Noisy Nuisance: Chris Ireland's Aphasic Poetry

Noisy Nuisance:Chris Ireland's Aphasic Poetry Katharina Fürholzer (bio) feeding your earstasting your eyestreating your spirittouching your soul Ireland and Pound 1. introductory remarks: the voices of language loss 1.1 Approaching aphasic poetry When suffering from the language impairment of aphasia (Greek: ἀφἀσίἀ = speechlessness), everyday sounds can turn into an almost intolerable noise, a stressful nuisance, a physical as well as psychological ailment creating a communicative border between aphasic patients and their environment. At the same time, aphasic language comes with its very own sounds: for instance, one may think of the stutter provoked by the anomic search for words or the use of phonetically distorted terms (so-called phonemic paraphasias), all of which can cause severe confusion and misunderstandings. In her poetry, UK-based writer Chris Ireland, who has been living with aphasia since 1988 (Ireland and Black 356), aesthetically addresses [End Page 197] the various sounds of both the aphasic and non-aphasic world and the at times exclusive "barriars" (sic, Ireland and Pound 155–56) that may accompany them. By juxtaposing or rather merging rhetorical style with pathological symptoms, Ireland's poems eventually create an aesthetic equality that forms a counterpoint to the common (communicative) hierarchies between aphasic patients and their surroundings. Interested in literary approaches to language loss, the paper at hand, which is anchored in the medical humanities while also touching on disability studies as two research fields particularly sensitive to impairment-related aspects of language, attempts to gain a better understanding of aphasic poetry. Using the example of selected works by Ireland, I will, to this end, analyze "aphasic" depictions of the sounds caused by both society and aphasia and will discuss their pathological, poetical, and sociocultural implications. Building upon that, I will conclude with a reflection on the question of genre in the context of poetic approaches to language impairment and will address the potentials and perils when approaching poetic forms of language impairment from the perspective of literary (sound) studies. Aphasiological explanations … So, what exactly is aphasia? In clinical literature, this specific form of language impairment is defined as a disorder caused by a brain lesion after completed speech acquisition (adults who had a stroke or an accident), which can affect patients' communicative and social functioning. Depending on form and gravity, partial or total recovery may be possible, either spontaneously or with therapeutic help. Aphasias can manifest in various ways, which are commonly divided into non-fluent and fluent forms. Non-fluent forms such as Broca's aphasia can be characterized, among others, by a heavily shortened style of speech, syntactically strongly reduced one- to two-word sentences, a lack of inflections and functional words (prepositions, declensions, or conjugations, which is called agrammatism or telegraphic style), an impaired speech that takes strong effect, and in times severe difficulties in finding words (anomia). Nevertheless, language comprehension usually remains relatively intact, and persons affected have a marked awareness of their disorder. By contrast, fluent forms of aphasia such as Wernicke's can manifest in long, entangled, duplicated sentences, defective forms of inflection (paragrammatism), the use of phonetic or semantic neologisms and/or phonetically distorted or semantically incorrect words (paraphasias), and an excessive flow of speech (logorrhea). In difference to cases of non-fluent [End Page 198] aphasia, the language comprehension of persons experiencing fluent forms is oftentimes heavily impaired, which in very severe cases may even lead to word deafness (auditory verbal agnosia). Despite their at times heavy impairments, people suffering from fluent aphasia are often hardly aware of their disorder.1 Aphasias can be accompanied by psychosocial impairments such as social isolation, reduced self-esteem, or depression (Hersh). This is not least due to the fact that this impairment is often mistaken for an intellectual debility—a widespread misconception within society that has been disproved by modern aphasiology from its earliest beginnings (Broca 356; Wernicke 35; for more recent literature on this matter see, for example, Hallowell 45–48). 1.3. … and aphasic expressions While aphasiologists are experts on the biological dimensions of aphasia and can thus help us to better understand its various syndromes and symptoms,2 it is the patients who are experts on the...

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