Autism

“Autism Screening Questionnaire — Speech and Language Delay”

Oliver de la Paz, 2017

De la Paz is the father of two autistic sons, and he built this poem out of the flat language of a real screening questionnaire, the kind handed to a parent in a waiting room with boxes to tick. Then he refuses to tick them. Every clinical question gets answered with an image too particular to fit: a fountain, then silence, then a breath heard through the window seams at night. What he is doing is quietly insisting that a form designed to sort a child into a category cannot hold the actual child. If you are a parent somewhere in that process, this is the poem that says the paperwork is not the truth about your son or daughter. It was first published in Poetry magazine and collected in The Boy in the Labyrinth, which is worth reading whole.

Read the poem at Poetry Foundation →

“The Listening World”

Hannah Emerson, 2021

Emerson is a nonspeaking autistic poet who composes by typing, and she calls the repeating phrases in her work her grounding sounds. That matters for how you read her. The repetition is not a stylistic flourish borrowed from someone else, it is the way her mind steadies itself, put straight onto the page. The instruction here is to pray for little things and for the things living in deep hurt, which is about as good a description of what this whole site is trying to do as anyone has managed. She is writing from inside autistic experience in autistic language, on her own terms, without translating it into a form that would be easier for non-autistic readers to digest. Her collection is The Kissing of Kissing.

Read more at Poetry Society of America →

“The Beauty of Autistic Knowing”

Adam Wolfond, 2022

Wolfond types with a letterboard and writes in long, moving sentences that behave more like water than like ordinary syntax. Here he describes autistic language as a kind of bathing, something that immerses everything rather than picking it apart, and the claim underneath is simple and worth sitting with: autistic thinking is not a broken version of anyone else’s thinking. It has its own coherence and its own beauty, and it is doing something the standard arrangement cannot do. If you have spent years being told your mind is a deficit, read this one twice. His book is The Wanting Way, from Milkweed Editions, and it is worth buying rather than reading in fragments.

Read the poem at poets.org →

“Wonder”

Thomas Traherne, c.1670

Traherne was writing in the 1660s and had no word for any of this, but he is describing a mind that takes the world in at full volume with nothing turned down. The air is not just air, it is lively and lovely and soft and sweet and fair, four adjectives where most people would manage one. Everything he looks at talks back to him. His manuscripts sat unread for two hundred years and were only published in 1903, partly because nobody quite knew what to make of a man who wrote like that. Read alongside the poets above, who are writing from inside autistic experience and with the language for it, he is a reminder that this way of perceiving is not new and never was a fault. It is just rarely written down this joyfully.

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