The spill: Kit Kavanagh-Ryan

Stim poetics is a neurodivergent claim, and it should be careful at its own borders. The most useful way I know to be careful is to read a crip poet who has already worked this ground, and to notice where the two accounts meet and where they have to part. Kit Kavanagh-Ryan published ‘Words and Spills: Disability, Sexuality and Cripping Your Poetry’ in this journal in 2017, alongside four poems and their recordings: ‘Kitchen Prep’, ‘Left Song’, ‘Wordspill’, ‘Mirrors’. The essay is about surgery, desire and the long labour of passing. It sets itself against the medical model of disability that Michael Oliver named, and it takes from Alison Kafer the caution that no experience of disability is universal. It is also, though it never uses the word, one of the most exact accounts of compositional repetition I have read.

Their account of their own method works at a scale criticism usually skips. Spaces are elided so that words crowd into compounds, wordspill and widevoiced and needlesleep; hyphens bridge the gaps the compounds cannot close; em-dashes carry a phrase over the line break instead of letting it land. Read as prosody, this is repetition below the level of the line, the same joining motion made over and over until the surface of the poem is mostly seams. Ottaway holds a single word and turns it until it gives up its anagrams. Kavanagh-Ryan presses two words together until the join is the sound of the poem.

In the recordings the doubling goes further, because they read with their screen reader as well as with their own voice, and the machine puts its emphasis on the wrong syllable, never having been taught where the wrong syllable is. Norma Cole’s readings are the influence they name. The screen reader is not a workaround in that essay; it is an instrument, credited the way anyone credits a co-reader. What the pairing makes is the poem said twice at once, by a body that spent more than 15 years in therapy learning to conceal what it does, and by a device that was never trained at all. Their essay is clear about which of those voices they are setting down for the length of the recording: the one they built in order to pass. Ottaway’s pantoums build masking into machinery. Kavanagh-Ryan turns the mask off in public and lets the screen reader speak. Crip poetics and neurodivergent poetics have different words for that. The gesture is recognisably one gesture.

The poems return the way the body returns to theatre. ‘Kitchen Prep’ opens and closes on “I have done this before”, and in between the lines come back shortened: a phrase that spreads needles and sleep and silver across a whole breath arrives later compacted into one of their compounds, the anaesthetic doing to the language what it does to the hour. The mother’s voice at the dinner table returns too, in brackets, unchanged and still unanswerable. And in ‘Mirrors’ a single sentence is given to two speakers. A surgeon marks the body in blue and says he does not want to get it wrong; later, with new hands in the same places, the sentence comes again with the exclamation taken out. Nothing has been added. Everything about the touch has changed. That is Echo’s method run through a life instead of a myth, and it is the phrase this essay keeps circling: never quite the same.

‘NDIS Access Request Form 2022’, published here in 2023, is a pantoum made out of the paperwork of proving disability to a scheme that asks for the proof repeatedly, and it begins and ends with “It’s paperwork for dinner.” Its repetends behave the way their compounds do, arriving changed. Settle migrates through the poem: the exercise list settles beside the electricity bill, then the knee and the wrist are ordered to settle, and then the form puts its own question about whether the condition has settled in the last three months. One word doing the state’s work and the body’s work by turns. Then the poem takes the form’s sentence about a condition remaining unchanged and says it a second time with a single substitution, so that what remains unchanged on the return is the panic. The state’s sentence is taken into the mouth and given back with the damage showing, and one word has moved, which is Hamouda’s wall and well working in the other direction.

This is where the pantoum earns its place in an argument about regulation. The three-monthly re-attestation is a repetition nobody chose. The pantoum is one they did. The poem does not get out of the loop and does not pretend to; it takes the loop into a form that can hold it and returns it with its actual shape showing. Kavanagh-Ryan is not writing about stimming and I am not going to say that they are. Their repetitions belong to a crip poetics with its own lineage and its own arguments. What the two poetics share is a refusal to hear a returning line as a fault in the writing, and Kafer’s caution disciplines both of them: no experience of disability is universal, and no account of repetition should be either.

The dark twin

Not all repetition stims. There is a dark twin: repetition engineered to seize a nervous system rather than settle it. The jingle. The slogan. The drill chant. The form that comes round every three months to ask whether you are still what you were. The feed that has learned to stim you so that you will not leave. The devices are identical to poetry’s, which is exactly the danger; the questions are not. Who chose this return? Whom does the rocking serve? Can the loop be put down? Kipling’s ‘Boots’ knows the difference from the wrong side: “boots — boots — boots — boots — movin’ up an’ down again”, the count not chosen, the march that owns the marcher, repetition with the discharge taken out of it. Set beside it Alfred Tennyson breaking his grief on the same stones three times, “Break, break, break, / On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!”, and you can feel the axis turn: the same engine, opposite hands. One is a cage rhythm. The other is a body giving its loss to the tide’s metre because the tide can hold what the body cannot.

And often, and this is the hard part, both at once. A refrain can be residue of the culture that captured you and the instrument you regulate with, co-present in the one line. I have written that co-presence without meaning to. In the elegy drawer of the collection I am writing, an everlasting daisy dries keeping its shape, and the villanelle’s repetend holds the flower and the masked self in the same seven words:

the way it's bent is the way it stays

The keeping of shape is the survival and the injury at once, and the villanelle says the line over because neither meaning will yield. This is why stim poetics is a reading practice and not a checklist. The question is never whether a poem repeats. It is what this repetition is doing, and for whom, now.