April is indeed the cruelest month, at least here on the Avalon; it’s been cold and grey, and we’re due for flurries and freezing rain for the next week or so.
But April is also National Poetry Month, and it’s also Autism Acceptance Month, and even though I don’t love awareness-type months in general, I do love both autism and poetry.
I haven’t written much here (if anything) about having completed my PhD last fall. I haven’t really told that many people in real life either. I suppose I don’t really know what to say. I have been known to adopt the voice of college-era Dr. Nick Riviera from The Simpsons and say, “Seriously, baby, I can prescribe anything I want…” but that’s about as far as I’ve gone to embody my new identity of Dr. Andreae Callanan. Baby steps, right?
I’ve made no progress in adapting my dissertation so I can attempt to find a publisher for it (indeed, I can’t even bear to open the file). I was thinking, though, that maybe I could share my talk from my thesis defense, because I do think that was quite good. So here that is, for your enjoyment. I think it sums up a lot of my feelings on autism and poetry (and on the way the two interact).
Content warning: horrible historical psychiatric treatments for autistic children.
On autism, poetry, and being human (originally presented 22 September, 2023, at my thesis defense at Memorial University’s St. John’s Campus)
On June 15, 2023, two days before my 46th birthday, Donald Triplett died in his hometown of Forest, Mississippi, at the age of 89. Donald Triplett was more famously known as Donald T., the child patient of psychiatrist and physician Dr. Leo Kanner; indeed, Donald T. was known as “Case 1,” the first American child diagnosed with autism. To us in the autism world, Donald T. was a boy who loved spinning pots and pans, who hated having his activities interrupted, and who seemed to revel in repeating certain words and phrases: Through the dark clouds shining, Trumpet vine, Chrysanthemum, Dahlia, dahlia, dahlia.
Donald T.’s death hit me hard. Not because I had spent so much time thinking about him, but precisely because I hadn’t. Kanner’s analysis of Donald T. features prominently in my thesis, as it does in the theoretical work with which my thesis engages. I’ve inserted Donald T.’s trademark utterances into papers I’ve presented, and into public talks. And yet, until the news came through my phone of Donald T.’s death, it hadn’t really dawned on me that he had, prior to that point, been alive. If I had thought about it, I probably would have imagined that he, like so many of the mononymic children who populate the documents that make up medical and psychiatric history, had eventually just vanished into an institution somewhere, his sole legacy being that once, for a time, he had been observed in a clinical setting, and was found to be quantifiably unusual. But I didn’t think about it. Through my research, Donald T. had been a data point, a proxy for a certain kind of communication, but not an entire human person. I did the thing that I have accused so many critics and theorists of doing: I dehumanized the autistic subject.
The process of writing this dissertation has been as much about what I haven’t included as it has been about what I have. Like, I imagine, many of the scholars in the room, I have a folder on my desktop filled with half-written chapters deemed not quite right for the project at hand – too broad, too specific, too tangential (even for me). One of these is a chapter I’d tentatively titled “Autism, humanity, and the humanities.” In it, I observe that the humanities—that is, the disciplines where we sit with the question of what makes us human—have not, historically, been a site of conversations about autism. The idea that autistic people are less than fully human is inherent to today’s medical notions of autism and to its attendant therapies. The clinical psychologist Ivar Lovaas, who is credited with having established what would become known as applied behavioural analysis (ABA), is famously quoted as having said, in a 1974 interview with Psychology Today, “you start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic child. You have a person in the physical sense — they have hair, a nose and a mouth — but they are not people in the psychological sense.” In the same interview, Lovaas describes his child patients as “monsters, little monsters,” and explicates to his interviewer the processes of spanking, shouting, restraint, and electric shock that led to his purported breakthroughs with autistic children. Paul Chance, the Psychology Today interviewer, glows with praise for Lovaas and his methods, writing that “[t]o free an autistic child from his compulsion to self-mutilate, to help him communicate with other people, to help him feel love for others and from others, amounts to giving him his humanity.” To Chance, and to Lovaas, humanity is not something the autistic child innately possesses; humanity is bestowed upon the child through strategic physical and psychological abuse. When the child is shocked (literally and figuratively) into submission, then they can be “constructed” into something we can consider human.
Poetry is a particularly human pursuit—perhaps (and I’m aware this might be controversial) one of the most human of pursuits. I feel confident saying this because poetry is one form of expression at which the robots are very bad. Artificial intelligence might produce eerily accurate headshots and dreamy surreal soundscapes and technically adept business writing, but so far it seems pretty hopeless at poetry. Earlier this year, I was invited on to CBC radio with a friend who has been an early adopter of AI for music and visual art. In the CBC studio, with my friend’s laptop, we asked ChatGPT to write poems in various styles, based on simple prompts. The results were comically clunky, and apparently not in an intentional, form-subverting way. Whatever we asked the computer for, and regardless of the style we suggested, the program spit back doggerel in common measure—the meter most commonly associated with Emily Dickinson’s poems, although that’s where any similarity to Dickinson began and ended. The poems were like something written by someone who had been told what a poem was, but who had never actually read one. Which, I suppose, is what was happening. How odd that AI is able to replicate so many forms of human expression, but crashes and burns when asked to compose a poem. (As I write this, it occurs to me that AI probably isn’t great at dance, either, but that’s outside my area of expertise.)
In my thesis, I posit that there is a uniquely autistic mode of engagement with poetry, and that this mode allows for novel interpretations of canonical poetic work. I suggest that Gerard Manley Hopkins’s overflowing sonnet “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” is not, as has been generally accepted, a poem of apocalyptic chaos, but one in which an ailing priest is prompted by a vivid sunset to envision a future where the Protestant and Catholic churches are woven back together, creating a new, redemptive text. I imagine Emily Dickinson’s small, fragmentary poems as part of a life’s work of collecting and capturing everything that is to be known in the world, a project shared by other nineteenth century figures: Charles Darwin, James Murray (the visionary behind the Oxford English Dictionary), and Peter Mark Roget (of thesaurus fame). I examine three of Les Murray’s poetry collections – Translations from the Natural World, Conscious and Verbal, and Poems the Size of Photographs – through an autism studies lens, and examine Murray as an autistic translator, translating texts from one language to another, and translating autistic experience into text. Finally, I examine Anne Carson’s debut collection, Short Talks, as a text that is autistic in form and content, and which luxuriates in (and celebrates) the cognitive and communicative weirdnesses that so many autistic readers find familiar.
My initial decision-making process in selecting these four poets and their work was simply that I liked them; the poems elicited a joy response in me, and that seemed a good enough reason to include them. As an interest-driven learner (like autistic people generally), I didn’t see much sense in committing years of study to anyone whose work I don’t find thrilling. But, as I explain in my concluding chapter, once I started examining the critical responses to my four chosen poets, I found a new and disturbing common thread. Each of the four had been the subject of ableist, and sometimes overtly autistiphobic, derision. For the nineteenth-century poets, terms like “idiotic” were used; Hopkins and Dickinson were babbling, their language was incomprehensible, meaningless, empty. The contemporary poets don’t fare much better: Murray is some sort of alien savant whose writing is both involuntary and impenetrable; Carson is a fraud, of whom critic David Solway asks, “[a]re we really impressed or edified by so autistic a performance?” There are many ways for a critic to express that they’re not fond of a poet’s work; why is disability so readily deployed in critiques of these four poets in particular?
One interesting effect of my research has been a re-evaluation of the relationship between poetry and narrative. Over the course of my doctoral program, I’ve had the pleasure of teaching creative writing – the beginners’ and advanced poetry writing courses – as part of Memorial’s creative writing diploma program. In these courses, I’ve had to explain that, unless we’re talking about epic poems or verse novels or ballads, a poem doesn’t usually relay a narrative; a poem might gesture towards a story, and it might give you enough detail to piece a story together, but that story is usually extrinsic to the poem as it exists on the page. And yet, over the course of this project, the stories around the poets I had chosen to study emerged as central to my position. I became, much to my own surprise, a story person. This meant throwing all my old school, just-the-text-ma’am training (McGill, class of 2000) out the window. Reading the biographical details of my research subjects, leafing through their letters (in the case of Hopkins and Dickinson), and watching their lectures and interviews (in the case of Murray and Carson) as part of my research felt like breaking a taboo. And yet, what an enriching experience it has been to dip my toe into the waters of the archival, to spend time piecing together stories around the poets whose work delights me.
Throughout my thesis, I invoke the notion of a particular and peculiar autistic reading style. I could have used any number of descriptors, but I’d heard the words particular and peculiar placed side-by-side in a passing conversation, and my brain latched on to them. I wrote them on a sticky note and stuck them on the wall above my desk. The two words together felt like an invitation – an exhortation, even – to lean into the weird, the odd, the mis-fit, the out-of-sync, the failure. I’ve done this while holding on to another quotation transcribed on another sticky note, from author/illustrator/animator William Joyce (who some of you may know as the creator of the animated children’s program Roly Poly Olie). Joyce writes, “Sometimes my job is pure joy. When my craft and abilities are put into the service of a Higher Silly.” For all that I wish for this thesis to serve as a crucial addition to the burgeoning field of critical autism studies, I can’t deny that one of the most satisfying and gratifying parts of this research has been interweaving a serious literary study with commentary from some of my favourite moments in comedy. I’ve cited ghosts with no haunting skills, swashbuckling jesters, erudite but terminally bored weather guys, pompous cowboy novelists, and stand-up comics who microdose Ecstasy as part of their creative process. It’s funny to populate a dissertation with these side characters, an act in service of a Higher Silly, my way of showing that I can take the work seriously while still laughing at the absurdity of it all.
In re-reading my thesis in preparation for this defence, I’ve had all the experiences I was warned about by colleagues whose defences were behind them: I’ve gasped in shame at the typos I’d inserted while trying to fix other typos that had already been identified; I’ve found spots where I promised to clarify or elaborate on something and then failed to do it; I’ve found places where my perspective has changed in the last few months, and language that I wouldn’t use as comfortably today. But I haven’t been horrified by the one thing I would have expected: the insertion of my own story, and my own voice, into my research. You would think a poet would be at ease with sharing her vulnerable moments in a format like this one, but expressing one’s human vulnerability in a poem is wholly different than doing so in a scholarly context. Poetry—and especially the formal-leaning poetry that I write, and with which Hopkins, Dickinson, Murray, and Carson all experiment—provides a nice, tidy container for messy feelings. Lengthy prose writing is unbounded and, as such, terrifying. I’m not really a trained autoethnographer, although I have had the great privilege of reading work by some excellent researchers using autoethnographic methods. Learning how and when to insert my voice and my story into my scholarly work—into this dissertation and into other acts of public scholarship—feels like an enormous accomplishment. To do so in the context of a literary study is to insist on foregrounding humanity in the humanities.
When I first read about the death of Donald Triplett last June, I was standing on the sidewalk outside my house, idly scrolling through news items on my phone. I was waiting for my husband to join me so we could drive to a local garden centre to pick up some seedlings for the front yard’s raised beds and mismatched pots. My final weeks of dissertation writing hadn’t left me with much time for gardening, and this was meant to be our one-stop birthday shop for vegetables and ornamentals. Once at the nursery, I collected my usual selection of cherry tomatoes and nasturtiums and kitchen herbs for the front step. I also chose something I had never grown before: a sunset-orange dahlia in memory of Donald T. Despite a summer of vicious slug attacks, unseasonable cold followed by unseasonable heat, and a degree of neglect, this dahlia bloomed its socks off for three months. As I read this today, the last flower is still full and open and vibrant. It feels almost too cliché to be worth reporting, and yet, here I am, reveling in the cringe. Every time I’ve walked up or down my front steps, every time I’ve answered my door, I’ve been reminded of one person’s humanity. For anyone unfamiliar with Donald T.’s story, he didn’t vanish into an institution; his parents kept him at home and raised him to be a respected and protected member of his community. He gave rhyming nicknames to everyone he knew, and even in his eighties he delighted at shooting rubber bands at people in public—an act in clear service of a Higher Silly. He lived a full life, and was loved.
As I wrap up this talk (so we can get on with the day’s proceedings), I’d like to return to something I wrote in my concluding chapter. After expounding on The Court Jester and the creative methodologies of Hannah Gadsby, I wrote that “I’m not particularly concerned about the impact my research has on how scholars read Hopkins, or Dickinson, or Murray, or Carson; if someone finds my chapters intriguing, that’s great, but it’s not the most important potential impact of this thesis.” Why, a reader might then ask, bother with literary analysis at all? The short answer is, of course: fun. Joy. Pleasure. And all these things are important. But I also believe that literary analysis is a site where enormous potential exists for critical autism studies. As a student of literature, I am, in the words of Tara Brabazon, “free of the evangelical belief in the empirical.” There is no expectation, in literary studies specifically or in the humanities more generally, that I should believe that the world’s harmful psychiatric and medical narratives about autism are actually true; indeed, if there is one thing that scholars in our discipline delight in, it’s the irreverent picking-apart of any piece of text that lands in front of us. My engagement with harmful texts around autism diagnosis and intervention—historical and contemporary—is a critical one. The advantage of working toward a neurocosmopolitan future via literary studies is that we humanists are in no way beholden to the tropes and myths that circumscribe the psychiatric and biomedical fields. An autistic researcher in the humanities is afforded the pleasure of provocation; I believe that this has allowed me to insulate myself from much of the psychic damage that occurs when we are exposed to research that dehumanizes us.
There is an oft-quoted quip, sometimes attributed to Brian Eno and sometimes to Lou Reed, that The Velvet Underground didn’t sell many records, but everyone who bought one went out and started a band. While first-person writing by autistic authors is still pretty niche (unless you’re Temple Grandin, or, I suppose, Elon Musk), this mode of writing—whether it be in the genre of memoir, poetry, social media, or scholarship—has emboldened autistic people to share their own stories by whatever media are available to them, circumventing the gatekeeping efforts of self-designated institutional “experts.” Since I first began writing and speaking on autism and creativity, I have had many people commend me for my bravery in sharing my story. As is my habit, I generally deflect these compliments by reminding them that a fun part of autism is impaired impulse control, and that this hasn’t really been a well thought-through decision on my part. But the reality is that I feel indebted to the other autistic writers and researchers who have put their whole selves into their stories; they made me feel seen, and I feel that I have a responsibility to do the same for others. The dissertation you’ve read is part of this project, and I hope I have done right by it.
Dahlia, dahlia, dahlia. Thank you.
Andreae Callanan 