poems of the neurodivergent experience

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About: Victoria Gray is an artist and practice-led researcher, based in York, UK.Her work includes actions, interventions, time-based sculpture and video, being presented in museums, galleries and festivals in performance art, fine art and choreographic contexts. Victoria Gray has developed a difficult-to-define, embodied thinking in her performance practice. Gray finds ways to go underneath appearances, connecting to a less appreciated level of existence.” When the arthritis in my hands got worse a few years ago, I stopped being able to write by hand. When it suddenly got a lot worse last year, I worried about even being able to type. People helpfully told me about voice recognition software. “But the point of writing is so I don’t have to talk,” I told them. But as an adult, poetry has given me the freedom to process, make sense of and even rethink my past experiences of growing up as a neurodivergent femme person in a hostile world. Dog violets push through first, just as the sparrows dig the moss from the guttering and the air is as puffed out as the robin’s chest. Dandelions and buttercups emerge like sunbeams, signalling to bees that it’s safe to come out now, finally’ (p14).

Writing is my safe space. As my brain doesn’t make enough dopamine, I get bored easily, but creating fictional worlds is far from that! Growing up, when things happened (or failed to), writing took the clamour out of my head and kept it above water. I re-wrote upsetting things, invented better scenarios, gave myself happier endings. Face It, filmed comedy drama monologues by writer Miranda Walker about two women exploring how they feel about their faces in the modern swipe-right world, and the impact of wearing face masks to protect against Covid-19. Produced by Michaela Hennessy-Vass. An inspiring story of a Deaf man’s life journey in a hearing world, as he learns to get by while gaining a deeper understanding of his own identity. An adaptation of the Mr & Mrs Clarks' celebrated stage show Louder Is Not Always Clearer, where performance art and physical theatre is used to recreate moments from Jonny’s life. The show created by Gareth Clark, Catherine Bennett, Marega Palser and Jonny Cotsen was described as a "brilliant exercise in empathy” by Lyn Gardner and shortlisted for a Total Theatre Award for Innovation, Experimentation and Playing With Form.

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About: Kate is a stand up poet from the North, who has been poet in residence for Radio 4’s Saturday Live, the Glastonbury Festival and the Great North Run. Her latest collection ‘The Oscillations’ is out now from Nine Arches Press.

As for the ‘Alice’ of the Alice books, she could be seen (as some have) as an autistic child with a logical approach to life and a tenacious insistence on what is right and appropriate, who must navigate an unpredictable and capricious neurotypical world. Julie Brown (2010). Writers on the Spectrum: How Autism and Asperger Syndrome have Influenced Literary Writing. Jessica Kingsley Publisher.

Poetry, too, is good for us. Both reading it and writing it have been shown in many studies to benefit us, not only psychologically, but even physically. The latter will take someone with a very different area of expertise than mine to explain, but the former has something to do with the rhythms to which we respond from birth. I suspect it’s also because poetry allows us to push language beyond its everyday usage and, if it’s not too grandiose a claim, begin to communicate things that words alone can’t convey. I’ve been interested for a long time in how other people ‘process’ words, images and feelings at different speeds and in different ways. It seemed important to try to understand this about audiences or the children I worked with when I’d parachute into a school to run a performance poetry or comedy workshop. It became obvious that poetry could reach the parts that other art forms couldn’t reach for some kids, when a teacher would breathlessly say of one of their students “I’ve never seen them so interested in something before – they were like a different person!”.

In general, poetry is a way to explore an obsession or a fascination with something I’m fixated on and discover more about it – and, inevitably, myself as part of the process. When I read a poetry book, I have Post-It flags at the ready. When I read a poem I like, I mark it with a flag. That way, when I revisit the book later, I can easily find the poems I like and not worry so much about the ones that did not stand out to me. With Pensiero’s collection of poetry, I flagged quite a few poems. However, I feel like a good number went unmarked. I don’t expect every poem in a collection to be a winner. Yet, with this book, I felt like bored while reading some of the poems. When all you have is one theme for a collection of poetry, it gets hard to create poems that are unique enough to stand out. Maybe that is why I did not like more poems in the collection. There definitely were some poems that I felt like I had read earlier in the collection. Furthermore, I noticed a lot of the poems rhymed. Poetry does not have to rhyme, and Pensiero knows that. Not all of her poems rhymed. However, a lot of them were rhyming poems. I felt overwhelmed by rhyme. I wish the poems had explored more than just rhyme. But, I want to be clear; Pensiero is not a bad poet. In fact, she is a darn good poet. I can tell from the poems I enjoyed that she has it in her to write great poetry. I just feel like she limited herself in this collection. Jaclyn, if you are reading this, please keep writing. I want to see what you can do with other themes.

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Fink, E., Deighton, J., Humphrey, N., & Wolpert, M. (2015). Assessing the bullying and victimisation experiences of children with special educational needs in mainstream schools: Development and validation of the Bullying Behaviour and Experience Scale. Research in developmental disabilities, 36, 611-619. Dara McAnulty’s book Diary of a Young Naturalist was published in 2020. Written as a teenager, the book charts a year in the author’s life: ‘This diary chronicles the turning of my world, from spring to winter, at home, in the wild, in my head’ (p7). Jonny Cotsen. Image credit: Jorge Lizald I’m thrilled that, as part of Culture In Quarantine, these pieces will be brought to life across BBC platforms. It’s imperative that D/deaf, neurodivergent and disabled professional artists are supported to carry on making brilliant work, as the constraints and continuing effects of this pandemic threaten to silence their vital creative voice.” — Lamia Dabboussy, BBC Head of Arts In The Annotated Alice (p56), Alice is disappointed that she cannot go through the looking glass like her fictional counterpart ‘Alice through the looking glass’ (by Lewis Carroll). She asks her mother if she would go into another world if she went through the looking glass: ‘No, she said:/I’d wake up in hospital, being mended,/and I was so disappointed. I never meant/to stay on the nonsense side.’(2017, p56). Please note that the nonsense side here refers to the neurotypical world, and possibly also the adult world.