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An Interview with Greg
Fraser
by Hani Sarji and Michael Hepner
Strange Pietà
By
Gregory Fraser
$22.95,
Hardcover
Gregory Fraser earned a Master of
Fine Arts in poetry at
Dr.
Fraser has taught literature, critical interpretation, and creative writing at
various institutions, including
Fraser’s
poetic achievements include being a two-time finalist for the Walt Whitman
Award from the
In Strange Pietà, Fraser largely focuses on
the life of his brother Jonathan, who was born with spina
bifida, a condition that rendered him disabled both mentally and physically. Strange Pietà begins with “Ars Poetica,”
and ends with “Strange Pietà,” both telling
recollections of family and personal life with and without Jonathan. The collections also provides the reader with poems dealing with
personal journeys through adolescence and adulthood.
For the
theorist, Strange Pietà enriches the discourse in disability theory. For the general
reader, Fraser provides a heartfelt look into his brother’s life—a life that
has always been deeply intertwined with his own. Emotion and wit never cease to
flow from Strange Pietà’s pages. That emotional
force is perhaps the most powerful remnant that stays with the reader.
The
following is an interview with Dr. Gregory Fraser that discusses poetry and
teaching, as well as the author’s views on disability theory and the subject of
disabled bodies.
Sarji
& Hepner How do you feel about being a poet tied to institutions of higher
learning? Does teaching help your poetry or does it take away time that could
be devoted to your writing?
Fraser Often, when I’m stuck inside a
poem, I ask myself: “How would I advise a student in this situation?” Sometimes,
I seem to gain “poetic confidence” when talking to students. The best students
are passionately open to ideas and new questions, and I need to relearn that
openness and questioning presence every time I sit down to write. So my
students are constantly teaching me, and I am internalizing their ideas as they
hopefully are mine. Ideally, there’s a generative exchange. But your question
about time is a valid one. Good teaching requires as much commitment, as much
creativity and drive, as good writing. In both practices, one has to court the
unexpected. Poetry and pedagogy can be mutually informing, but the demands of
both can be draining at times. I guess that’s why many of us take summers off.
To reflect, breathe, refuel. Strangely enough, I think the academy has been one
place in our culture that still embraces poets. I actually like university
life, though many poets find the university setting confining. I like a
community of generally like-minded people. And I cherish the eternal energy of
students.
S & H
Which poets have
inspired your notion of poetry? Which poets do you aspire to be like?
Fraser These are good but difficult
questions to answer because poets go through many phases of developing
allegiances. I started out with a passion for the shimmering surface veneers of
Mark Strand, and I struggled and largely failed to emulate his style. Later, I
sought out poets of overt force: James Dickey, Ted Hughes, Richard
Hugo. The appeals of greater subtlety came as I began to study Elizabeth
Bishop. Then I met and studied with Adam Zagajewski,
who introduced my to a host of Eastern European poets.
Right now, I’m reading Sandor Csoori
and longing to produce a poem informed by his vision, his voice. But the point,
in the end, is that all these other voices mix in one’s head, enter one’s
blood. And of course, every poet has his or her own particular outlooks and
modes of expression, which can’t be fully traced or located. Other poets help
us grow into poets. We learn by reading, internalizing, chanting what has come
before us. But there come times when we have to shed the skins of those we’ve
wrapped ourselves inside.
S & H How did you find your poetic
voice?
Fraser I’m not really sure, because of
course poetry is an art of dictation, a process of using language and being
used by it. It is a practice that requires one simultaneously to “dictate”
language and to “take dictation” from it. One works in a threshold space, both
willing poetry into being and being willing to let poetry become itself, on its
own terms. This is the oldest story of poetry, its myth of origins, I suppose.
We’ve always known the poem to be both inside and outside of the poet, and vice
versa.
S & H
What is the role
of self-examination in your poetry?
Fraser I think good poetry performs self-examination—not
so much about a particular issue like disability, but as a mode of thinking.
Poetry is a way of being in the world that embraces self-examination. I think
it pays attention to will, to power. The poet can’t be tyrannical with respect
to language. He or she can’t use it as an instrument to serve some
pre-determined end. Poetry is much more open and embracing of discovery. I
think an “outsider” discourse like disability theory can do that, too.
S & H
Your poetry is informed by breakups
and fractures—especially of the body and of cultural ideas and ideals about the
body. Yet despite these disunities, the poems are still structured. Can you
elaborate on this competition?
Fraser If we as a culture start to think
about bodies poetically, I wonder what that might offer us. It’s an interesting
question. There is a desire to use the space of the poem as a place where rules
are put into interesting tension with each other. I’m interested in using the
container of the page and resisting it at the same time. Discourse and cultural
rules can be thought of in similar terms. You want poems to be surprising, you
want to go into them with no idea what’s going to happen, and I guess you have
to let them be broken and unshapely somehow, sometimes. Thinking about the poem
as a space, and thinking about culture as a space, we recognize that there are
always competing needs. Maybe that “competition” doesn’t have to be destructive
or relentlessly subordinating. I think in poetry no voice is given guaranteed
meaning. The words in a poem support one another, not in a neat New Critical
unity, where everything is resolved, but where everything is echoing off of
everything else—reinforcing multiplicity and openness. It’s a different way of
thinking about unity. It’s a unity that allows disunity to happen, and vice
versa, depending on the engagement with the reader in a particular cultural
context. The poem then is never static, but always open
to re-seeing, revision by reader and writer alike. If culture could be more poetic,
in that way, I think it would be less destructive. A poem is not trying to kill
off parts of itself, or say that this part over here
is insignificant. A good poem knows that it relies on everything. And it knows
that it isn’t one thing. It embraces that. It is willing to discover what it
can be at all times. That’s my sense of poetry. Maybe it is my hope, as a
disability theorist, for culture and bodies as well.
S & H
You have asked
and we ask you: How does poetry’s liminal nature
connect to disability?
Fraser I guess this is one of the primary
questions of my book. First, I see the disabled body as a site of
contest—certainly social and political struggle, but also linguistic contest—in
the same way that every sign inscribes ideological debate and philosophical
wrangling on the limin, the intersection of
differences. The disabled body, in my work at least, “enables” language,
meaning, debate. It actually permits meaning to occur—all meaning, but
especially poetic meaning, which is never fully present or decidable. In the
same way, the “normal” body is never fully present or decidable. Neither is the
“abnormal” one. Each is a threshold leading to the other, endlessly. On wonders
if there might someday be a way cross a threshold and enter a space where
bodily differences would not sites of prescription, moral law, charity,
loathing, violence, neglect. I think poetry, frankly, has been outcast by the
technologies of late capitalism in much the same way that disabled bodies have.
Neither fit acceptable norms, neither obey the rules; both disrupt the status
quo, both shake us out of our complacencies. Poems and disabled bodies: they’re
siblings if you ask me.
S & H
What are your
assumptions about embodiment? How are embodiment and disability connected with
changing power relations? In addition, is the naming,
or defining of “disability,” just a construction of language, a play between
signifier and signified?
Fraser I think my work in disability
poetics proceeds under various, perhaps self-contradicting, assumptions about
meaning and embodiment. I wrote my first “disability poem,” entitled “Ars Poetica,” at about the same
time that I was starting to read Barthes and Derrida
and especially Foucault. I had absorbed from these thinkers that meaning is not
only linguistically produced through the play of arbitrarily determined
conceptual differences, but also that meaning is always traced through with
power relations, anxieties and desires over questions of empowerment. So part
of my early poetry had to do with speaking truth to and about power
(understanding “truth,” of course, not as something absolute and fixed and
final). My work set out to speak for the disabled person, who, as in the case
of my brother Jonathan, couldn’t speak poetically for himself. But this work
lead me to realize that meaning also arises out of embodied experiences that
cannot be understood solely as constructed in a language of hierarchical binary
oppositions. In other words, any understanding and representation of the
disabled body must account for the ways in which our experiences of reality,
our sense of what is “real,” is simultaneously and undecidably
shaped by the relational, hierarchical, and contingent natures of language. By
contingent, here, I mean both that language can never supply a mythic full
presence, the final essence or Being, but also that language and meaning may
have “no say” in some instances—that the body speaks for itself, and that
language is contingent upon the disabled body, that it depends on this, its
Other, to exist and mean. The disabled body, especially the disabled body in
pain (the way my brother’s body has so often been) may be a kind of
S & H
Do you think that
your brother’s body can articulate itself, somehow become self-evident inside its
rejection and inside its pain? Can it reach a “full” inside status—an essence
outside of language? Or is his body always already mediated by language?
Fraser I’m not sure, but I want to
suggest that language both can and can’t do justice to his body, or my
relationship to it. The notion of anything having an a priori essence or
significance (any human body, for example, no matter what its physical
characteristics) is to me bankrupt for any serious poetic or critical practice.
But does my brother’s body at some points exist “outside” of language? No. But
maybe also yes. I’m not sure. If I were, I fear that I’d stop writing.
S & H Is the continuum of bodily
existence different and varied from culture to culture, thus being culturally constructed?
Or is the continuum biologically determined? Does the essence of disability
precede culture, our lived existence? Does the disabled person determine what
he or she is to be? Or does “normal” culture determine what bodies mean? Who defines who or what is beautiful, and
conversely, ugly or disabled?
Fraser First off, I think it’s important
to pay attention to the ways in which the dominant “normal” culture expects
disability discourse to step in and teach the so-called “abled”
how to see, how to understand disability. Certainly, on some level disability
writers and theorists need to raise awareness about the conceptual apparatuses
that govern our real-world relations to people with anomalous bodies, cognitive
differences, and so on. For instance, it seems useful to reiterate the
distinction between “impairment” (which disability discourse locates in the
body) and “disability,” which resides in culture, in the minds of the
non-disabled and in the public and psycho-social spaces that “disable” people
with bodily difference that don’t fit these spaces. My brother’s spina bifida is his bodily fact, his paralysis from the
waist down is his bodily fact, his need of a
wheelchair is a fact of his lived existence. But these are not disabilities.
“His” disabilities are socially manufactured when a building entrance lacks a
ramp. The absence of the ramp is “his” disability. He doesn’t carry “his”
disability—we do, as a culture that has neglected to address his needs (which
are also our needs in many profound ways, not the least of which is the fact
that many of the “able-bodieds” will one day require
wheelchairs and become disabled by absent ramps). A wheelchair-bound person
like my brother Jonathan is “disabled” by the culture because the impairments
inherent in his spina bifida prevent him from walking
up steps. His impairments are culturally converted into disabilities. But with
the addition of the ramp comes the erasure of the disability. That being said,
I think it’s important as critical thinkers to demand that non-disabled culture
do some self scrutiny. We need to realize that terms like “abled/disabled”
and “normal/abnormal” are both arbitrary and motivated simultaneously. We need
to discover for ourselves some of the pitfalls of a binary abled/disabled
mentality. I don’t think I answered your question.
S & H
How is the body
constructed in society? How is it written into place or acted on?
Fraser In our culture, you the individual
are responsible for your body. That’s why there are all those products out
there to help you care for your body. And if your body doesn’t look right, then
it’s your fault. You carry this guilt of the body all the time, and when you go
to the hospital, that guilt is intensified. The rhetorics
of medical power exacerbate that guilt. The hospital can be a kind of panopticon. There’s an implicit judgment and punishment in
the hospital: your body is not living up to what it’s supposed to be. And
you’re not living up to the responsibility of tending to your body. So when you
walk into the hospital door, you’re carrying this blame already, which is
reinforced sometimes by the discourse inside the institution. You’re made
doubly small, doubly diminished. If we had a different attitude about the body,
this often unconscious dynamic of guilt and blame might not present itself so
powerfully. I’m not sure, but maybe it wouldn’t be so individualizing, and the
onus of care might be more culturally collective. Starting in the seventeenth
century, when metaphors for the body shifted into something more mechanistic,
we really did begin to think of the body as a machine that we’re responsible
for keeping in good running order, something that has to be fixed when it
breaks. It’s all very particularized. Today, it’s
still the able-bodied people making room for the occasional individual disabled
person. And this really enforces a sense of difference and separation.
S & H How can thinkers critique
disability theory without condemning the entire discourse? Does disability
discourse need to be critiqued in order for political change to happen? Is
political advocacy for the disabled to be connected to aesthetics? How should
we act in the presence of disability?
fRASER Disability discourse needs to be
able to critique itself, yes. This is one of the things
I like about the theorist Lennard Davis. He’s willing
to talk about disability discourse and critique the discourse from within. He’s
not afraid to say that disabled peoples need to maintain solidarity, because
we’re an oppressed, outsider group, and unless we hold onto this unity, then
we’re going to be silenced again. But I think he also realizes that any
discourse has to examine its own centers for any real change to take place.
______________________________
Hani Sarji graduated from