Autistic people’s rights are being threatened. Our worth is being questioned. And suddenly, we’re facing a bizarre accusation that an autistic child will never grow up to write a poem.
This call for work sought poetry by autistic writers that is socially-engaged, politically-charged, and geared toward raising our voices together against oppression and erasure. The work we received defied my expectations and the very definition of what it means to write protest poetry when one’s existence itself is an act of dissent.
Thank you to all of the contributors who have come together to make our voices heard. Thank you to all of those who stay by us in this fight. In the words of contributor [sarah] Cavar, who was gracious enough to write a more proper introduction to this folio—“thank you, tylenol.”
Which is to say, I’m glad we are who we are. And fuck anyone who has a problem with that.
Sarah Clark, editor
October 2025
They say each poem’s an engine w/ an animal heart.
Wholed by a light at the snuff of your day,
autistic. Please love poets we are the first
who do not yield to their authority.
—Derek Yen, “Cento for Autistic Poets Whose Words Offer a Map of Possibility When My Words Are Lost”
Lately, I’ve been getting up before dawn. I drink my coffee in the dark against the glow of my computer screen, shotgunning the PDFs saved to my desktop. When the coffee is gone, I pull on my shoes and drive in the dark to the path where I run—me, my headphones, my music, my stories, the deer, the herons, the still lake water, its misty halo. I listen to the songs on a secret playlist of music that embarrasses me, but to which some part of me is still pulled to listen. During these mornings, I rarely think about the characters in whatever manuscript I’m preparing to share with the public. I think about the characters I have held since childhood, whose lives I envisioned in moments not unlike this one, while listening to embarrassing music and pacing the length of the yard in my childhood home.
I am not supposed to be good at metaphor, but let me try this once: the pacing girlthing that I was, much like the pacing entities I am now (whose shadow sub-selves also rattle around inside this one flesh body), are an embodiment of autistic poetics. At least, a part of it. They are repetitive, restricted, embarrassing, bizarre. They are all of those things, at least, to the outsider’s eye; inside our body there is instead a gathering of intense feeling, relief, excitement, imagination. This feeling cannot be released in the usual way. Prose is all wrong. It needs to be poetry because it is agrammatical. Taking inventory, missing parts. The stories in my head are recursive. They have no endings. They grow in the shape of my comfort. Characters are built out, changed, scenarios repeated. The beauty rests in the familiarity of its rhythm. There is a beauty in the respite of the word, even (and especially) when the word is difficult to pronounce.
*
In a recent conversation with an allistic colleague, I mentioned that I resonate neither with the framing of autism as a superpower, nor simply as an individual medical problem. This isn’t to say I don’t consider autism a disability, because I do: after all, as autistics, we certainly experience interpersonal and structural ableism that alienates us from abled/sane life. Instead it is to say that I understand autism less as a matter of individual identification (medical or otherwise) and more as a politic, an orientation, and a relationship to norms. To be openly autistic can be an expression of dissent—what Taylor Tiezst, in “Duplex for [Autistic] Soverignty,” describes as a “site of resistance” which can move us toward collective liberation.
Another way of saying this is that I am identifying less with my diagnosis and more with my people, which, in an age which requires a folio titled autistic protest poetry is necessary, is an important shift. It is a shift in a discourse which has largely relied on autistic silence, on the notion that the autistic mind is opaque and interpretable only by parents and designated medical providers. While much has been made of the trope that we, autistic people, exist only in our own worlds, seemingly lacking in a shared sense of personhood allowing us to connect with our allistic counterparts, it has become clear that autistic silence, when it exists, exists as the result of deliberate muzzling rather than personal pathology. Let me be clear: we have a lot to say.
Sarah Clark invited me to write this introduction for the folio they edited because I, in their words, know more about autistic poetry than they do. Maybe that’s true, but I also think what many autistic people share (regardless of literary credentials) is a defamiliarized relationship to language that lends itself to the poetic, the experimental. If we are to think about poetics in repetition, in opacity, in silence, in rhythm and movement, these can also be attributed to the non-normative and unexpected “behaviors” routinely pathologized in autistic bodyminds. When they occur in those diagnosed with autism, it seems, they cannot be the result of concerted thought or commitment to an artistic (here, I note a slippage between autistic and artistic, recalling my grandmother’s thick New England accent which would render the two indistinguishable) vision. Rather, autistic creative achievement must be a fluke. The work of an idiot savant.
The trope of “savant syndrome,” of course, deprives autistic people of rhetorical personhood. It forecloses the possibility of the quotidian autistic, which most of us are: the autistic person who, like anyone else, can work hard at something and get pretty good. Instead, it creates autistic people along a spectrum of exception: exceptionally competent or exceptionally incompetent, either way more worthy of gawking than respect, impenetrable in their singularity. In any case, autistic people must be the exception. Whether exceptionally intelligent or condemned to intellectual “failure,” we must be outliers, what autistic rhetorician Remi Yergeau calls “demi-rhetors” perpetually unable to speak reliably about our needs and experiences. We must be classifiable in our relative distance from normalcy yet never worthy of evaluation on our own merits, our own potential.
*
“Normal” is a political project, as is the notion of exceptionality. Hans Asperger’s now-infamous work as a clinician involved delineating children deemed educable from those deemed uneducable—that is, those assimilable into Nazi visions of productive citizenship and those marked for eugenic elimination. (Of course, such attitudes and practices, to which readers of this folio likely need no introduction, continue in the present day).
On a larger scale, the difference between “normal” and “exceptional” can be seen in the horrors those at the heart of empire, and those imbued with unearned social privileges like whiteness, maleness, abledness, and cisheterosexuality, tolerate in “Others” but would refuse for themselves. Since I began working on this introduction, which has now reached an unwieldy length, Greta Thunberg has forced international audiences to examine this hypocrisy, using her capture and torture by the israeli military as a platform from which to draw attention to the genocide of Palestinians. Thunberg, an openly autistic white cis woman, demands that audiences critically interrogate their disproportionate attention to her suffering at the expense of racialized Palestinians.
While Thunberg, given her extraordinary stature (in addition to her extraordinary moral courage) is an exception in her own right, this particular act of social disruption emblematizes something I love about autistic creative practice: a sharpness, perhaps even a “spikiness,” which challenges common sense notions of worthiness and voice. Here I deliberately reclaim “spikiness” from its association with the autistic developmental profile, which may leave a Doctor of Philosophy unable to hold a pencil or read a map. (Not that I would know.) If to be spiky in a clinicized sense is to exist on a spectrum of diagnosable exception, the approach to autism—and autistic poetics in particular –– that interests me most is one whose spikiness is intentional, political, and collective, something capable of interrogating and transforming our relationships to place, language, and power.
If we are to look at what autism does on a social level, rather than try to answer etiological questions about what it is and where it comes from, we can see again a kind of poetry—what I, in a previously-published poem titled “a small something,” call a shapegrammar shift. I didn’t know at the time what I meant by “shapegrammar shift,” nor exactly what I meant at all when I wrote the poem “A small something.” Much like one of my poems included in this folio, “Poem for my empire,” its writing arose out of a sense of frustration with, to paraphrase Foucault, the order of things: namely, the idea that our feelings of distress at the state of the world must have names, justifications, and ultimate solutions, or else be rejected as Mad and bad. Instead, I want to draw attention to the gap between what we sense, what makes sense of itself on our bodyminds (what Alexis Deese-Smith names “the brokenness that bears my signature”), and what we have the capacity to language.
*
Autistic poetry is a kind of scream, you know? Or perhaps, the autistic scream is a kind of poetry? I say this not only because it is true, but because I know it is something lawmakers now fight breathlessly to dispute.
In many ways, the opacity of meaning here is part of the plan: it is a form of noncompliance with the demand to make all disabled cultural output focused on confession, hardship, and recovery. In this poem, I observe a small something, express oblique fear, but I do not resolve its presence in my life any more than I can resolve accusations of worthlessness by rabid republicans convinced I cannot write a poem. (And I certainly can write a poem, albeit a poem they won’t like.) So I invent small something to hold my hand as I walk a strange epistemic tightrope between illegibility and legibility, too autistic and not autistic enough.
The small something could be a creature, perhaps a technology. Maybe, in more abstract terms, a political orientation or set of social norms. Looking back, I now understand “A small something” as part of a larger body of autistic poetic work, which, in my view, are always and already “protesting” neuronormative creative and political frameworks. Thinking back to the misleading figure of the savant and this demand for autistic exceptionality, it seems to me that to impute autistic life into our creative practices, to document it as it exists and not as our neurotypical counterparts with it were, then we must turn to a form prepared to resist normative grammars and restrictive relationships to language, activity, and achievement. After all, these very restrictions—this sociocultural “common sense”—are what got us into this mess in the first place: demands for tact over honesty, ambiguity over courage.
Instead, I want live in a poetics which refuses common sense, a poetics of autism.
*
Coda:
A fellow trans writer posts online, thank you, tylenol, for creating some of the most beautiful girls and theys I have ever slept with.
My best friend and I work ourselves into a frenzied banter, a stimmy flow. My head hurts, and I grin maniacally, bottle in my hand. I say to her, guess what I’m about to take.
[sarah] Cavar
October 2025