“Looking behind the canvas: repairing notions of (dis)ability through the tool of (in)verse ekphrasis”

Report by Sarah Noon

Dr Kane Holborn is a poet-painter who gained his PhD at Winchester University. As someone with Cerebral Palsy, his work explores art and disability.  His assistant, Louise Tett, accompanies him this evening and he is talking to us about what he describes as inverse ekphrasis -ekphrasis being the use of the spoken word to describe art in great detail.

Kane begins by thanking the people who have enabled his talk to happen – Gary, Louise, Antosh and others.  He then goes onto explain that his exploration of ekphrasis is more contemporary than James A W Hefferman’s work, which Kane describes as “largely redundant” in relation to his own writing.

Kane explains that he is “…to describe a contemporary viewpoint [which] cuts to the core of what it means to be a disabled poet,” and goes on to say that living with a disability “carries a form of being othered.”  He uses his work as a “tool in my craft of poetry” to discover and highlight the feelings and behaviours surrounding disability. He explains that he writes the “in” part of the word “inverse” in brackets – (in)verse – “as a way of encouraging my readers to see me holistically.”  What he means by this is that he writes his poems as paintings.  He uses his work as a way of “putting my lived experience of what it’s like being disabled, on the page.”

There is a whole movement dedicated to disability poetics. However, Kane explains that he has a “distaste” for much of the “depressive verse” that is often created within this genre. He clarifies that as a reader, he does not want to be left “feeling depressed.” With this in mind, Kane decided to create work that turns this on its head and explores his own personal feelings and experiences more specifically.

He then reads us one of his poems entitled “Wheelchair Flâneur:”

He then goes on to ask, “What is a parallax?” He compares it to looking through a kaleidoscope, which “offered us a more coloured viewpoint of things.”  He also compares it to looking through the window of an aeroplane or wearing sunglasses – or looking through a lens of a camera. “…the lens of your camera only photographs the perspective field you have chosen to capture in the moment.  Kane uses this parallax as a way of explaining the world through his lens.  “My poetry presents another lens through which the reader can see me as I truly am.”

Kane describes the effects of his condition, including memory loss, unwanted movement and speech impediment. He talks about the preconceptions that people have of him and how he challenges these within his poetry – using parallax and ekphrasis as powerful tools.  “It is a way of redirecting my reader’s attention to reflect on my real-life capabilities.” He also highlights the impact of creating poetry, but physically being unable to read it, and how Wheelchair Flaneur is describing that “ultimately physical differences are meaningless when it comes to love.”

Kane views himself as a “poet-painter.” His use of ekphrasis, he says, blurs the lines between poet and painter. He also is “playing with” the idea of sonder “The idea that every passer-by is living a life as vivid and as complex as your own.” This notion, he explains, creates “elaborate passageways” to other people’s lives. Kane has also collaborated with his brother, Tayler Holborn, an artist. He shows us one of his images and reads us the poem he wrote alongside it, entitled Self Portrait of Someone Else’s Self Portrait.

In terms of his writing, Kane’s talk has delved into great detail about how he approaches his writing – his notion of (in)verse ekphrasis and the idea of having the power to steer the reader towards a particular viewpoint. His poems are moving and thought-provoking. They seem simple on first reading, but there are many layers to be unpeeled.

As a final quotation from Kane, he summarises that (in)verse ekphrasis “ is the tool which has allowed me to adapt ekphrasis in a way which transfers my true experience of disability in a more striking way, and, like a photographic negative, develops the negative to a positive in the truest sense.”

Dr Kane Holborn’s poetry appears in The Lost Art of Staring into Fires (2022) and is due for publication in Dancing About Architecture and Other Ekphrastic Manoeuvres (2024); he runs his own poetry collective, Quills Anonymous, which meets monthly on Zoom. He has hosted poetry workshops at the University of Winchester, as well as at the Disability Expo as part of London Excel (2023).