Composing at the wrist

I came to all of this backwards, through my own late diagnosis: I came to it the way you find out the name of a plant that has been growing by your door for 30 years. The evidence was already in the poems. ‘POLLY POCKET’, which this journal published in August, is spoken over an open palm, and it begins the only way a monotropic eye can begin, by listing: “a bed with a coverlet painted on, / a pond with fish painted on, / a horse the size of a grain of rice.” The list is the look. The poem cannot love the miniature world in summary; it has to touch each thing in turn. And the touched things come back near the end, held in one repeated word: “The queen is still in the shell. / The fish are still in the pond.” Still is where repetition and duration meet. Say a thing is still there, twice, and you are no longer reporting. You are keeping. The poem also knows what the world made of that eye: “a symptom. A deficit. A thing to grow out of”, and its answer is not an argument but an imperative, the poem closing its case by opening a fist: “if anyone has ever told you / the way you pay attention is wrong, / open your hand.” I wrote it before I could have told you it was a poetics. Attention was the stim all along: the gaze that pools and returns, pools and returns, monotropic as a tide. Monotropism, Dinah Murray, Mike Lesser and Wenn Lawson called it 20 years ago, attention that runs deep in few channels rather than shallow in many. They were describing minds. They had also, without quite saying so, described lyric.

That figure is not casual. My current collection-in-progress, Propagation: a neurodivergent herbarium, mounts each poem beneath a working botanical label, and the label’s quietest field is Determinavit: the botanist who finally identified the specimen, and when, often decades after it was collected. A plant can lie correctly pressed and wrongly named for half a century. The Determinavit line is the closest form I have found for late diagnosis, and the collection’s repetitions are built to be read as stims rather than merely to contain them. The incantation drawer says it plainest, in the voice of a lichen:

The rain is a milk
the coolest pour
I drink it down
I drink it down
I drink it down

Its middle drawers move through pantoums, whose lateral, runner-like returns I chose for the same reason Ottaway chooses them: the form performs the replay. And one line runs through the whole book, spoken by fleabane, a plant native to this coast yet classed and sprayed as a weed: You can pull me. The root breaks where you grip it. You met the line earlier in this essay, being dosage; here is its working life. It recurs in three registers across three drawers, first as accusation, then trapped inside a villanelle as grief, finally broken open into something like hope, the breakage completed: the root breaks where you grip it, and that is how it spreads. Same words, same order, three different regulations. This is the double action of the stim demonstrated from inside: the repetition is not the meaning. The repetition is the instrument, and what it plays depends on the hand.

Here is what composition feels like from inside a stimming body, or at least this one. I draft aloud, walking, and the first thing a poem is, before it is any words in particular, is a rhythm at the wrist and the jaw. A rocking. The words come to fill the rocking, the way the tide fills a pool it has already shaped. I collect small objects and arrange and rearrange them, and a manuscript, for me, is a drawer of this kind; my chapbook-in-progress Worry takes the held object itself as its unit, poems worked smooth the way a thumb works a stone. ‘Stim Rock’, whose refrain has been keeping this essay company, says why:

I rub them until they warm.
I rub them until
they almost breathe.
I rub them because the body
needs somewhere to put
what the mouth cannot say.

Revision is not carving away repetition but tuning it: deciding which returns regulate the poem and which merely repeat it – because there is a difference, and the difference is felt, not counted. A stim is not any repetition. It is the repetition that works, the one the body chooses and keeps. Form is the stim a poem keeps.

I had been told, in workshops, more than once, that my drafts repeated themselves. The advice was always the same: vary it, cut the second occurrence, trust the reader to remember. It is good advice for a certain kind of poem, and it is neuronormative advice, resting on an unexamined premise: that repetition is cost, that the ideal poem is maximally various, that the reader’s pleasure is novelty and the writer’s job is supply. Some readers’ pleasure is novelty. Mine is return. When I stopped obeying, my poems found their actual shape, which is tidal: the image that comes back changed, the phrase that will not leave and should not be made to.

This is why I want stimming understood as a form of composition and not only a theme available for representation. The distinction matters. A poem about autism can be written in any shape. A poem that stims makes its meaning with its motion, and it can be about anything at all: bats, tides, fleabane, the doctor’s waiting room. Neurodivergence in poetry is so often located at the level of content – the disclosure poem, the diagnosis narrative – and those poems matter, mine included. But the deeper archive is formal, and it is enormous, and most of it was never labelled, because the labels are younger than the practice by several thousand years.

The poem as technology

Let me say the largest version of the claim plainly. We are used to thinking of the poem as an object that represents experience, including neurodivergent experience: the poem as portrait, as testimony, as window. Stim poetics proposes the poem as a technology that stims with us. A refrain is a device in the engineer’s sense before it is a device in the rhetorician’s: a small machine for producing return – portable, requiring no battery, running on breath. Edgar Allen Poe understood the machine part frankly. ‘The Bells’ is barely about bells at all; it is an apparatus for producing “bells, bells, bells” in the mouth until the mouth itself is ringing, and generations of readers who would never flap in public have operated it with pleasure. When you read a pantoum, the pantoum reads you back into rhythm. When you say the memorised poem in the waiting room, you are operating equipment.

If this is right, some things follow for how we read and how we teach. It suggests that the neurodivergent reader who reads the same poem hundreds of times is not stuck but practising, in the musician’s sense. It suggests that formal poetry’s supposed artificiality has the same relationship to the body as a rocking chair’s artificiality: built, yes, and built to fit. It suggests that when a workshop tells a poet to vary her repetitions, someone should first ask what the repetitions are doing, and for whom. And it suggests a criticism that asks of any repeating structure not what does this emphasise but what does this regulate: a small change in the question that changes most of the answers.

Three times now the same four words have come back through this essay, each time with different weather behind them. They are the refrain of ‘Stim Rock’, a poem about the rocks I carry in my pockets, printed whole at the end of this essay, and here they have done what they do in the pocket: come round, and round, and steadied the hand that held them. If they steadied you even a little on the return, you already know everything the essay knows.

The tide does not vary its material. It has one gesture and it makes the whole coast with it: every pool, every polished stone, every soft-edged piece of glass that ends up in a collector’s pocket. On weekends I take my repetitions to the sea, to the ladies’ baths at Coogee, where women have been coming down the steps to repeat themselves in salt water for more than a century. Standing there I sometimes flap my hands, now that I let myself, and the water and I repeat together, neither of us making a point, both of us making a shore. My hand is open. The queen is still in the shell. The eels are still in the river, and on Monday I will walk beside them again. The poem has been down here with us the whole time. It was never only saying something. It was rocking, and holding out its hand, and asking the oldest question one body can ask another: like this? like this? like this?