Jessica Lewis Luck is Professor of English at California State University San Bernardino and coordinator of the department’s MA program. She has published essays on Larry Eigner, Harryette Mullen, Sylvia Plath, and disability poetry and poetics. She is currently completing a book that explores the “poetics of cognition” in contemporary experimental poetry.
Authors | Jessica Lewis Luck
Articles on Amodern by Jessica Lewis Luck
PROPRIO-SPECTION
The Poetics of Medical Imaging
With the rise of medical imaging technologies in the latter part of the twentieth century, Charles Olson’s famous exhortation that poetry should explore the body’s depths and interiors has become literalized and depersonalized in the spectacle of the MRI, ultrasound, and CT scan. This essay explores how contemporary poets with disabilities, including Hillary Gravendyk, Alex Lemon, Laurie Clements Lambeth, Danielle Pafunda, David Wolach, and Joyce Cutler-Shaw, are investigating this transformative relationship to the interior of the body. They work to probe and expose the ways that medical imaging shapes the body and its treatment, while at the same time appropriating and reinterpreting the spectacle of the body’s interior through their own visual aesthetics and activism.