming both deeply related to and radically distant from its original sentence.
Using the strikethrough, Hofmann crosses out each word and puts a revised word beside it, then does the same to the new word, crossing it out and putting beside it another revised word. Sometimes also adding words or phrases using a caret, she continues on and on, adding new language placed akimbo on the page then recanting it, until the outskirts of the poem are left unstruck, creating a new sentence. What begins as “what’s in your pants” becomes “i wish i was what slithers between my endocrinologist’s manufactured girlhood.”
By using a strikethrough instead of some method of total erasure like whiteout, Hofmann leaves visible not only the original language of the poem, but also each iteration of its revision. Without signaling an order of the revision process outside of the original line and end line, the reader becomes an actor of the process of transition, able to read through the seemingly infinite iterations of the line. Each stage of revision is present, visible, and unable to be disentangled, its trace murky and nonhierarchical. Despite having a clear starting and endpoint, that i want clearly rejects a binaried view of transitioning. Not only stuffed with contradictions, the poems feel like they could go on being revised forever, their stopping point plausibly arbitrary and temporary.
Though the language of these poems can be considered material, moving from one form to another as a transitioning body does, these poems are not just renderings of medical transition, but critically encompass the totality of gender transition, blurring interiority and its external expression. That the originating lines are thoughts or communicated language is significant. The mind becomes its own kind of body moving in and out of its own alignment. From original line “i can feel my body changing” to end line “you can’t understand this gap where a person couldn’t be revising itself into an eldritch form,” the word “body” transforms to “skin” to “hair” to “face” to “dick” to “brain” to “hole” to “gap.” The somatic expression of gender is situated on a continuous line that ends in not only interiority, but also a different kind of dysphoria that Hofmann relates to monstrosity.
Historically depicted as an expression of body divergence and otherization, monstrosity can broadly be considered anything anti-normative. Foucault describes monstrosity as combining “the impossible and the forbidden.” Like Hofmann, Diana Khoi Nguyen hovers somewhere between the two in Ghost Of. An elegy on the loss of her brother to suicide, she reanimates her late brother in language. Just before his death, he cut himself out of every photograph his family had. Nguyen uses these photographs in Ghost Of, seemingly editing the photos themselves to create an artificial double exposure that’s a visual echo of the original photograph, including the hole cut by her brother, appearing ghost-like. In some photographs, Nguyen fills in the emptiness where the body of her brother should be with text.
In the poem “Triptych,” Nguyen first shows a photograph of her family on a couch, her brother on the end cut out precisely around his body’s shape:
On the next page, she recreates the shape of her brother’s cut-out in text, his textbody otherwise floating on a blank page:
On the next page, she recreates the rectangular shape of the photograph with text, leaving the shape of her brother textless:
The poems themselves consider the materiality of absence. In the shape of her brother, she writes, “with e / yes close / d he waits / for his bo / dy to do / the sam / e . . . . he is e / mptying out ever / y hour, all hours / before his death h / e is dangerously cl / ose to living, his bo / dy is warm his mind / cool.” While assuming his form, his mindbody becomes textbody. Divergences of the mind expressed in mental illness are presented in the dyssynchronization between body and mind, which is refracted through the materiality of the language itself in this poem.
Its words become disconnected from themselves, their letters separated from one another (“with e / yes close / d”). This not only creates polyvocality through enjambment (“yes close”) as a kind of relationship between Nguyen and her brother, but also renders the disintegration of the self in the textbody. At the same time, Nguyen reanimates her brother’s form as text, an ambiguous combination of monster and ghost, making his figure both something real and something of her own imagination and memory.
In the rectangular shape of the photograph, which like a memory is an artificial harborer of the body’s form at a given place and time, she writes, “What may exist between appearance and disappearance, between sound and silence, as something that is nearly nothing . . . what has a form but no sound?” The blankness of her brother’s form haunts the texts, literally pushing itself into and around it. The poem renders the brain’s memory as text in the shape of a photograph, her brother’s body and presence made unignorable.
Within “Triptych,” mental illness as expressed in the individual becomes communal and familial as Nguyen’s grief becomes a continuation of her brother’s depression. “I stretch the y / ear, and longer, it keeps me alive it keeps me alive it keeps me alive . . .” she repeats over and over. Textual and formal dis-order and boundarilessness between self and other, wellness and sickness, life and death, is what allows Nguyen to more fully realize her experience with grief and illness, particularly as one that is not a contained to a moment in time but stretches and lives on.
Though poetry seems more opportune for this kind of formal rendering of body divergence, prose can be equally formally experimentative. Sarah Manguso’s memoir The Two Kinds of Decay structures its narrative in fragments. Akin to Ellis’s engagement with crip time, Manguso renders the loss of memory inherent to her experience with severe illness and hospitalization by rejecting an ordered and linear narrative and moving outside chronology. She leaves its holes and gives us its pieces as she can recall them, however she can recall them. Jenny Boully’s The Body: An Essay, comprised of footnotes to an invisible text, serves as a guide of what it means to be palpably and sturdily absent and how to render that on the page. With the primary text unknowable, the secondary text becomes centered while technically remaining secondary. The hierarchy of narratives becomes jumbled. Authorities are transferred.
Who is the authority of my body? In my disabled body, I am an authority figure without much traditional power. The disabled experience is one of a profound lack of control. The self must cater to the body. Like translation, disability is widely perceived in terms of limitations, impossibilities, loss, and lack. But it’s through these impossibilities that possibility and creation open. The self learns to radically accept, move with rather than against. The self learns to listen to the body’s wisdom. Hierarchies are destroyed. The self and body, artificially demarcated, become equal partners.
It’s through that same channel of wisdom that new possibilities in writing can emerge. The body can guide the process of its own translation if its author will let it. An expert at adaptation, it already knows how to exist on the page. Authorial authority can be relinquished to create an equal partnership with the textbody. Alive with its own systems, the animated textbody does more than just render the divergences of the body alone. It becomes experience itself—ongoing, messy, and indecipherable.
Olivia Muenz is the author of poetry collection I Feel Fine (Switchback Books, 2023), which won the 2022 Gatewood Prize, and chapbook Where Was I Again (Essay Press, 2022). She received a BA from New York University and an MFA in creative writing from Louisiana State University, where she received the Robert Penn Warren Thesis Award in prose. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, The Missouri Review, Poetry Daily, Michigan Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by the Tin House Summer Workshop, Zoeglossia, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and NYFA. She lives in the Hudson Valley.
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