what does poetry do for crip culture?
And what does crip culture do for poetry? Through close readings of poems by Jim Ferris and Philip Dowd, new lands emerge, and Neil Marcus’s Disabled Country comes into view. The essay frames this discussion through a poetry banquet, held as part of a disability culture course at the Institute for Medical Humanities, UTMB, Galveston, Texas. Keywords: poetry, Jim Ferris, Philip Dowd, Neil Marcus, T. S. Eliot, Roland Barthes, Greek myth, crip culture, disability culture, pedagogy, close textual analysis, embodied reading Introduction Since I was a little girl, I have been fascinated with Greek mythology, sung in verse. That world explained my world to me. In these stories, there were always so many people I could feel myself into, try out different characters at a time. Of course, I would not just be limping Eurydice, her foot bitten by a snake, now on wobbly feet trying to escape the world of the shades, only to be betrayed by her lover’s glance— I would be searching Orpheus, too, using
