Writing Poetry Through Disability and Physical Limitation
Poet Judith Kerman shares her thoughts (and a couple poems) on writing poetry through disability and physical limitation.
Poets often experience ourselves as outsiders, because we cultivate a different way of seeing from most other people and work to explore and express that perception in our poems. Whether or not we are concerned to be understood, we are usually concerned with “craft,” finding a disciplined way to express what we perceive and to avoid saying things we know have been said before. Although we write first of all to satisfy ourselves, we often imagine a reader who will appreciate what we have made and find it personally meaningful. Ideally, what we write reflects back to readers' possible ways of being human.
I have written poetry since childhood, seriously since high school. Through most of my adulthood, my body seemed normal to me, although decidedly unathletic. I didn’t begin to consider myself disabled until I developed chronic back pain in my late 50s, when I was working as an academic administrator and later as a professor. I suddenly could not walk out to the campus parking lot without needing to sit down on my way. Around that time, I also began to have trouble climbing stairs. Later, in my early 70s, a fall after a total knee replacement made my left knee much less functional. For a while, I was in a wheelchair.
Using a wheelchair, in particular, made me much more aware of the way that, in American culture, disabled people (or “differently-abled” people, as the euphemism has it) are also outsiders. Even normally-able and middle-aged people fail to meet American ideals of youth and athletic prowess. Much more so the disabled and “elderly”; we and our needs for inclusion are often invisible.
Public spaces ignore the disabled unless accommodation is required by law, and many people seem to feel that accommodation is an annoyance. Even the Americans with Disabilities Act, a landmark legislation, makes exceptions where accommodation can be seen as “too expensive,” for instance in older buildings. As a result, many experiences taken for granted by other people are not easily available to us. Something as simple as watching a movie (without subtitles), crossing a street alone (if we are blind), going to a poetry reading (upstairs in a venue without an elevator) or visiting a restaurant or shop with steps at the entrance will be foreclosed to us.
Disabled people are acutely aware that many able-bodied people are only not-yet-disabled; as people age, disability becomes more and more likely. And everyone who lives a long life eventually becomes (that terrible word) “old.”
Disabled poets are doubly outsiders. A disabled person who is also a poet might (but does not have to) try to write poems that explore and reflect the experience of disability, an unavoidable part of the full human experience. Writing from within this kind of subjectivity is not fashionable in American literary culture. It requires a willingness to be vulnerable that can be frightening to both poet and reader. Although much of my poetry over the years has been rooted in my body, I have found it necessary to incorporate my new fears and discomforts into my poems as my body has become less dependable. Writing helps me to think about these new experiences and acknowledge my feelings about them.
To write this way means facing my own vulnerability, with the awareness that readers will see that aspect of me if I publish my work. If I have succeeded in rendering my truth in a poem, I will be exposed. This is emotionally difficult, so I try to remember that my particular vulnerabilities are only one version of the vulnerability that everyone shares. I have to fight my feeling that other people have their acts together. I recognize that I felt this way when I was not “disabled,” but just an odd kid with odd perceptions who wrote poems. Back then when I wrote poems, I think I was trying to explore the textures and complexities of my life so I could understand them better. I’ve continued doing that into disability and old age. It’s just that the textures and complexities have changed.
I don’t know what it would be like to have been disabled all my life. For me, aging and becoming disabled are part of the same experience, which includes remembering when I was not disabled, and when I was young. Those words have a flavor of nostalgia, a recognition of loss. But having to deal with my disability, I think, has made me braver, more willing to write about emotions that I used to hide.
Check out Judith Kerman's A Hard Frost here:
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Poems excerpted from A Hard Frost by Judith Kerman. Copyright © 2026 Broadstone Books. Reprinted with permission from Broadstone Books. Frankfort, KY. All rights reserved.
Wheels
What did the Inca do before the Conquest?
Did they carry their disabled up to Machu Picchu
on their shoulders?
Bumping along the rocky trails
on travois poles? On litters?
I imagine they had people
who couldn’t walk,
who fell off those terraced walls onto stone.
There are ancient toys from India,
little horses with wheels.
But the genius of the Inca did not
extend that far.
The genius of my culture
does not always
extend that far.
I push my way along,
wheels bumping over paving stones
and over the edges
of badly-installed ramps.
I sit at the bottom of stairs,
growling.
Scars
I used to drive through countryside
where soft shoulders of hills hid
sharp-edged cuts.
When I flew over,
I saw rock and rubble,
stripped mountaintops,
driveways for machinery.
I pierced my ears when I was twenty.
Today the young have
nose rings, tongue rings,
navel rings, arms and backs covered
with tattoos: skulls, hearts,
roses, logos, crescent moons.
My body is a world
that has been mined.
I count my scars:
hysterectomy a vertical valley,
hands and forearms creased with cat scratches,
the ladder of stitches covering a steel pin,
knee replacement
and revision and revision.
A perfect body shines,
unmarred. Who has one?
