Owls Easy on the Ways of Language
If you study science fiction, you become familiar with the concept of world-building. Writers use details, piece by piece, to construct an alternative reality for the reader to cognitively inhabit. But in truth, all writing is a form of world-building. Every story unfolds its world to the reader and every poem as well.
Science fiction writers often use world-building to summon forth a world they fear will come (dystopia) or a world that might show us life farther along the arch toward justice (utopia). In either case, the writer wants their reader’s mind, and their ethical imagination, to stretch.
So much of autistic literature bends toward explaining autistic experience, which often does little justice to its richness and depth and variety. As Adam Wolfond writes, we must work “toward questions other than what is autism.” For instance, what if we replaced what altogether? What if we asked how is autism instead? That’s the kind of question that finds its answers in Adam’s poems. As his most recent poem unspooled during our weekly session, I felt invited into a world; a world of rapacious nature, pacing language, and surprising patterns.
Adam’s wild-conversant mind finds its thinking mirrored in the swoops and sweeps of winged beings. His experience of the world is suffused with water’s wanting ways. You could try and explain Adam’s relation to the world, but how much better to experience it? That’s the rare opportunity that a poem like this affords the reader. Adam’s gorgeous use of tumbling language–The ways of threes / are the ways of partly / laking partly iridescent / waters that ripen with / the ways of pacing–awakens within us a sense of his how, and in the process our minds find new suppleness and pliancy that was previously impossible.
A poem like this one is a gift to the mind that wants to grow. That’s the promise of neurodiversity. Our worlds touch and expand. In these all-too-rare encounters we each become more than we were.
Partly laking partly iridescent,
Chris