Poetry Society of America

Neurodivergent Poets from Unrestricted Interest

Chris Martin

Imagine your brain is a nest of highly charged wires, many of them overlapping in ways that bring you startling and multidimensional impressions of the world. Then imagine these same wires threaten at all times to overwhelm your ability to engage with that world. Imagine your sensory acuity is so intense that its five inputs habitually merge and surge, creating a feedback that cancels them all out. Imagine you have so many thoughts, abrupt and nimble as lightning, that you can only grab the tail of one before another bursts forth. Imagine that a mechanism exists–a technology, an intervention–that is able to bring this abundance into focus. Imagine its structural elements operate like a dial that helps locate a clear frequency from which to broadcast. Imagine that this mechanism–an organic machine–has been around for thousands of years and no one realized it could soothe and facilitate your thinking in ways no pharmaceutical possibly could. Imagine that this vehicle of transformation is somehow…a poem.

Only after working with neurodivergent learners for several years did I fully realize the special reciprocity between poetry and autism. I had been conditioned to expect a connection between autism and STEM subjects, but being a poet I was eager to experiment. Five years ago I co-founded Unrestricted Interest, an organization dedicated to helping neurodivergent learners transform their lives through writing. The results have been staggering. Not only do autistic writers have a unique penchant for poetic language, but many of them, especially the minimally speaking and nonspeaking among them, possess their own intrinsic idiolects and choose poetry as their central means of expression.

That’s the case for Hannah Emerson, a nonspeaking 27-year-old who lives outside Syracuse. From the moment she appears on video chat, Hannah is singing. It’s not the kind of singing you find in a Karaoke bar, but the kind you might hear in the trees. Hannah’s singing is echolalic, which means she collects fragments of songs she’s heard and mixes them with snippets of my own speech as we interact. Once you acclimate to them, they begin to form a sort of aural tapestry that enlivens the room from behind. For Hannah, however, these songs are not background material; they are foundational to her presence. She calls them her “grounding sounds.” In these three poems of Hannah’s, you can see how lyrical repetition complements her keen attention to the more-than-human world. The first poem is my inspiration for a new poetry newsletter, The Listening World: dispatches from our neurodiverse future.

The Listening World

Say prayer for little

things, things that live

in deep hurt. Feelings

language take to lair.

Let it signal God’s

light, I say for want

of light feelings. Is my

ear deep or deeper?

Grounding Sounds

Keep me growing down

to my soul. Yelling to go

to keeper of the every

hello. Hello to new

sounds. Hello to freedom.

Hello to my being. Good

bye to drowning. Good

bye to trying. Goodbye

to trying to stop the crying.

I Live in the Woods of my Words

I live in the branches

of the trees. I live in

the great keeping

freedom of the really

helpful down yearning

in the grownd of the forest

floor. The words fall

from the sky like snow

on this day. They become

the floor of the forest.

The ground from which

all things grow into

the towards. It is great

great dream of life

try to dream. I live

in each letter that is

where you will find me.

They have been given

to us as keys to the great

breathing hope of life.

I always wanted to live

there, but couldn’t live

there until the poetry

gave me life of words.

Another nonspeaking writer who wields a thrilling poetic idiolect is Adam Wolfond. Adam is, in his own terms, a “maker of wanting space.” I think all poets are. The space of the poem, constellated around each stanza (which in Italian means room), opens itself to the poet’s creative desires. Adam makes various spaces more alive with his want: learning environments, documentary films, podcasts, and publications. I am less Adam’s teacher and more his amanuensis, hurriedly finding poetic shape for the gushing lyric that fluidly pours forth from his single typing finger. As he wrote in his first poem with me: “Like water I am eager / Like water I am thinking / Like water I always move.” These lines are characteristic of Adam’s writing, which often emerges in patterns of three. Since water is a constituent part of Adam’s being in the world, I call it his three-wave pattern, like the grouped set of waves for which a surfer eagerly watches. I suppose I am the surfer attempting to ride each wave, looking for the moment where one wave becomes another, breaking the line like a board carving back into the tunnel of expression refreshed.

In Way of Music Water Answers

Like water I am eager

Like water I am thinking

Like water I always move

Like water I am thinking time

open and following eager going

pathways and open going nowhere

I boat on the water the way I want to talk

The Maker of Wanting Space

I want to say that I want

to amazing space think

about the way I move

to think

I game the space the way

I open with the body and the way

I think which is the way

of water

It touches me open and I am

away with really easy feelings

of dancing for the answering

really rare always rallying

thinking and it is rare with the way

people think

Really way of touching the world is

the way I am wanting with

my tics

I think that I want the way inside

questions opening the want to

the wanting way which thinks openly

toward the water and I am

thinking about it all

the time

I think that I want the way inside

questions opening the want to

the wanting way which thinks openly

toward the water and I am

thinking about it all the time like

eating words

Answers Toward Questions Other Than What Is Autism

Ticcing through the world

is like touching it

The inward rotation of a spiral

is like amazing tall idea

always thinking

around and

out

Inside the world is the question

of easy touch

Good thought moves like fluid water

and the way of water is raining

really into the seething good

cracks of wanting

thought

Mostly I sometimes tic through the world

and that is the way I feel

I feel the world too much so open

bothersome work is to feel

inside pandering

to language

The work is to feel the world

that is touching me

One of the first nonspeaking poets I worked with, Mark Eati, has grown from one word to one poem to one chapbook to co-founding her own advocacy and co-housing non-profit, the Autism Sibs Universe (ASU). Along the way she enlisted her brother Max Eati, who is also nonspeaking, as her collaborator and co-editor in all things. In writing together, they wield an astounding balance of simplicity and surprise, always expanding my understanding of autistic experience. Mark and Max smell water the way I smell coffee. They revel in the idea of “zero point,” a state where “humans can merge with their infinite presence and live a creatively authentic life.” They harness the alapa–the underlying rhythmic structure of an Indian raga–to reinvent the autistic body as the “alapa body,” a porous mode of “enriched musical patterns suffused with nurturing connections.” In May, Mark and I will be in San Francisco to be interviewed for The Neurodiversity Project.

Awed

Awe arrives as the sound of string instruments

Awe arrives as the feel of a silky shirt

Awe arrives as the taste of coriander spice

Awe arrives as the sight of a seal

Awe arrives as the smell of water

May

May today be awake

May today be awake with scent

May today be awake with the scent of flowers

May today be awake with quality

May today be awake with the quality of motion

May tomorrow be awake with time

May tomorrow be awake with the reality of time

May tomorrow be awake with touch

May tomorrow be awake with the touch of zero

A Volcano Named Junnuru

A volcano named Junnuru

erupts inside our bellies

at the sound of a pattern

family member’s pattern of joy

or pattern of worry

We experience synchronous

and asynchronous changes

good and bad

heavy and light

We laugh like

the alapa pattern

starting at our heads and

ending at our toes

We scream when it

rocks our bellies

like the pattern of a song

pattern of drumming

alapa pattern of emotional pain

We feel the

joy and pain

in our alapa bodies

all over our navels

all over almost everything