Foisy, C., (2025) “Sounding Mad Poetics as Resistant-Methods and Research-Creation ”, Disability Studies Quarterly 44(5). doi: https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.6913

There are no methods

to Madness. Only rituals,

ways to live and die

with what resists being held.

It's how you get through

the days you can't name,

holding on by the edge

of something shapeless, raw.

Not therapy or treatment,

not a cure or clean line,

but something older, rougher—

the way hands clasp in dark rooms,

the way a heartbeat pauses,

then carries on.

What it is—

a language without words,

a steady breath,

an old wound

you press against the night.

-Christina Foisy, excerpt from Black Pond unpublished manuscript.

I scribble these words on a scrap piece of paper as I listen for the possibility of a poem by sounding madness, tuning out the visceral sinking feelings and injustices woven into everyday existence: the banality of corporate greed, manufactured consent and institutional violence posturing as care. I sense it—a heartbeat pulsing near me, but it isn't mine; it's one of collective resistance. Madness is not an object to be examined from a safe, clinical distance but a mode of embodied inquiry, an active engagement with the power structures we must dismantle to be free. Madness is both a poetics and praxis, an art of making language that cannot be tamed with traditional research methods and cannot speak in ways we expect. As La Marr Jurelle Bruce says, "Healing isn't simply banishing madness or harnessing it for good use–it's a readiness to rally voices in your head, listen, rather than silence them" therefore how do we listen to madness outside of the epistemic confines of the psy-complex, systems of knowledge-power and cultural production?¹ As a poet and sound artist engaged with sounding madness and mad poetics, my work begins with an act of listening. Listening is not just about perceiving sound but about bearing witness to the unvoiced histories, the silenced narratives, and the marginalized experiences that haunt spaces of the psy-complex.

What does it mean to listen to madness? Beyond the strictures of diagnostic frameworks and solution-focused therapies, how might we engage with mental distress and mad creativity as modes of knowledge and praxis that resist intersectionally oppressive paradigms? Sounding madness and Mad² poetics invites us to reimagine epistemologies that transcend language and reason, offering a resonant space where madness speaks—and is understood through Mad methodologies and research-creation. This article explores the potential of listening as a subversive act, examining how poets and thinkers like Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Roxanna Bennett challenge hegemonic frameworks through practices of attunement, relationality, and creative resistance that enact what I call sounding madness. As Sinclair and Mahboub argue, maddening post-qualitative inquiry means embracing rupture, affect, and entanglement; anti-sanist and anti-neuroableist readings are methodological commitments, not afterthoughts.³ Sounding madness takes this up through deep listening, affective resonance, and interference as critique: a practice of listening-with that refuses extraction and reconstitutes relation.⁴ Building on these textual experiments, sounding madness amplifies and extends recent "Mad[]Neurodiverse" literary approaches, which call for cross-pollination at the level of method—not simply reading differently, but cultivating analytic practices that refuse cure narratives, normative cognition, and disciplinary containment.⁵ Where Fixter and Downs chart this shared horizon through poetry and criticism, sounding madness enacts it sonically—an aural poiesis in which knowledge takes shape through vibration, echo, and polyvocal resonance.⁶ Read alongside these works, sounding madness moves method beyond the page, embodying what Loveless infers as "politics of form" while enacting what Bruce identifies as "madness's analytic force."⁷ The result is an analytic that treats sound not as metaphor, but as method: a practice of listening-with rather than listening-for.

Sounding madness as a conceptual practice extends into Gumbs' and Bennett's poetics, where listening functions as both analytic and ethical method—an embodied refusal of the sanist, colonial logics that equate silence with cure. Gumbs' poetic reframing of "rock bottom" as a generative space of transformation, coupled with her invocation of whale song as a model for resistance in her book Undrowned, foregrounds the political and ethical dimensions of listening within mad methodologies.⁸ Similarly, Bennett's Untranslatable I resists the reductive frameworks of institutional care, using poetry to critique the extractive, transactional methods of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and the psychiatric-industrial complex.⁹ Together, their works illuminate the possibilities of listening otherwise—of attending to the sounds of pain, survival, and difference in ways that affirm life outside colonial and capitalist constraints. I situate Gumbs and Bennett's interventions within the broader field of Mad studies, disability poetics, and decolonial listening practices, framing their work as a challenge to systems that pathologize difference while silencing subversive voices.

By attending to the resonances of madness, this exploration seeks not only to disrupt dominant narratives but also to cultivate radical compassion, opening new pathways for justice, solidarity, and healing.¹⁰ Radical compassion in Mad poetics is an approach to care, listening, and expression that resists psychiatric violence, epistemic injustice, and sanist exclusion while centering Mad people's lived realities, voices, and creative expressions.¹¹ This form of compassion welcomes the co-presence of grief, rage, joy, and dissociation without forcing resolution while embracing the range of Mad experiences rather than smoothing them into neat biomedical "recovery narratives."¹² Radical compassion is also an ethical praxis that allows for cross-pollination, reparation and solidarity across difference, as Bruce says, radical compassion "is not an appeal to an idyllic oneness where difference is blithely erased…rather radical compassion works to impart care…to walk and sit and fight and build alongside another whose condition may be utterly unlike your own."¹³ In bringing their politicized poetics into dialogue with sounding madness, we begin to hear how listening itself becomes a radical method of world-making—an epistemic and ethical stance that transforms both what and how we know.

Sounding Madness: A concept emerging from research-creation process

Emerging from my own research-creation practice, sounding madness began as a way to listen otherwise—to attune to grief, silence, and memory as forms of knowledge rather than symptoms of disorder. Over time, it evolved from a sonic method into a conceptual framework: a way of thinking with and through the resonances of madness. As a practice, sounding madness treats listening not simply as perception but as an ethics.

My Ph.D. dissertation and research-creation project, "Sounding Madness: The Ethics of Listening in Janet Frame's Faces in the Water extends this sonic method about mis/listening and epistemic injustice in the psy-industrial complex and the ethics of ECT.¹⁴ Rather than adjudicating ECT's clinical efficacy, I asked what becomes inaudible when evidence is standardized and "recovery narratives" are scripted for institutional use. Frame's novel offers a rare literary acoustemology of mid-century asylum life: city anxiety, ward hums, nature's counter-voice, and interior monologue. It stages diagnostic listening (physicians hear symptoms) against dialogic listening (readers hear persons). Frame's claim that madness is "a new kind of music" becomes a method.¹⁵ I sound the text with survivor archives and contemporary field recordings, composing three interlinked works:¹⁶

• Faces in the Water — Readings of Frame are interleaved with archival fragments and domestic room-tone to stage polyvocal reflexivity (Frame/Istina/my voice/Mad activists). Lo-fi is preserved as form, resisting the polish of cure.

• Season of Peril — Field recordings from survivor/mad protests (chants, speeches, AM-radio bleed) enact "sound as a verb": testimony as collective signal rather than extractable data point.¹⁷

• Madness as a New Kind of Music — Collaboration with Mad-identified musicians: blindfolded vocal takes, heartbeat mic-taps, "false-bright" major intervals, dynamic shocks that render the ward's electrical metaphors as felt structure. Disorientation opens into spaciousness that resists harmony.

Across the trilogy, composition is the analytic engine. Rhythm functions as reasoning, "jumping the tracks" of linear logic; consent is treated as relation (ongoing negotiation with my collaborators), and refusal/hesitation/silence remain in the mix.¹⁸ The works do not translate grief and dissent into legible data; they create conditions for listening otherwise—an ethical relation attuned to what will not settle into measure.

Throughout my research-creation process, I drew on a mad methodologies framework articulated by scholars such as Ken Gale which eventually led me to conceptualize sounding madness as a method in an attempt to merge what I was learning in Mad studies, literary studies and sound studies with research-creation.¹⁹ I was inspired by the way Gale intentionally framed mad methodologies as transforming how we analyze, read and create. Mad methods unmoor research from reductionist, metric-driven methods. Rather than creating standardized protocols that researchers can replicate to achieve consistent results, mad methods cultivate spaces where unconventional, unpredictable, and embodied knowledge can thrive. Gale frames madness as a productive force—a challenge to normative knowledge structures that opens possibilities for alternative ways of knowing. Bruce further idealizes mad methodologies as recognizing "madpersons as critical theorists and decisive protagonists in struggles for liberation."²⁰

I frequently struggle to convey the legitimacy of my research rituals in professional settings, especially at work. These include reading abstract theory slowly and deliberately and privileging process over product. Though nonlinear and improvisational, these rituals are no less rigorous. However, they appear indulgent, impractical, and "out of scope" to those who decide what my work should look and sound like to have value (academic or corporate). I realize these methods are not uniquely Mad, nor do they require one to self-identify to find them useful or helpful; they exist across a broad spectrum of critical theories, disciplines, and activism. Still, I wrestle with the tension between resisting structure and seeking it—striving to articulate "core components" of this praxis grounded explicitly in mad people's histories, art, and activism but also beyond. Mad methods are part of a larger ecosystem of resistant methods and practices and should not be framed as the only way to resist knowledge-power hegemonies. Yet, similar to research-creation, Mad methods remain marginalized, under-represented and under-valued within research institutions and industry.

What, then, are these "core components"? Gale and Bruce emphasize the denaturalization of psychiatric and biomedical metrics and the adoption of anti-methods that resist dominant paradigms. These anti-methods often take post-qualitative, process-based, and nonlinear forms, invoking frameworks like "Mad Time" or "Crip Time."²¹ Additionally, they center embodied, experiential, and ancestral knowledge as vital epistemic resources. Emerging from the collective intellectual labor of mad activism, mad methodologies theorize from within and beyond academic contexts, applying intersectional frameworks and polyvocal perspectives. They privilege the narratives, insights, and expertise of those with lived experiences of madness, mental distress, or psychiatric treatment, challenging traditional psychiatric models that exclude Mad people from shaping knowledge about themselves.²²

The term sounding madness emerged from a deeply personal and intuitive process long before I had formal knowledge of immersive storytelling, the Mad movement, or sound studies. It was during my Master's thesis that I began to experiment with "sound as a verb," using it to navigate and transform the grief of my mother's suicide into something else—something closer to forgiveness or a new world of emotional possibilities. This process starkly contrasted the recovery models described in psychiatric or clinical textbooks. For me, sound became a way of working through, creating, reclaiming and inhabiting alternative healing pathways.

At the time, I was exploring the concept of "madness" through the lens of my father's home renovations. His stories of my parents lives as hippie artists and carpenters—repurposing materials from Westmount mansions—became metaphors for recovery, for taking fragments of the past and assembling them into something new. This practice of listening, collecting, and reassembling fragments elevated both my creative and intellectual processes. Without realizing it, I was immersing myself in what Levinas would later help me articulate as listening otherwise. I didn't know the formal terminology, but I knew I was listening to my father's stories, to the echoes of my mother's presence, and something ineffable beyond those voices.

In those early years, I was also listening to Mad activists, ECT survivors, sound artists, and ghosts. Attending my first CAPA (Coalition Against Psychiatric Assault) rally in 2009—Stop Shocking Our Mothers and Grandmothers—was a turning point. Standing outside the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (formerly the Clarke Institute), I encountered the psychiatric survivor movement and became politicized (as someone who also had a lived experience of being psychiatrized). This was where I first met incredible activists like Don Weitz, Mel Starkman, and Bonnie Burstow, whose lives and work introduced me to the Mad Pride movement and the rich legacy of psychiatric survivory activism. I left that rally with a flyer, later becoming a memento of my initiation into this world.

While working with PSAT (Psychiatric Survivor Archives of Toronto), I immersed myself in the archival materials that became the foundation of my sound pieces. These included protest recordings from the 1980s, such as City Hall demonstrations against ECT led by Don Weitz and Bonnie Burstow, interviews from Weitz's radio show Shrink Wrap, letters between Wendy Funk and Weitz, and articles from Phoenix Rising and Mind Freedom. I spent hours listening to these voices—voices that demanded to be heard, voices that resisted silencing, voices that fought for legislative change. One concept from that time changed my life: madness cannot speak.²³ This idea encapsulated both a painful truth and a radical challenge. If madness cannot speak, then how do we listen? How do we create spaces where the unspeakable can resonate? These questions guided me as I synthesized these experiences into sounding madness, a concept rooted in listening—not just to the content of what is said, but to the silences, the ruptures, and the possibilities that lie between. Reflecting back, I recognize how this term grew from a convergence of personal grief, political awakening, and creative exploration. Sounding madness became a way to articulate the complexity of mental and emotional distress while challenging the dominant structures of psychiatry and colonial mental health systems. It continues to evolve as a framework for listening otherwise, for tuning into the multiplicities of mad knowledge and the transformative potential of sound.

Why Sound & Sounding? 

Sound plays a central role in the Mad poetics writing I will be exploring, often reflecting the experience of being unheard and erased from history. For Bennett and Gumbs, sound is a means of reclaiming memory, voice, and community. The focus on "sounding" provides a unique framework for analyzing how we listen to and interpret madness. This article aims to intervene in the idea that madness cannot speak, using sound to reconsider our relationship to memory, place, land, and time.²⁴ In "listening otherwise," the goal is not to dissect or make sense of madness but to engage with it on its own terms.

Sound is a potent, boundary-transcending force rooted in vibrational, embodied knowledge. As Jonathan Pettman observes, we are "born in and of sound," sensing vibrations through the skin before sight develops; even those who are deaf "cannot escape the feeling of sound waves."²⁵ Listening involves more than hearing with precision or clarity; it is a visceral, felt experience beyond mere accuracy. I use the concept of "sounding" to explore sound's epistemological potential for engaging with madness. Sound becomes a vehicle for expression, dissolving the rigid mind-body boundary and allowing "practical wisdom" to resonate within knowledge production.²⁶ Julien Henriques's work on sonic epistemologies challenges the dominance of visual hierarchies, proposing instead "a pattern of cooperation of sensory modalities," where each sense contributes uniquely to our navigation of the surrounding "energy flux."²⁷ In my sounding madness research-creation project, sound is used as a method to explore and convey these lived experiences in ways that resist traditional, often reductive, narratives about mental distress.²⁸ It allows for the complexity of madness to be expressed in nonlinear, layered, and immersive ways—qualities that resonate with mad perspectives on mental health as multifaceted, fluid, and nonconforming to binary or diagnostic labels. Sound allows for the emotional textures and nuances of madness to be "heard" rather than merely "explained."²⁹ The act of "sounding" is a metaphor for breaking silence—a potent element in epistemic justice, especially for voices silenced by psychiatric or systemic sanism and other forms of oppression. This disruption aligns with Mad methods by challenging silence around taboo subjects and amplifying perspectives that mainstream narratives ignore. Sound as a medium for conveying madness can defy the controlled, ordered ways mental health is typically presented, embracing instead raw, unsanitized, and often intense expressions. By crafting counter-narratives through sound and poetics, Mad creators, like myself, disrupt normative listening practices and create a space where their experiences can be heard as legitimate forms of knowledge rather than as symptoms to be managed.

Listening Otherwise

"Saying does not happen through the content of what speaks, but through the nearness and orientation we bring to the other"³⁰

The concept of "listening otherwise" stems from dialogic ethics, as articulated by philosophers such as Levinas, Buber, and Heidegger, where ethics begins in dialogue and listening suspends our desire to know the Other.³¹ This form of listening respects the Other's absolute otherness and alterity without attempting to contain, define, or circumscribe it to a fixed interpretation. In the framework of dialogic ethics, "listening otherwise" is an epistemology that remains comfortable with discomfort: it stays "open-ended," unfinished, and unsure of what it knows. It is an epistemology that undoes itself, urging us to let go of understanding, empty our vocabulary of hierarchy, and allow silence—or madness—to speak. Listening becomes a mode of relationality that allows learning from the Other rather than imposing meaning onto them in a symbolically violent manner. The ethical possibility of listening respects the Other's alterity and attends to it gently. Ethics always involves an engagement with the other's otherness, acknowledging that one's view of the Other will inevitably be partial and incomplete, as the Other resides beyond one's thought.³²

In Totality and Infinity, Levinas contends that the history of European philosophy represents a history of violence towards the Other, as alterity was always reduced to the same, intending to subsume the Other into the sphere of absolute knowledge. Respecting the Other's unknowable difference is at the heart of Levinas' ethics, and he proposes "listening otherwise" as the most viable way to attend to this difference. Even when we are empathetic and deeply moved by someone's speech, it does not necessarily mean we are listening fully to the difference that marks their experience as distinct from our own. We often desire to understand and absorb the Other into our words, experiences, and memories, thereby relating the information back to ourselves. We do not always realize the distinct boundary between our subjectivities—how we can never truly know the Other, no matter how hard or how much we listen. The challenge is to let go of understanding, to welcome all that cannot be known, and to hold the richness of absence. Levinas notes that listening threatens the ego, plunging it into uncertainty. Ethics, for Levinas, requires a responsibility towards the Other, which is an asymmetrical subordination. Turning toward the Other is an act of renunciation, giving up our attachment to what is familiar and understood. Reading Levinas, Gemma Corradi Fiumara in The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening describes listening as a risky undertaking: "Any new attitude must take on the semblance of a loss of the previous mode of seeing things and evaluating them."³³ To listen, one must let go. In this sense, listening becomes a gesture toward the Other—a gesture that never fully arrives at finite meaning. Levinas describes this radicality of the Other as "a horizon:" we can only perceive its distance, but we can never reach it. Building upon dialogic ethics and Levinas' work, Lisbeth Lipari describes listening as a voice always speaking, even if we cannot hear it.³⁴ How we listen says more than what we might think, and it should be the foundation of all communicative ethics, especially when one is trying to express suffering. Lipari writes, "listening engagement with otherness that is itself a voice of awareness of receiving and obedience, the voice is always speaking."³⁵ She affirms the role of vulnerability in supporting awareness of the radical alterity of the Other. Listening otherwise refers to acknowledging and accepting vulnerability—both of self and other. We are called not only to attend to the suffering of others but also to our own suffering. Vulnerability counters the medical authority and rational logic within diagnostic listening practices maintained by psychiatry. Vulnerability in psychiatry would require a renunciation of power and a dialogic process of intersubjectivity and inner listening.

Mad Research-Creation: From Bridge to Threshold

Mad research-creation is an emerging praxis that collapses the presumed divide between "artist" and "researcher" and expands the potential of Mad cultural production as an epistemic, political, and methodical intervention to the biomedical psy-complex while also offering non-binary ways of existing and thinking within the hyphenated space of artist-researcher. ³⁶ Research-creation, Natalie Loveless writes, invites us to "re-assess which knots we are tying with our research stories" and to rethink publication and pedagogy for the crises that are "actively remaking" knowledge production praxis.³⁷ Mad research-creation is one such knot: a constellation of practices naming the entanglement of Mad studies with research-creation.³⁸ Both are "intentionally slippery;" they privilege process over product, relational attunement over extraction, and conjecture over conclusion.³⁹ Yet there is a lack of attention to the potential both sites of praxis could offer when they meet on a threshold. Much of Mad cultural production has been framed as a "knowledge politic" which is highly valuable and important for redressing epistemic injustices.⁴⁰ However, calls for partnerships between "researchers and artists" affirms disability/Deaf/Mad cultural production as an epistemic and "knowledge politic," but never imagine the possibility of the artist-researcher as a single intersectional figure which seems like a missed opportunity.⁴¹ Similarly, Pilling's useful metaphor of a "bridge between Mad academia and Mad communities" presumes two shores—research and art—joined but still distant.⁴² Mad research-creation refuses this premise. It lives in the hyphen: making-thinking as one act.⁴³ The point is not to ferry content across a bridge, but to inhabit a threshold where method and poiesis are co-constitutive. In this liminal space, form is argument and process is theory.

Mad Art as Epistemic Work

Beginning from the premise that Mad art can produce knowledge, I distinguish between celebration/consumption of "Mad art" and its epistemic labor.⁴⁴ Too often, Mad cultural production is folded into disability arts without attending to distinct onto-epistemologies and critiques of the psy-complex.⁴⁵ Institutional "inclusion" can package work for surface-level consumption or, worse, instrumentalize it as evidence of recovery or cure.⁴⁶ Pilling notes how "the full potential of Mad art as praxis has yet to be fully explored and disability arts does not adequately question, explicate, and challenge the links between Mad art and a biomedical framework" and he is right.⁴⁷ Much of the literature situates mad cultural production within broader social, political, and cultural resistance movements — useful groundwork — but it tends to treat cultural production primarily as representation (e.g., art about madness, or activism expressed through culture), rather than as method or poiesis.

Against this, mad research-creation treats form and content as inseparable: fragmentation, dissonance, repetition, and silence do theoretical work. It centers mad knowledge, privileges embodied and multisensory method, advances anti-sanist critique, and orients toward collective accountability.⁴⁸ Manning's intervention is instructive: research-creation has "no method to follow" and aims not to explain but to forge relations in "differential attunement."⁴⁹ Chapman and Sawchuk similarly emphasize that through research and through creation "the very phenomena we seek to explore are brought into being."⁵⁰ The risk, of course, is romanticizing "anti-method."⁵¹ Rigor here is not control but attunement—to materials, relations, and histories; to the politics of access and sector memory; and to the specific solidarities that animate the work.⁵²

Emerging from the collective intellectual labor of Mad activism, Mad methodologies theorize from within and beyond academic contexts, applying intersectional frameworks and polyvocal perspectives to address structural issues within the psy-complex. They privilege the narratives, insights, and expertise of those with lived experiences of madness, mental distress, or psychiatric treatment—challenging traditional psychiatric models that exclude mad people from shaping knowledge about themselves.⁵³ As LeFrançois and Voronka put it, mad methodology seeks to "unveil and disrupt colonial ways of knowing in order to make visible ‘the unheard of' and to allow for (racialized/mental health) knowledge production" to flourish inside/outside institutional spaces.⁵⁴ This approach intentionally unmoors research from reductionist, metric-driven methods. Rather than producing standardized protocols that others can replicate for consistent results, I cultivate spaces where unconventional, unpredictable, and embodied knowledge can thrive. Gale frames madness as a productive force—a challenge to normative knowledge structures that opens possibilities for alternative ways of knowing. Bruce further insists that Mad methodologies recognize "madpersons as critical theorists and decisive protagonists in struggles for liberation."⁵⁵

Research-Creation is not Arts-Based Research

While arts-based research and research-creation are often used interchangeably, their genealogies and commitments diverge in crucial ways. Arts-based research (ABR) emerged primarily within education and social science contexts as a strategy for using creative practices—poetry, visual art, performance—to communicate or illuminate research findings in more accessible, affective forms.⁵⁶ Its aim was to "bring the arts into research," extending qualitative inquiry through aesthetic representation. By contrast, research-creation, as developed in Canada through SSHRC policy and theorized by Natalie Loveless, and others, does not treat creative practice as adjunct or illustration, but as the epistemic site of inquiry itself. It names a mode of making that thinks—a process in which art and research are co-constitutive rather than sequential.⁵⁷

Loveless defines research-creation as a politics of form—an intervention into the academy's conceptual and ethical underpinnings. Rather than asking artists to justify their work as research, she asks how institutions might change if artistic, embodied, and sensorial forms of knowing were recognized as legitimate scholarship. Research-creation, she argues, "marshals new methods that allow us to tell new stories," but its force lies not in novelty of content but in how it remakes method itself.⁵⁸ In this sense, it differs from arts-based research's tendency toward application—where the artwork often functions as data, dissemination, or illustration within pre-existing methodological frames. Research-creation instead foregrounds process as inquiry, embracing indeterminacy, iteration, and relation as methodological values. Other scholars reinforce this distinction. Chapman and Sawchuk describe research-creation as "a conceptual mash-up that foregrounds process, materiality, and theorization through making," emphasizing its anti-linear, performative nature.⁵⁹ Erin Manning and Brian Massumi similarly situate it within process philosophy, defining creation as "thought in the act," where thinking itself is an event.⁶⁰ For these scholars, research-creation is not about applying art to research but about practicing research as art.

This distinction matters for Mad studies. Arts-based research has sometimes risked reinscribing the very binaries it seeks to challenge—separating artistic output from intellectual labor or treating Mad art as illustrative evidence of lived experience rather than epistemic work. Research-creation, by contrast, is more hospitable to the resistant and relational epistemologies that animate Mad methodologies. Its refusal of fixed method aligns with what Burstow and LeFrançois describe as Mad praxis: a process of unsettling, improvising, and re-imagining the terms of knowledge production itself.⁶¹ In this context, maddening research-creation names a convergence of these two trajectories. It borrows research-creation's formal experimentation and Loveless' call for ethical attunement, while grounding them in the anti-sanist, anti-neuroableist commitments of Mad methodology. Rather than "adding art" to research or "Mad" to art-making, it maddens method through embodied making and collective inquiry as a politicized praxis.

Listening to Mad Poetics

Similar to Frame, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Roxanna Bennett challenge conventional listening frameworks by proposing alternative ways to engage with expressions of madness, distress, and ecological interconnectedness that are often silenced or overlooked in institutional and clinical settings. In Undrowned, Alexis Pauline Gumbs explores strategies for interspecies listening that draw deeply on the legacies of radical queer Black feminist thought and activism intertwined with disability and climate justice. Gumbs' work emphasizes a profound attentiveness to the voices of non-human life forms, encouraging readers to engage in a form of listening that crosses inter-species boundaries and recognizes the interconnectedness of ecological and social struggles. Meanwhile, in Untranslatable I, Roxana Bennett utilizes traditional poetic structures to subvert standardized cognitive-behavioral therapy intake forms, revealing how the language of institutional listening practices often fails to accommodate the complexity of madness, particularly from neurodivergent, queer, and non-binary perspectives. Bennett's poetry highlights the inherent limitations within clinical settings. Madness—understood as inexpressible pain, mental distress, anger, and even revolutionary political intent—is frequently rendered inaudible or invalid within the confines of medical discourse. Through this lens, Bennett invites readers to engage the spectrum of mad poetic interventions—from unruly expressions to troubling forms. Together, Gumbs and Bennett invite readers to listen to madness as a multifaceted expression that resists simplistic categorization, urging an approach to listening that is attentive to the layers of meaning embedded within sound, silence, and the spaces between words.

Rock Bottom as Resonant Resistance: Alexis Pauline Gumbs' Undrowned

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a Black queer feminist poet and radical scholar, offers a profound reframing of "rock bottom" in her work Undrowned.⁶² In her writing, she rejects the notion of rock bottom as an insurmountable, despairing end. Instead, Gumbs envisions it as a reverberation—a "sound you were making called need"—signifying a complex space where survival, transformation, and resistance intersect.⁶³ This reframing is deeply informed by Gumbs' listening practices, particularly her engagement with whale song, which she interprets as a model for resisting exhaustion and extinction. In terms of ad methods, I explore how Gumbs' metaphors and methods offer radical resistance to colonial, Eurocentric frameworks of knowledge while providing a subversive alternative that draws from the wisdom of marine mammals, Blackness, and queer theory. She wrote Undrowned to meditate on social movements and our whole species from the guidance of marine mammals as mentors. Gumbs draws a relationship between the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and her Indigenous Shinnecock and Black enslaved ancestors to show how echolocation changes our understanding of sight-centric ways of knowing towards listening in new ways that support multi-species collaboration and justice. She asks: "How can we listen across species, across extinction, across harm? How does echolocation, the practice many marine mammals use to navigate the world through bouncing sounds, change our understanding of vision and visionary actions?"⁶⁴ I was drawn to Gumbs writing and her reflection on process (or methods), how she weaves inner listening, ancestral wisdom, and dreams within environmental and social ethnography because it resonates with what a lot of mad resistance sought to accomplish.

In her poetic exploration, Gumbs challenges the hegemonic understanding of "rock bottom," suggesting that it is not the end of the road but rather a space of potential and renewal. A "rock bottom" is not a symptom; it is an expression that can cultivate radical compassion for madness as a site of resistance, mobilizing care that doesn't hold it captive. She writes, "What you thought was rock bottom was just a reflection of a sound you were making called need… We could change the story with what we know. That this is not the bottom, this is our life. This is not the floor; this is our air."⁶⁵ Through this poetic reframing, Gumbs illuminates rock bottom as a space not merely for resting but for listening and responding to the unmet needs that have been silenced within colonial and capitalist structures. This space is generative, opening up the potential for subversive action through an attentiveness to the unacknowledged sounds that reverberate from marginalized bodies and endangered species alike.

This invitation to listen more profoundly aligns with Gumbs' broader project in Undrowned, in which she seeks to learn from marine mammals, specifically whales, as mentors in resistance. Whales' songs, according to Gumbs, are not simply a form of communication but an act of survival in the face of environmental violence and existential threat. Their songs become a model for human resistance: "This is where we start our trans-species communion, opening a space to uplift the practice of listening even more than the practice of showing and proving and speaking up."⁶⁶ In focusing on listening as an act of resistance, Gumbs pushes against the colonial frameworks that have historically silenced the voices of marginalized communities, positioning listening as a subversive and transformative act.

Listening as Subversive Political Action

The act of listening in Gumbs' work is not passive but political. It is a challenge to systems of power that demand action, speech, and visibility. Listening allows us to "challenge political ideologies and paradigms of power"—particularly those rooted in patriarchy and white supremacy—and to "articulate difference" in ways that confront the dominant narrative of singular reality.⁶⁷ By listening otherwise, Gumbs invites readers to experience the world as it existed before it was understood through colonial, Eurocentric knowledge systems. This practice of listening resonates with the work of critical theorists like Bruce, who argues that "blackness and madness" often intersect in ways that resist diagnostic, reductionist models of understanding.⁶⁸ Listening then becomes a form of "undrowning"—a process of survival through breath, slowness, and attentiveness. Gumbs draws from Indigenous practices of healing and listening, aligning her work with a broader tradition of radical compassion and solidarity. "How diligent your breath is for staying deep with all the noise that bounces off our lives," she writes, recognizing the power of listening to remain present amid the cacophony of a world designed to drown out the voices of the oppressed.⁶⁹

Sounding Crip Time and the Politics of Slowness

A critical dimension of Gumbs' work is her engagement with crip time. This concept signals both psychosocial and physical disability, as well as a critique of capitalist notions of productivity and speed. In an interview with Kameelah Janan Rasheed about Undrowned, Gumbs reflects on her creative practice as one that requires intentional slowness, a pace that allows her to "listen between her heartbeat and the ocean." In this, she challenges the capitalist emphasis on efficiency and productivity, instead advocating for a form of listening that is attentive, deliberate, and patient. In this interview, Gumbs articulates her listening practices closely to what might be understood as research-creation. She links archival research, voice-hearing, ancestral presence, and non-human more-than-human worlds in her creative practice, showing how she attends to "voices" beyond the human and exceeding conventional categories and how listening is the process by which she can create, pointing out that listening does not always aim for clarity, mastery or translation: "I don't necessarily know … what I'm hearing … but I know I am committed to listening."⁷⁰ This orientation toward listening as care and as refusal of certainty parallels the dialogic ethics described earlier as listening otherwise: an epistemic practice that suspends the self's desire to know the Other, opening instead to co-presence, multiplicity, and untranslatability. Gumbs's commitment to "listening with the ocean" enacts the same relational, embodied, and decolonial ethos that animates Mad research-creation—where method and making, sound and sense, are inseparable processes of becoming with others, a stance that mirrors non-binary Mad epistemologies and methods, like research-creation.

This critique of speed intersects with how Gumbs' work resists colonial frameworks of time and space. Drawing from the metaphor of whale echolocation, she reflects on how "sharp teeth" have evolved into tools for listening. What was once an instrument of harm becomes an instrument for survival and attunement, thus reimagining what it means to listen in a world that demands constant motion.⁷¹ In this context, the dual meaning of "slow" speaks to the intersection of disability and resistance, offering a model for a listening practice that values patience and deep attentiveness over efficiency and goal-oriented action.

For Gumbs, the intersection of Blackness, disability, and madness becomes a site of resistance to the pathologization of creativity and the marginalization of Black bodies within medical and psychiatric frameworks. Listening to the "ungraspable alterity" of mental distress—what is submerged and unsayable—becomes a form of radical solidarity. Gumbs resists diagnostic, goal-oriented listening in favor of a "healing justice" framework that acknowledges the autonomy and imperfection of healing processes. This approach draws from the activism of the Kindred: Southern Healing Justice Collective, which seeks to move away from fixed notions of healing and embrace a more fluid, decentralized approach to care.⁷² Gumbs' practice of "listening otherwise" approaches listening as a relational process that requires empathy, active participation, and a willingness to learn from those whose voices have been marginalized by colonial frameworks. While Gumbs's work does not explicitly situate itself within Mad studies or Mad research-creation, it still provides a critique of the psy-complex (the interlocking medical, psychological, and institutional systems that regulate, pathologize, and discipline subjectivity) through its form, ethics, and ontology. Her decentering of human cognition and "expert" authority destabilizes psychiatry's monopoly on defining consciousness and normalcy.

Undrowned provides a radical reimagining of rock bottom, framing it as a space of survival, transformation, and resistance. Through her poetics of listening, Gumbs challenges colonial epistemologies and offers a model for decolonizing knowledge and power. Listening, for Gumbs, is not merely an act of reception but a political and ethical practice that allows us to engage with the world in new, subversive ways. By attuning ourselves to the sounds of resistance—whether through the song of whales, the breath of the earth, or the silenced voices of the oppressed—we can cultivate a new vision of justice and solidarity.

Listening Otherwise: Mad Poetics, CBT, and the Ethics of Radical Compassion

"A cognitive behavioural therapy worksheet and a prescription will never heal the human heart the same way as sharing your unique perspective with other human beings who have also experienced the unrelenting pain of being alive."⁷³

Through their work, Untranslatable I, Roxanna Bennett engages with forms of listening that decompose the transactional, extractive, and solution-focused methods typified by CBT. Published in the same year as Ontario's Roadmap to Wellness, which promotes Ontario's Structured Psychotherapy Program (OSP), Bennett's work utilizes poetic forms to subvert the standard CBT intake process, demonstrating that madness cannot fully "speak" within the confines of institutionalized listening practices. Bennett's work exemplifies a critical approach that resists seeing poetry as a mere symptom of madness or viewing madness as something to be celebrated uncritically. Instead, they encourage us to engage with the spectrum of Mad poetics—from unruly expressions to troubling forms—as a strategy of resistance against neoliberal, productivist demands within the psychiatric-industrial complex.⁷⁴ Untranslatable I centers on the challenge of translating pain into a language understood in radically compassionate ways. Bennett writes, "Doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, the people who ostensibly care for the mentally ill do not have time or space for compassionate connection, attentive non-judgmental listening."⁷⁵ This quote highlights the disconnect between institutional care and the more profound, more humane listening required to acknowledge the complexity of mental distress.

Building on Bennett's sharp sense of form, the work challenges myths and poses difficult questions like, "Was I chosen? Is this a gift or a curse?" Yet, rather than offering answers within a prescribed path or cure, it unfolds as a beautiful song—a sonic space where pain and difference take on meaning beyond conventional structures.⁷⁶ As Bennett's work exemplifies, Mad poetics involves holding space for mad knowledges and resisting the urge to interpret such stories through dominant epistemologies, such as developmentalism. These practices of continual questioning, challenging, and disruption serve as an antidote to epistemic injustice—defined by Miranda Fricker as the erasure and discrediting of mad knowledges, testimonies, and experiences.⁷⁷ In this context, Mad poetics refuses to be relegated to pathology or mere narrative disturbance. Instead, it seeks to write madness and mad subjectivities into existence in disciplines and spaces that actively work to silence them.

Bennett's poetics exemplify this practice. While she is known as a formalist poet, in Untranslatable I, she uses conventional forms such as sonnets to be heard concerning the "unrelenting pain of being alive." Even as the framework of sounding madness engages with uncertainty and the unknowable, Bennett's radical compassion is foundational to this process. The form of her poems becomes a vehicle for the subject matter, a space for "cripping myth" in ways that allow for madness to be understood in liberatory rather than reductive terms.⁷⁸ Through resonant language, her poetry disrupts the "recovery narrative" and the storytelling economy imposed by the psy-industrial complex, which extracts "patient stories" to sell treatments as solutions to systemic issues.⁷⁹

Sounding the Liminality of Madness

At the hospital, we listen to each other's music

Learning what sounds save

Learning how to hear

Each others pain

In our room, song is salve,

Vibrates asylum

Elemental wombheart, humming us home

The deep sound I am transforming 

Before hearing earless, I'm vibrating

Look at me now & after formless (Bennett 2021)

Roxanna Bennett's poem "Travel Diary Doing Laundry in German" invites readers into a liminal space where the mundane act of waiting—whether for the end of a wash cycle or a hospital stay—intersects with the profound navigation of Mad experience. The laundromat and asylum merge into a shared geography of in-betweenness, where time drags, and the cycles of crisis and care echo one another. Bennett uses sound as a central method for re-orienting within this space, transforming it from stasis to transformation. In the poem, music becomes both salve and salience. Here, sound operates as a Mad methodology, grounding the speaker's fragmented experience while simultaneously offering transcendence, breaking free of the containment that institutions impose.

Bennett's use of "earless" vibration and fluid, formless transformation evokes a logic that resists biomedical reductionism.⁸⁰ Instead of framing madness as pathology, the poem frames it as a mode of being that resonates beyond verbal articulation. The act of listening is central—not as a clinical diagnosis but as an ethical, embodied practice. By sharing her history through poetic "sounding," Bennett opens space for readers to re-member madness outside the confines of stigma or institutional control, offering a vision for Mad methodologies to prioritize relationality, resonance, and re-imagining over cure. In this context, sound is both a method and a metaphor, bringing us home to new possibilities of witnessing and listening to madness.

Bennett explores the intersection of sound and language in relation to alienation and the mundane. The poem's speaker moves through spaces where time seems to drag on—the laundry mat, the psychiatric ward—asking, "Can I be here?"⁸¹ The speaker is a body displaced, unable to speak the language of medical psychobabble or the foreign tongue of German. Yet, listening to a familiar song becomes a way to ground oneself and transcend the pain of the present moment. Song allows the speaker to slip between time and space, offering solace in the face of grief and alienation. This use of sound as a means of grief and mourning evokes a similar function to the music in Wings of Desire by Nick Cave, which allows for engagement with complex histories not as "trauma porn" but as a way of taking responsibility for collective suffering.⁸²

In this way, Bennett's poetry embodies sound's transformative potential to heal, mourn, and connect. The speaker in the poem notes, "At the hospital, we listen to each other's music, learning what sound saves, learning how to hear each other's pain in our own. Song is salve, vibrato asylum, elemental wombheart humming us home."⁸³ Here, song is not merely a form of entertainment or distraction but a form of ethical listening that fosters empathy and solidarity. Music provides a space for resonant healing, where shared pain becomes the medium for mutual care. Bennett's exploration of pain as individual and collective experience reflects a broader critique of the psychiatric and medical systems attempting to contain and manage suffering without attending to its deeper meanings. In her work, pain is not a symptom to be eradicated but an embodied expression of lived reality that demands recognition and care. As she writes in "Travel Diary," "No, I am not on vacation, cripple's a 24/7 vacation."⁸⁴ For Bennett, pain is not an interruption to life; it is life, ever-present and persistent. This reframing of pain within a context of radical care and compassion echoes the broader ethos of Mad poetics, which refuses to pathologize or dismiss experiences of mental distress but instead seeks to honor them as valid and meaningful forms of knowledge. As Bennett's poetry shows, it is not enough to "work through" distress; instead, we must engage with it in ways that acknowledge its full emotional, physical, and existential dimensions.

Madness speaks polyvocally, across timelines and embodiments, without a clear consensus on its boundaries. That is the point: it is not easy to listen to, which is precisely the work we must do. As Bruce writes, "We might seriously engage rather than glibly dismiss accounts that appear delusional, unreasonable, far-fetched, fantastical, mythical, improbable, impossible."⁸⁵ This is the ethos of Mad methods—deep, reparative work that requires us to listen to the stories that challenge our understanding of reality. Ultimately, the need for Mad research-creation arises from the failure of dominant systems to listen to those who experience distress as meaning-making subjects. Might we imagine re-writing madness with Mad poetics, embracing "sounding madness" techniques, and fostering radical compassion to resonate with the beautifully imperfect realities of mental distress?

Conclusion

Sounding madness performs method as poiesis, as Mad research-creation. It listens to the untranslatable, the excessive, and the trembling edges of sense that persist after institutional containment, refusing the linear narratives of recovery and the structural oppresion of the psy-complex. It insists that the sonic is not merely representational but constitutive: it produces ways of being and knowing that resist containment but maintain rigor. As Bennett suggests, could we rewrite CBT intake forms through Mad poetics? Could we, as Gumbs teaches, learn to "breathe through rock bottoms" with radical compassion, appreciating our beautifully imperfect selves? These possibilities require more than mere institutional reforms; they call for a profound shift in how we approach mental distress and the methods we use to engage with it in research, policy, and beyond. This shift demands a listening practice rooted in radical compassion and the recognition of Mad knowledge, challenging the foundations of existing mental health structures and creating a space where individuals are heard. It requires a poetics of survival—a practice of listening not for "answers" but for what can emerge from the spaces of pain, difference, and complexity.

The works of Gumbs, and Bennett and Frame illuminate the transformative power of listening otherwise—attending to the sounds of pain, survival, and difference in ways that affirm life beyond colonial, white supremacist, heteronormative, and capitalist structures. Through their poetics, we can imagine methods that evolve into a relational, dialogic process that holds the epistemic value of madness while questioning and resisting the dominant frameworks that seek to silence it. This work, however, remains unfinished—intentionally so. To listen to madness is to dwell in the unknown, to embrace the ruptures, silences, and rhythms that resist commodification or closure. It is to recognize the vibrancy of collective resistance in the face of injustice and stand in solidarity with those whose voices have been silenced or ignored.

Through Mad methodologies, research-creation and poetics, we carve out a resonant space where marginalized knowledge can flourish, offering new ways to imagine liberation, solidarity, and care. Reflecting on this journey, I return to the heartbeat I once heard that wasn't mine. It was the pulse of something larger—an unyielding force that compels us to listen otherwise. It is the rhythm of sounding mad poetics, the echoes of activism, the vibrations of sound and silence. It is a call to resist, create, and cultivate spaces where madness is heard and understood on its own terms. These are not methods to be mastered and instrumentalized, they are ongoing practices of attunement, acts of justice, and, ultimately, multiple arts of listening to what resists being heard.