Sometimes, out of nowhere, my brain starts quoting poetry I memorised for the HSC. It is nearly always the same poem. ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ by Emily Dickinson, studied at seventeen for an exam I can no longer remember sitting: the mourners who keep “treading – treading”, the service like a drum that keeps beating until the mind, she says, goes numb. I did not choose to keep it. Somewhere between the practice essays and now, the poem moved in, and it does not come back to me as content. It comes back as equipment. It arrives when the head is crowded, right on cue: an overwhelm poem turning up to meter the overwhelm, the doubled gerunds not describing a flooding nervous system so much as counting one into bearable units, beat by beat. Anyone who has shut down in a loud room has read that poem from inside. My brain, without asking me, reaches for it the way my hand reaches for the rocks in my pockets. It knows what it is doing. It took me until a late diagnosis to catch up.

The recitations happen most on my walk to work, beside a river that never stops repeating itself. The Parramatta River is tidal all the way to the city that shares its name, which surprises people who know it only from maps: this far from the sea, the mangroves still fill and drain twice a day, the ferry wake still arrives at the seawall in the same unhurried laps, the same water rehearsing the same arrival. This is Burramatta, Darug Country: the place where the eels lie down, and the eels still return, and have been returning for longer than there have been poems to say so. I walk it every working day, so the walk itself is a refrain: same path, same tide at a different height, same heron in a different spot, same Dickinson going round in the same skull, a poem learned on Gadigal Country now reciting itself on Darug Country, commuting with me all these years. Nobody stands on the riverbank and accuses the water of redundancy. Nobody tells the tide it has made its point. We understand, watching a river breathe, that repetition is not a failure of invention. It is how a place stays alive.

Poetry has always known what neurodivergent readers know in the body. Anaphora, refrain, the rocking of metre, the flick and return of the pantoum: these are the motions a stimming body makes. The hand at the wrist, the rocking at the hips, the phrase said over and over under the breath until it goes soft at the edges. And yet criticism, for the most part, treats repetition as a device. It is catalogued as technique, praised as emphasis, diagnosed as excess when there is too much of it. What it is almost never called is what it so often is: regulation.

I want to propose a different reading practice.

Call it stim poetics: an approach that reads the repetitions of poetry as stimming, and stimming as a form of composition. I mean this more than metaphorically. I mean that the repeating structures of poems and the repeating movements of neurodivergent bodies belong to the same family of acts, that they do the same work of soothing, sorting, intensifying and holding, and that when a poem repeats, it is not merely representing a mind. It is offering to regulate alongside one.

The device and the body

Open almost any glossary of poetic terms and you will find repetition filed under rhetoric. Anaphora is the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive lines. Epistrophe is its mirror at the end. Refrain is a line or lines recurring at intervals. The definitions are accurate the way an anatomy textbook is accurate: everything named, nothing moving.

What the glossary cannot say is what the refrain feels like from inside. Ask anyone who has recited a poem to themselves in a hospital waiting room, or on a delayed train, or at three in the morning when the mind will not stop its awful spinning. The poem is not communicating in those moments. It finished communicating long ago; you know it by heart, which is to say its information content is zero. What it is doing is regulating. The known words in the known order, arriving on the known beat, are doing for the nervous system what a rocking chair does, what the worry stone does, what my thumbnail does against the ridged edge of a matchbox in my pocket, what a komboloi does in Greek hands – the beads sent around and around, worry given a circumference. This is what my HSC Dickinson has been doing all these years, unthanked: the funeral in her brain conducting order in mine.

And what the said poem does for the reciter, the written poem does for the writer. On the worst days I do not draft so much as administer:

You can pull me. The root breaks where you grip it.

One line of mine, from the collection I am writing now. I will tell you later what it is for. For whole afternoons it has not been for anything. It has been what the beads are for, what the matchbox is for: the mouth’s worry stone, said until the hour fits the hand. The line is not information either. It is dosage.

Neurodivergent communities have a word for this class of action: stimming, from self-stimulatory behaviour, a clinical term the community long ago took home and repainted. Stimming is not an autistic possession, though autism is where it has been most heavily policed; it is neurodivergent property in common. Autistic people rock, flap, hum and echo. ADHDers fidget, tap, click and pace. Tourettic bodies keep a returning grammar of their own, though the Tourette’s community is right that a tic is not a stim, and I do not want to collapse the two: a tic arrives whether or not anybody chose it. What the word covers is repetition a nervous system reaches for, sometimes by decision and more often below I – and I should not overstate the choosing, because a stim is not always something a person could put down because a room would prefer it. You will not find stimming in the DSM, not under that name. What you will find is the behaviour scattered through the manual like contraband. For autism it is diagnostic criterion B.1, “stereotyped or repetitive motor movements, use of objects, or speech”, trailed by a list of examples that reads like a found poem: lining up toys, flipping objects, echolalia, idiosyncratic phrases. For ADHD, it is the fidgeting and tapping catalogued under hyperactivity. And where the repetition is judged to belong to no other diagnosis, the manual supplies one just for it: Stereotypic Movement Disorder, repetition as a condition in its own right. The manual has been keeping a catalogue of the body’s poetics and calling it symptoms. For decades that catalogue justified training the stim out of autistic children as though it were a weed in the lawn of the person, and in plenty of clinics and classrooms it still does. The neurodivergent counter-account is simple and, once heard, obvious: stimming is regulation. It manages a sensory world that arrives too loudly. It expresses joy that exceeds the available words. It is the body thinking in its own language, which happens to be a language of return. And it is often simply good, which is reason enough; a stim does not have to be useful to be allowed.

Stim poetics begins from a suspicion that poetry is this language written down. Not all poetry, and not only poetry written by neurodivergent people. But the deep structures of verse, the ones that predate literacy, are rhythmic and repetitive because they were built by and for bodies. Metre is entrainment: the poem sets a pulse and your pulse negotiates with it. Rhyme is prediction and reward, the click of the expected sound arriving. Refrain is the return to base, the tide coming back in. The oldest anthologies are stim archives: Psalm 136 returns “for his mercy endureth for ever” 26 times, once for every verse, a congregation rocking in language. And English poetry’s great rocker said it in his opening breath: Whitman’s seashore elegy begins, “Out of the cradle endlessly rocking”, and the whole poem sways on that participle, the metre doing at the scale of the line what the cradle does at the scale of the child. Oral cultures made poems this way partly so they could be remembered, yes. But memory and regulation are not different systems. We remember what rocks us.

A word about where I am standing. I write as a late-diagnosed neurodivergent poet and as an academic who works on neurodivergence, which makes me both the subject and the analyst here, and the two do not always agree. Most of what I know about the stim I know from the inside, from a nervous system that had been rocking, collecting and reciting for decades before it had a vocabulary for any of it; the scholarship reached me second, and it reached me late. Diagnosis in adulthood, with a job and a supervisor and the words to ask for it, is a form of access rather than an achievement, and what I can see from here is shaped by it. Some things I cannot see from here. I do not speak for autistic people who do not use speech, whose relationship to repetition and to being interpreted by others is not mine. Kit Kavanagh-Ryan, whose poems I read later in this essay, writes out of a history of surgery and gait charts that I have not lived, and the crip poetics that history belongs to is not mine to speak for. I am a settler on Darug Country, walking beside a river that was named and known long before any of this. Critical Neurodivergent Studies, the framework I am building and the one this essay works inside, inherits my position along with my questions.

I should say plainly that this is not a conversation I am starting. It is one I am joining, at a particular angle. Crip poetics has been asking versions of these questions for two decades, since Jim Ferris first argued that disability poetry was a form and not merely a subject, and its Australian conversation is current and crowded with life: Tim Loveday and Andy Jackson asking, in Griffith Review, whether poetry itself is disabled; Kit Kavanagh-Ryan cripping their own poems in these pages and then setting out, line by line, how they did it; Caitlin McGregor writing on mad pride and the disruptive potential of autistic storytelling; the Admissions anthology gathering writing from inside mental illness; Red Room’s MAD Poetry commissions; the communities of practice around Schizy Inc. In the scholarship, Julia Miele Rodas has read the diagnostic literature against its own grain, showing that what the DSM catalogues as autistic disturbance: the echo, the list, the verbal ricochet is – feature for feature – a poetics.

What stim poetics hopes to add is specificity: a neurodivergent claim about repetition in particular, about form as regulation, which sits beside crip poetics without dissolving into it. The stim is the neurocrip gesture par excellence. It deserves its own poetics, and its own readers.