Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: Ted Snyder’s series of erasures and found poems is a stunning project, subversive, wily, and smart. He both reveals and rewrites the ableism of his chosen source texts (including a Q and A with a speech pathologist, research papers, and evaluations and diagnoses of children), and he helps us see a different voice inside of the “official” documents. As one of our early readers noted, these new texts “speak to the violence of ‘normality’ on the disabled body,” and she admired how the fragmentations “invite readers to engage in different methods of reading.” This destabilizing of the idea that there’s a correct way to read echoes the aims of the series itself.
We’re glad to present these poems as a special online feature.
Three Perspectives on the Hyperactive Child
Being Seen by the Speech Pathologist
Artist Statement:
These found poems focus upon special education and are part of a larger series on disability.
When children are assigned to special education, adults limit their agency and voice, placing responsibility for poor academic performance upon something being innately wrong with them, rather than upon the inflexibility of our educational system. Here, I use erasure on articles about special education to uncover the experience of being in special education and to reveal the deficit thinking that can pervade our schools.
As a child, I spent time in special education (I was seen by the speech pathologist) and experienced systemic humiliation for not being like the other students. Now, many years later, I am a high school teacher. This puts me in an uncomfortable space that I explore to create these found poems, as I now work for the system that tried to break me.
Ted Snyder (he/they) is a writer, a scientist, and a teacher. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Georgia Review, Confrontation, The Mythic Circle, The Banyan Review, and elsewhere. He studied creative writing at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and currently teaches high school in Milwaukee.
