In this vein, the editors apprehended the necessity for collective organization in disability poetics and scholarship, and Beauty is a Verb became a watershed moment of its own kind as it amassed dozens of voices over four hundred pages of crip poetics. More to the point of product, the anthology aimed to “transform disability poetry from marginalia into part of the American text.” This call for spatial inclusion was also temporal: “The time is right for it” when 1992 saw the Americans with Disabilities Act “ a watershed moment for disability poetry” which culminated in Northen’s preface with magazines such as Breath & Shadow and Disability Studies Quarterly. This anthology, too, was a product in the most literal sense: a collectively edited work by Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black, and Michael Northen designed to put poets from the 1920s to the present in conversation through an Americanist context.
As an anthology of poetry and poetics, with various, short prefaces historicizing disability poetics in a United States context, the book marked an early start for disability poetics as a broader field of study, one that connected poetry with scholarship through sites of crip embodiment. Rarely, though, did the American canon center poetry and poetics that situated the everyday, lived, complex experience of crip times and places. When Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability emerged from Cinco Puntos Press in 2011, disability studies was in its earlier stages of organizing and thinking through the ways language congealed around and on bodies to construct difference as disability - abject, without agency, othered or made superhuman, exemplary, extraordinary. A politics of austerity, I conclude, will always generate the compulsion to fortify borders and to separate a narrowly defined ‘us,’ in need of protection, from ‘them.’ Crip Times, and crip times, however, can and will only end with an aspiration to the outward-looking vision proffered by the indignant ones - Robert McRuer, Crip Times
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