Place Your Fingers Here

Abstract

My creative thesis largely focuses on material art manifestations of poems — particularly poems that reflect variously on embodiment, body image and social performances; illness and disability; gender, sexuality and queerness; as well as Christian ritual speech acts and theologies of the body. These themes, though varied, often intersect in particular poems, for instance considering the relationships between medical disability and medieval Christian theologies of ecstatic pain. Most often, the body is at the center of the poem, and other thematics revolve around embodiment. In this critical essay, I primarily focus on the material art forms of poems in book arts and textile/fiber arts, arguing for the potentials of a sensory engagement with a poem that is not only oral and visual but also tactile, haptic. Following the primacy of chronic pain as a thematic in my material and more traditionally typed poems, I consider the social and political registers of disability and chronic pain. Following these theoretical considerations of touch and pain, I look to examples of art objects that place text in a material form to be read and/or held, touched, manipulated: Jen Bervin’s The Desert, which uses thread to produce a textured erasure over the smooth page, and Layli Long Soldier’s Obligations star quilt poem, made of visual poems on paper pieces, sewn with wire into the pattern of a star quilt.