Deafing the Sonnet:
John Donne as Adaptive Device
John Donne as Adaptive Device
Creative writing, as both a field and an industry, is steeped in ableism and audism. From the mythology of Allen Ginsberg as the father of ASL poetry to Frank Bidart’s The Book of the Body, poetry privileges “the normate” (Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s term for the nondisabled) in a variety of ways, forever anticipating a nondisabled readership and allowing disabled participation only as ableist metaphor or within the framework of conceptual experimentation. This talk will address the potential of the sonnet as an access point for disabled—specifically Deaf—poets writing in English. Amidst the momentum of #NothingAboutUsWithoutUs, The Disabled & Deaf Uprising, and the #criplit movement—& interrogations of whether or not disability poetics is truly for and by disabled poets—mastery of the sonnet (reading them, writing them) remains a steadfast & sometimes compulsory membership admission to participation in American poetics.
For the last year & a half, I’ve been working with Donne’s La Corona, studying its merits as an adaptive device for Deaf poets writing in English. By “working with” I mean I’ve been using him as an auditory prosthetic & inhabiting his rhymes. Donne as assistive device is newer territory for me; I’m more comfortable writing queer responses into his framework or finding respite in the company of another poet frustrated by existence. In Boy Corona, I’ve pirated & preserved all of Donne’s end-rhymes for the entirety of the crown; if, as a Deaf poet, I use Donne’s rhyme, I don’t have to worry about not knowing anymore how these words actually sound. Instead, I can queer my relationship with the textual English & focus on what it does to the body, how it transforms. Is this cripping the sonnet? Deafing the sonnet? I’m not interested so much anymore in how things sound, but how sound makes things feel: the phenomenology of rhyme, the felt sense of it. What it means to wrap your mouth around a vowel that repeats. A new understanding of internal rhyme—not the hidden repetition of assonance, but the linked physical movements such recurrence requires. Given my sequence also concerns itself with the push-pull of a kind of physical conversion, the exercise is, like my native language, multimodal & expansively nonlinear. Donne as adaptive device. Donne as accommodation. The sonnet as a bridge between falsely divided groups of American poets.
For the last year & a half, I’ve been working with Donne’s La Corona, studying its merits as an adaptive device for Deaf poets writing in English. By “working with” I mean I’ve been using him as an auditory prosthetic & inhabiting his rhymes. Donne as assistive device is newer territory for me; I’m more comfortable writing queer responses into his framework or finding respite in the company of another poet frustrated by existence. In Boy Corona, I’ve pirated & preserved all of Donne’s end-rhymes for the entirety of the crown; if, as a Deaf poet, I use Donne’s rhyme, I don’t have to worry about not knowing anymore how these words actually sound. Instead, I can queer my relationship with the textual English & focus on what it does to the body, how it transforms. Is this cripping the sonnet? Deafing the sonnet? I’m not interested so much anymore in how things sound, but how sound makes things feel: the phenomenology of rhyme, the felt sense of it. What it means to wrap your mouth around a vowel that repeats. A new understanding of internal rhyme—not the hidden repetition of assonance, but the linked physical movements such recurrence requires. Given my sequence also concerns itself with the push-pull of a kind of physical conversion, the exercise is, like my native language, multimodal & expansively nonlinear. Donne as adaptive device. Donne as accommodation. The sonnet as a bridge between falsely divided groups of American poets.
Deaf, genderqueer poet Meg Day is author of Last Psalm at Sea Level, winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, and co-editor of Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master. Day’s work can be found in, or forthcoming from, Best American Poetry 2020, The New York Times & elsewhere.