Hello, poets. My name is Chris Martin and I am many things: a poet, a father, a college professor, a rapper, and the executive director of Unrestricted Interest, where we are dedicated to helping neurodivergent learners transform their lives through writing. I feel so grateful to have this direct line to the Spellerverse, which seems to continually spread and connect like the wood wide web.
When Brian Laidlaw and I co-founded Unrestricted Interest five years ago, neither of us had ever worked with a non-speaking student before. Fast forward to right now and we have worked with dozens of non-speaking students, published over twenty chapbooks of neurodivergent poetry, and further advocated through features, essays, and our own weekly newsletter, The Listening World.
Some people might assume autism and poetry are distant worlds, but in my experience they intrinsically overlap. You probably get what I’m saying right away. For those that don’t, my quick answer is: poetry is sensory-rich, patterned language and autistic thinkers are characterized by sensory-rich, patterned thought.
Not only do I find autistic thinkers to be natural poets, but I find non-speaking writers to be among the most poetic individuals I’ve ever met. In addition to using language in glorious and surprising ways, my neurodivergent students genuinely care about it. I’m not sure there is such a thing as a neurotypical poet, but many poets who don’t identify as autistic find themselves juggling their poetic voice and their “normal” voice. When it comes to my non-speaking students, I constantly marvel at how these two voices are one and the same. They consistently renew my understanding of how language can work and work differently, which is a tremendous gift.
I’ll leave you with some recently published poems by Unrestricted students. I hope they inspire you as much as they inspire me.
“In the Quarantine Body” by Imane Boukaila
In Other Words,
Chris
Chris Martin’s fourth book of poetry, Things to Do in Hell, will be published by Coffee House Press this fall and his first book of essays, May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism, and Our Neurodiverse Future is forthcoming from HarperOne. He is the recipient of grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Minnesota Humanities Center. He is the co-founder and executive director of Unrestricted Interest, an organization dedicated to helping neurodivergent learners transform their lives though writing. He lives in Minneapolis, where he also teaches at Hamline University and Carleton College.
