The Aut istry in Poetry

Autistic traits are often recognized as deficits. Why not as poetry?

Poetic devices are often recognized as artistry. Why not as autism?

I once wrote a story reflecting on snapshots of life and the cyclical nature of summers spent with my Oma before she died. It was my best attempt at narrative storytelling. But during my creative writing workshop, the professor told the class “This doesn’t work as a story.” My stomach sank. He followed it with “…but it does work as a lyric essay” (Roberts, oral communication, December 2016). Upon googling “what is a lyric essay,” I learned that it’s a hybrid form that features poetic devices. I felt elated. It was the first time I found a categorical fit for my writerly voice, my first glimpse of genre that made intuitive sense to me.

I am an autistic person, writer, researcher, poet, nature lover, and cat dad; the salience of those labels changes daily. I advocate for autistic people, host community spaces, research autistic communication needs, write about autism, and serve on suicide prevention workgroups creating resources for the autistic community. I am part of the autistic community, and I listen to others in the autistic community.

The more I listen to autistic people, the more I hear poetry. I’m not saying we all go around reciting it; I’m speaking of the devices that make poetry ¹ : anaphora (repetition), rhyme (using words that sound alike), enjambment (the continuation of a sentence through a line break), unique diction (word choice), allusion (indirect reference), alliteration (repetition of consonants or vowels), imagery (visual description), and many more. I hear the diverse ways poetry expresses itself.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, ² in The Future is Disabled, similarly describes the diverse ways autistic individuals express themselves: the non-linear, sensory-rich, and often associative nature of autistic communication. Piepzna-Samarasinha names these the “autistic long-form,” “short-form,” and “no-form.”^2(p98) These are, respectively, the common autistic traits of info-dumping (going on about one’s interests), blunt communication, and the state of non-speaking. Piepzna-Samarasinha renames these autistic communication traits after poetic form and, in doing so, reclaims them as valuable.

Both poetry and autism challenge normative assumptions about language and expression. Yet, as Yergeau ³ points out in Authoring Autism, autistic people have been traditionally cast as incapable of agency in communication, as seen through only deficits. They have been viewed not as authors but as symptoms. It is only after bending into neurotypical shapes that autistic communication is seen as valid rather than a sign of what is missing or needs fixed. Autistic people interact with language itself differently than non-autistic people, and autistic people interact with the world differently; we exist outside the dominant narrative.

Yergeau ⁴ engages with perseveration, a term commonly attributed to autistic people’s tendency toward sameness and repetition. They say, “I propose that perseveration may at times provide us a performative framework—an unruly, indecorous framework—for writing and multimodally composing, for creating scenes and disrupting, for cripping and defying and spiraling.”^4(p39) and they place this within disability rhetoric focused on power dynamics and norming of communication. They discuss perseveration as “access creation,”^4(p46) using what is pathologized as its own methodology, its own device, perhaps even of liberation. I suggest that, perhaps, the inherent commonality between autistic traits and poetic devices can also serve the autistic community as “access creation”^4(p46) of its own methodology, even of liberation.

Poet Andreae Callanan ⁵ writes about the overlap between poetic embodiment and being autistic, describing how poetry both masked and revealed her autistic ways of sensing, thinking, and being. She explains that poetic language allowed her to express her sensorial experiences, non-linear thought, and intense emotions in ways that felt nearly impossible in normative conversational or narrative speech. Poetry’s celebration of patterns, fragmentation, and rhythm mirrors how her autistic mind naturally experiences and expresses the world. Both resist linear, surface-level translation. Poetry helped her hide her autism because her autistic traits were valued in poetry but devalued in being autistic.

For autistic people who are non-speaking, meaning may be further embodied rather than normatively narrated. The I-ASC ⁶ article Poetry Thrives in the Nonspeaking Mind explores poetry’s emphasis on sensory precision, repetition, and non-linearity as mirroring the communicative landscapes of many non-speaking autistic individuals. They say, “poetry is sensory-rich, patterned language and autistic thinkers are characterized by sensory-rich, patterned thought.”^6(para3) The Polyphony, ⁷ a platform for conversations in the medical humanities, featured a reflection on “Poetry and Stimming,” how the body’s movements—rocking, flapping, tapping—are their own kind of poetry. Autistic traits and poetic devices overlap through shared methods of constructing meaning and challenging conventional communication.

For me, poetic devices offer a more tolerable form of language because they embody a truer expression of my existence. Poetic devices focus on the immersive and experiential, whereas narratives focus on a more linear, causal, social reality construction. Linear narratives are not truth-forming for me; they do not reflect my existence in the world; they are not clean building blocks of reality. Linear narratives, to my mind, are assumptions, blocks, traps that are forcing my experiences into narrow structures. These narratives rip my experience from its sensorial, experiential, lyric home, and force it into a shared, external meaning, a joining of the normative narrative.

Some of us autistic people remember and express the world not in linear cause-and-effect narratives, but in associative, non-linear, sensorial moments. We may hold memories in a state of existing there, in the past, and we may think about the world sensorially, immersively. Some autistic friends and I were discussing this the other day over Zoom. They were in Seattle, part of the Autistic Square Pegs group that meets to discuss anything and everything autistic. We stayed past the meeting end for over an hour talking of sensorial memories, or as some of us called it, feelings memories.

An autistic friend, Liana, said she can’t make these sensorial memories anymore. She used to have fully embodied snapshots of images, feelings, a sense of being entirely immersed in a moment, like flashbacks but not necessarily traumatic. Now, after years of scripting what she calls “psychological play-by-play,” practicing social communication, she can no longer access that sensorial state. It’s always so loud in her mind, and she just wants the words to “QUIET” so she can feel present again. It’s devastating, she says, to lose this connection with herself and the world for the sake of thinking in social communication units. She now feels “not-real.” She lost a part of herself in the process (Liana, oral communication, April 2025).

Another autistic friend, Joe, told me he didn’t think in words until he realized others did, and he forced himself to learn to think this way. He grieved his natural, pre-word experiential thoughts because the words were too loud (Joe, oral communication, April 2025). Ahimsa, a non-speaking autistic person, says even the words themselves shouldn’t be viewed as “high and mighty” as some believe. Even when an autistic person can speak, if speaking doesn’t feel true to that person, they shouldn’t have to. Simple as that. Ahimsa says what’s most important is, “your own true self being” (Ahimsa, written communication, April 2025).

The construction of a linear, less autistic narrative contorts my reality to fit a more normative one. According to the concept of crip negativity, ⁸ a stance that resists compulsory positivity in the disabled experience, these losses should not be framed as personal tragedy, but as evidence of what the normative world demands through linguistic conformity.

Nick Walker’s ⁹ concept of neuroqueering describes the everyday practices by which neurodivergent people resist normativity, whether consciously or unconsciously. Perhaps embracing poetic device in autistic communication is a form of “access creation”^4(p46) within the rigid normative structures of communication.

When I tell a story, I stay too long in one place, a singular sensory moment, I provide too much background information, I fail to establish cause-and-effect, I focus on the details, I relay an echoing snapshot of dialogue without context, and I repeat the same phrases over again. But so does a poem use imagery, stream-of-consciousness, lyricism, radical clarity, allusion, and repetition.

It is well-established that coherent, linear narratives solicit social support. ¹⁰ Yet, it is also well established that forcing autistic people into normative structures can cause harm. ¹¹ We can see through accounts of autistic people that conforming to normative communication can lead to a loss of sense of their “own true self being.”

Perhaps, instead, we can embrace and value poetic devices as meaningful modes of expression, within and beyond poetry. Devon Price, ¹² in Unmasking Autism, writes about the losses of our authentic, internal ways of experiencing and expressing the world when we mask our autistic traits. Reclaiming non-linear communication in things like poetic device as a more tolerable form of language can be seen as part of unmasking and restoring autistic ways of being.

Normative communication traits are laced with a poison in my mind because they conclude, finalize, trap, close, an open landscape of possibilities into a singular, linear cause-and-effect interpretation. While I grant that many poisons are medicinal in small quantities, communicating in a coherent, linear narrative rather than with the poetic devices of being autistic means my reality is forever changed, chained, to a less autistic mode of meaning-making. My true thoughts, past, present, and future, exist in a sensorial landscape, an experiential immersion, and I wish to communicate them as such.

Perhaps this is poetic; perhaps it’s autistic.

Or, perhaps, it could be that autism is poetic, or maybe even that poetry is autistic (Supplementary Data S1).