Extract from the Poetic Labor Project

Abstract

This chapter is a lyric essay recounting the diverse interconnected forms of work DiPietra undertook at the time of writing, with a particular focus on embodiment. DiPietra discusses work as a community practice artist, poet, performer, and disability rights advocate. She describes the disciplined and rigorous health regime she uses to manage her disability, which she names “body-work,” including exercises to move and to rest her joints throughout her body so that they don’t contract and become locked. She explores the emotional labor of constantly managing chronic pain so she can focus on “work-work”. This labour of self-maintenance is carried out alongside DiPietra’s advocacy in supporting people with disabilities, which includes facilitating creative writing for empowerment classes. The essay explores the “labor it takes for things to lapse in time,” and it comes with a small, poetic twist, insofar as it speaks of a time nearly ten years prior to this publication.

Since this piece was written in 2010, I have left San Francisco and moved back to Florida due to health issues and increasing pain. Public transit as well as disability services and community are fairly non-existent in Florida, so I am now a sex worker and body worker, which is labor I can do from home.