This poem is in five numbered parts.
'How does poetry deal with disability? At the level of theme and voice, Australian poetry – including the theorising and criticism of it – has rarely given overt priority to disabled experience. This essay seeks to contribute to a correction of this neglect by adapting the philosophical approach of Emmanuel Levinas, who wrote of the phenomenological preeminence of the Other. It considers how disability – defined expansively as a bodily otherness which also implicates the self – might become apprehended not only within thematic content, but through the disruptions of poetic form.' (Publication abstract)
'How does poetry deal with disability? At the level of theme and voice, Australian poetry – including the theorising and criticism of it – has rarely given overt priority to disabled experience. This essay seeks to contribute to a correction of this neglect by adapting the philosophical approach of Emmanuel Levinas, who wrote of the phenomenological preeminence of the Other. It considers how disability – defined expansively as a bodily otherness which also implicates the self – might become apprehended not only within thematic content, but through the disruptions of poetic form.' (Publication abstract)