" . . . teeth—and not only because insurance markets put them in a largely separate budgetary category (eyes, too). They aren’t actually bones (and so don’t fit into the musculoskeletal system) and stubbornly resist being studied alongside the digestive system, since their makeup has little to do with the slime-lined absorption and secretion systems that unify our various tubes. Or take the placenta, which defies our ordinary definition of an organ—being, as Sophie Lewis argues polemically in Full Surrogacy Now, a “ghastly fluke” that neither has nor respects boundaries, eroding into vessels in ways that occasionally kill its host. To see human anatomy in its complexity, we must unsee the monadic, isolationist fiction of the well-wrought organ, much as Arnold Schoenberg challenged the normative supremacy of sound over silence and Ruth Asawa made air as integral to her sculptures as their wire forms.
One of my favorite squabbles in the history of poetry arose between Denise Levertov and Robert Creeley in 1990, when the former criticized the latter for suggesting that William Carlos Williams intended, in public readings, to deliver his line breaks as significant pauses. For Levertov, these halts were simply the unfortunate by-product of Williams’s neurological struggles following a series of strokes. Creeley countered that, whatever the cause, Williams’s halting patter improved his reading. The strokes had “necessitated or, more to the point, discovered” powers that had been present—but largely overlooked—in the poems.
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