Toward a Poetics of Stuckness • by Andrew McEwan 1

Hamilton Arts & Letters   PLAY AUDIO VERSION: voice of Ally Fleming   One of the opening poems in my 2017 poetry collection, If Pressed, titled “Depression Inventory”, takes as a poetic form the “Beck’s Depression Inventory”, a common diagnostic survey for assessing psychiatric risk. I wrote the poem in 2016 by answering the survey questions with the language of anxious speculation in the media about the ongoing economic situation in the aftermath of the 2008 recession. I recognized the medical model of mental illness and disability in these economic reports’ constant need to diagnose disorder, and an overlap in the language of illness and depression. Despite a socio-political imperative to separate and individualize spheres of life under neoliberalism, the language of madness, illness, medicalization, abnormality, disability, anxiety, depression, and dependency may be found ubiquitous in our forms of thinking and speaking about a multiplicity of personal and collective states-of-affairs.  [  >>>>>  FORWARD ]   + [Distillate © HA&L + Andrew McEwan {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]