The loop: Esther Ottaway

If Murray shows stim poetics as texture, Esther Ottaway shows it as architecture. Her 2023 collection she doesn’t seem autistic (Puncher & Wattmann) is, to my knowledge, the most formally explicit act of stim poetics yet published in this country, though she does not use the term. The book, written from her own late diagnosis and her daughter’s, and voiced through a composite autistic woman and girl, is saturated in the repeating forms: pantoums, list-poems, litanies, anagrams, and no fewer than five villanelles, some mutated into invented variants whose names themselves stim, the villanelle looped through wordplay into new species of itself. Ottaway is also, with Andy Jackson and Kerri Shying, an editor of the 2024 anthology Raging Grace: Australian writers speak out on disability (Puncher & Wattmann); she is helping build the room this essay hopes to speak in.

Consider what a pantoum is, mechanically: a form in which every line must be said twice, each one leaving and then returning two lines later, so the poem advances only by looking back over its shoulder. And the villanelle, its obsessive cousin, in which two lines take turns coming back until they finally arrive together: Edwin Arlington Robinson’s ‘The House on the Hill’ turns on the repetends, “They are all gone away” and “There is nothing more to say”, grief with nothing new to add, adding it anyway. This journal knows these compulsions intimately. Eileen Chong’s ‘Pantoum for My Parents’, in Cordite, replays a single wounding family conversation about a poem, shame arriving on schedule with the form; and Cordite‘s scholarly essays have read the repeating forms closely before, pantoums and villanelles as sites of constraint and thwarted agency in the poetry of Emma Lew. Those readings take constraint thematically: law, gender, inheritance. Stim poetics adds the body. Because consider what masking is: the exhausting autistic labour, disproportionately demanded of women, of rehearsing and replaying every social exchange; the conversation run in advance, the conversation run again afterward, each line of the self said twice. Ottaway’s pantoums and villanelles build that condition into machinery, the dismissals returning on schedule the way intrusive replay actually returns, and her very title is one of the looping voices: she doesn’t seem autistic. You find these forms’ rhythms pleasant, the book implies, because you have never had them stuck.

The collection’s most concentrated stim is a poem called ‘Neurodiverse’, and its constraint is severe beyond anything the inherited forms demand: every line is an anagram of the title word. Twelve letters, and the poem is not permitted any others. It is the gestalt method taken to the letter: the diagnostic word held in the hand and turned, turned, turned, until it confesses everything it contains. And what it contains is a whole late-diagnosis arc – the nervous wreckage, the pleading to revise and undo, the exhaustion of enduring – until the final rearrangement finds, inside the same twelve letters, the instruction the whole book has been looking for: redo universe. The letters that spell the label spell the liberation. Nothing new is ever added. Everything changes. This is the fleabane principle at the smallest possible scale, same material, different regulation, and it is my title’s seam again, skim to stim, wall to well, worked here through an entire poem with a lexicon of one word.

The book’s great anaphora poem is harder to sit inside. ‘Night vision: apology to a late-diagnosed daughter’ is a mother’s litany that runs nearly unpunctuated down the page, every clause beginning with for: for the toothbrush forced in, for the reward charts, for the time-outs done to Supernanny’s specification, for every piece of neuronormative parenting advice obeyed to the letter on a child it could only injure. The anaphora is the replay. The poem can no more stop returning to the scenes than the mother can, and the withheld punctuation means there is nowhere to breathe, which is accurate. Then the turn, and the turn is a change of list: the apology lands, and the poem begins renaming the daughter in threes, parallax, shoal, diaspora, the same engine of accumulation that carried guilt now carrying wonder. It is Lamisse Hamouda’s gesture in another key, renaming as repair, and it is the fleabane turn again: the list was the wound’s form, and then the list is the love’s form, and the form never changed. The hand did.

Elsewhere the book shows the stim’s involuntary edge and its blessed one. ‘The viola d’amore on why she avoids conversation’ speaks as the instrument whose sympathetic strings sound without being touched: resonance with no off switch; empathy overarousal rendered as luthiery; an echo that never consented to echoing; the dark twin’s territory scored for strings. And ‘The autistic woman’s self-compassion blessing’ turns litany to benediction, each couplet laying a burden down and blessing what replaces it, including one blessing that reaches straight across this essay to Hamouda: may quokkas carry away your unfinished projects. Two neurodivergent poets, separately, blessing the unfinished. What moves me most in Ottaway’s book is this: the loops are not only wounds. The lists accumulate the way special interests accumulate, with relish. The blessings hold. This is the double action of the stim, which is also the double action of the refrain: the same motion that carries distress can carry joy, and the body – like the poem – does not always announce which.

The quick return: Lamisse Hamouda

The ADHD stim runs at another tempo: less the long rock than the quick flick, attention leaving and snapping back, the mind’s rubber band. Lamisse Hamouda’s ‘Instead of ADHD’, commissioned for Red Room Poetry’s MAD Poetry project and published in October 2025, the year of her diagnosis, writes from inside this rhythm, and it announces its method directly beneath its title: after Andrea Gibson’s ‘Instead of Depression’. The poem is a kept construction. Gibson built the template, the instead-poem, the reframe held open long enough to live inside, and Hamouda takes the borrowed form the way the gestalt speaker takes a borrowed sentence: whole, and makes it hers. Echo’s method again, and this time it is also inheritance, one poet regulating with another poet’s frame.

What the poem does inside that frame is pure ADHD poetics, because its repetition is not a returning line but a returning act. Every clause performs the same gesture with new material: an imperative to rename. Call the condition an adventure. Recast the unfinished projects as a celebration of process, since nothing here rushes its finish. The hummingbird is produced as a character witness, a creature that sometimes flies backward and has never been asked to apologise for it. And when the poem reaches the fleeting thought, the diagnostic complaint itself, it cannot rename it once. It renames it three times in one breath, “a sparkle, a swing rope over / stepping stones, a zigzag to your well”, each metaphor letting go of the last mid-air, the list itself zigzagging, the form doing the attention it defends. This is the ADHD tempo of the stim: not the same words again but the same motion again, re-approach as refrain.

And the landing is the poem’s finest formal argument. The well arrives, at the poem’s last breath, exactly where a wall had been: the whole reframe achieved at the scale of a single vowel, the smallest possible repetition-with-difference, one sound moving so that the obstruction becomes a depth. My title’s four words work the same seam, skim to stim, stone to rock. Hamouda shows that seam bearing the weight of a whole poem. And the tenderness of the close, the direct address Gibson’s poems taught a generation, makes the imperatives safe to obey: this is renaming done to someone, gently, the way you talk a person somewhere safer.

Where Ottaway’s pantoums dramatise being unable to stop returning, Hamouda’s poem works the opposite shift: the anchor is not a line but a frame, the instead-construction as home base, the swing rope’s fixed post while everything else swings. Every parent knows this technology; it is why children’s books repeat, and why the repetition is the pleasure and not the price. Reading the poem, your own attention learns the flick. The poem does not depict a brain. It lends you one.

This is the other tempo of stim poetics, and it is worth naming so the field does not quietly default to autism: the fidget as well as the rock, the return that keeps attention fed as well as the return that keeps the world survivable. A poetics of the stim will need both hands.