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.
Of interest to my disabled creative comrades: ANMLY Magazine recently released a folio of autistic protest poetry, to which I was fortunate enough to contribute both some poems and an invited introduction (excerpted above). Check it out!