“Helen Keller is to blame.
Can’t I pick my nose
without it being a miracle?”
The author of this collection is himself a DeafBlind poet. In multiple interviews, he has broken with tradition and spoken quite negatively about the climactic scene in the play and film The Miracle Worker in which Annie Sullivan finally is successful in teaching young Helen Keller the word for water. The speaker’s assertion here comes in response to the awe expressed by a reporter at watching a DeafBlind man cook a meal on the stove without burning himself. The speaker is a direct conduit expressing the frustration of the poet that the story of Helen Keller as told on film has deeply informed the public view toward the capabilities of those living with deafness and blindness. The accusation is misleading, however. It is not really Keller that the speaker is blaming for this misapprehension. It is the misleading myth created by Sullivan’s approach and the influence of the popular movie to sustain the propaganda with each new generation of viewers.
“I, sobbing in the rolling mist,
Started for peopled days.”
This poem is an example of “erasure poetry” in which a poet takes an existing work of verse and removes certain words to create new meaning. In this example, the poem being reinterpreted is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Palingenesis” and the erasure is significant. Longfellow’s version is more than sixty lines long and comprised of eleven stanzas. Clark’s version is just eleven lines, essentially meaning that each of Longfellow’s stanzas has been cut down to a single line each. This quote does not contain a single word that cannot be found in the original. To demonstrate how this type of poem works, there are ten words between the “I” and the “sobbing” in the original. Fifteen words separate “in” and “rolling” and six words are erased between “rolling” and “mist.” The purpose of this erasure poem is to illustrate how poetry is presented for the DeafBlind community in a way reflecting the language itself. Longfellow’s speaker uses figurative language to convey the sense of lying on the beach and watching the waves and listening to the sounds of water filling unseen caverns below the surface. In a prefatory note to the book’s section which includes other erasure poems, the author asserts his intent to address issues of ableism in poetry by giving them a new meaning which is more easily conveyed to members of his shared community. The result goes beyond that community, however, as this example uses just ten words to say the exact the same thing it takes Longworth around fifty words to say.
“Papa Bear asked when arrive here you
She said my name yellowcurls
Papa Bear asked need help you”
This poem is a modern-day update of the classic fairy tale. In this version, Goldilocks is from Long Island and eats a bag of Doritos when she breaks into the bears’ home. The significance of this quote, however, is the language. The speaker is telling the story in the language of his DeafBlind community. “Goldilocks” is not a word that translates easily into any language and thus “yellowcurls” is more direct, to the point, and easily understood. When Papa Bear speaks to her, it is not in the word order that is familiar to standard English conversation. Stripped down to the basics, it sounds like what someone from another country who is just learning English would say. This is the point of the whole book. Poetry is an especially difficult form of writing to translate from one language into any other. This process becomes even more challenging when sensory imagery requiring familiarity with things unseen or unheard is introduced. Regardless of the specifics of the communication medium—whether sign language or Braille or whatever—communication is the key term. As written on the page, this may seem awkward, but it is completely natural sentence construction within the author’s community.
