"Stammering Elocution": Disfluency and Disability in Modern American Poetry

Abstract

This study shows how the experiences, metaphors, and insights of communication disability are an overlooked but crucial factor for understanding the work of four American poets, William Carlos Williams, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Sonia Sanchez, and Bernadette Mayer. The poets I study radically refashion poetic form as they manage audience expectations surrounding their own provocative, disfluent voices. In so doing, their work reconceptualizes how we might think of voice and identity in poetry, as they innovate poetic form in response to changing social contexts. In the Introduction, I develop the concept of disfluency in light of paradoxical theories of poetic voice, the contextual nature of fluency, and the recent shift in disability studies toward cognitive disability, the connections between disability and rhetoric, and a relational model of disability. In Chapter 1, I argue for the significant role that William Carlos Williams’s post-stroke embodiment and aphasia play in his late-career poetry and performances. Williams wrote collections such as The Desert Music (1954) and Journey to Love (1955) with the expectation of performing them, and when we listen closely to the available recordings of Williams’s reading his work, it becomes apparent that what Williams called “the variable foot” offers an accessible formatting that makes both composing and performing possible for his disfluent poetic voice. Listening closely to Williams’s audio archive also reveals many moments in which Williams explains his newfound difficulties with speech, even as he continues to tout the “American idiom” and its potential for postwar American poetics. In Chapter 2, I look to the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, especially her 1982 book Dictée, to argue for how Cha’s intermedial experiments with language upset hegemonic conceptions of fluency. Taking up Ed Park’s suggestion that Dictée is an “eloquent stutter” of a text, this second chapter makes a broader claim about the relationship between poiesis and varieties of “broken” language, as well as critics’ propensity for grasping at metaphors of disability to describe nonstandard language use. Paying careful attention to stuttering (both literal and figurative) in a text as suggestive as Dictée opens up other modes of eloquence outside of supposedly self-evident fluency. As Dictée, in addition to Cha’s earlier work such as Mouth to Mouth, stretches the limits of language’s shapes and sounds, Cha’s work offers an opportunity to think about disfluency beyond the disability studies context of the previous chapter. Chapter 3 looks at the long career of Sonia Sanchez, as I follow the repetitions and rhythms of stuttering across Sanchez’s vast poetic corpus, interviews, and recordings of her performances. I argue for how Sanchez’s reading voice—and indeed, her genuine chorus of voices and different vocal styles—incorporates disfluency, music, and different languages to uncanny rhetorical and poetic effect as she talks back to the social forces that would otherwise silence her. While the critical narratives about Sanchez’s poetic voice focus on her childhood and adolescent “overcoming” of stuttering, I survey poetry from across her sixty-year career to illustrate stuttering’s long-standing influence on her poetics. I conclude by locating Sanchez’s legacy in the work of Douglas Kearney, JJJJJerome Ellis, and Tracie Morris. In Chapter 4, I read the early- and late-career poetry of Bernadette Mayer in order to recognize the significance of disfluency, disability, and neurodivergence in Mayer’s late-career practice. This chapter speaks to how her post-stroke experience significantly altered her writing practice and daily life, but I also explore how Mayer in her early career challenged dominant assumptions about how an experimental poet was supposed to express her voice in poetry. I show not simply how disability disrupts Mayer’s famously intense methods of writing, but rather how she incorporates the lived experiences of disability and neurodivergence—these nonstandard ways of thinking, moving, and communicating—into a body of work that has always challenged the social perception of women’s expression. Lastly, in the Coda, I consider my experience meeting Mayer, my own experience as a stutterer, and—via the theories of Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre—the potential of disfluency to disrupt the rhythms of everyday life.