May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism, and Our Neurodiverse Future

By Chris Martin

An author and educator’s pioneering approach to helping autistic students find their voices through poetry—a powerful and uplifting story that shows us how to better communicate with people on the spectrum and explores how we use language to express our seemingly limitless interior lives.

Adults often find it difficult to communicate with autistic students and try to “fix” them. But what if we found a way to help these kids use their natural gifts to convey their thoughts and feelings? What if the traditional structure of language prevents them from communicating the full depth of their experiences? What if the most effective and most immediate way for people on the spectrum to express themselves is through verse, which mirrors their sensory-rich experiences and patterned thoughts?

May Tomorrow Be Awake explores these questions and opens our eyes to a world of possibility. It is the inspiring story of one educator’s journey to understand and communicate with his students—and the profound lessons he learned. Chris Martin, an award-winning poet and celebrated educator, works with non-verbal children and adults on the spectrum, teaching them to write poetry. The results have been nothing short of staggering for both these students and their teacher. Through his student’s breathtaking poems, Martin discovered what it means to be fully human.

Martin introduces the techniques he uses in the classroom and celebrates an inspiring group of young autistic thinkers—Mark, Christophe, Zach, and Wallace—and their electric verse, which is as artistically dazzling as it is stereotype-shattering. In telling each of their stories, Martin illuminates the diverse range of autism and illustrates how each so-called “deficit” can be transformed into an asset when writing poems. Meeting these remarkable students offers new insight into disability advocacy and reaffirms the depth of our shared humanity. 

Martin is a teacher and a lifelong learner, May Tomorrow Be Awake is written from a desire to teach and to learn—about the mind, about language, about human potential—and the lessons we have to share with one other. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Aug 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9780063020177

Chris Martin

CHRIS MARTIN is this very moment endeavoring to become himself, a somemany and tilted thinking animal who sways, hags, loves, trees, lights, listens, and arrives. He is a poet who teaches and learns in mutual measure, as the connective hub of Unrestricted Interest/TILT and the curator of Multiverse, a series of neurodivergent writing from Milkweed Editions. His most recent book of poems is Things to Do in Hell (Coffee House, 2020) and he lives on the edge of Bde Maka Ska in Minneapolis, among the bur oaks and mulberries, with Mary Austin Speaker and their two bewildering creatures. 

Book preview

Dedication

For Mark, Max, Adam, Matteo, Hannah, Imane, Zach, Bill, Khalil, Lonnie, Soren, Dustin, Wallace, Brian, Amelia, Brother Sid, and Rowan

Epigraph

This is what I want to do. This is what I want to be,

surrounded by kindred spirits, doing useful things

with care, knowledge and clarity.

—Dara McAnulty, Diary of a Young Naturalist

Take good care

to shape with language

worlds that want to hold us all

—Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, Of Forests and of Farms: On Faculty and Failure

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction: Keepers of the Light

1. Like Water I Am Eager

2. A Place Where the Islands Touch

3. The Moon Is Especially Full

4. The Listening World

5. A Brand New Outfit

6. I Can Be My Real Self

7. Becoming Rainbow Man

8. Living in a State of Hell

9. Calm-Arriving to a Wanting Safe World

10. The How of Autism

11. May Today Be Awake

Coda: Full Spiral

Afterword: Belonging to the Future

Anthology of Poems

Acknowledgments

Notes

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

Keepers of the Light

The Rallying Dance—To Extend the Choreography—Forging a Whetstone—To Educate Myself—Angling Toward Autonomy—Denizens of the Intense World—The Lava of Language—To Reach and Root—The Light That Leaps Forth

I watch from my end of the video chat as Adam’s lanky frame once again escapes the purview of my Zoom screen. He is answering the beckoning call of a stick he gleaned from the woods earlier that day. When Estée, his mother and communication partner, reorients their screen in Toronto, I can see Adam rhythmically twallowing¹ the stick in his left hand, expertly moving it back and forth like a windshield wiper or wing. Estée takes the keyboard to him and Adam begins typing again with his right hand: I am wanting to ask you a question I have. I am wanting to ask the teacher how you can think with me so easily about doing poetry love that you can have thinking about much movement using me good to have support about it and understanding. That is meaningful to me and I thank you doing the dance.

This dance—which Adam alternatively calls a jam or an assembly or a rally—was at once metaphorical and real. Adam, who is a nonspeaking autistic eighteen-year-old, often makes a peripatetic sort of dance of our one-hour session, alternately typing and repositioning himself elsewhere in the room. But he also leads the dance of conversation by way of his writing, which sets a different choreography in motion. Today, as most days, the three of us are joined by Ellen, one of Adam’s art collaborators. Like Adam, Ellen and Estée are both artists who often work in material or sculptural modes. But sculpture, writing, dancing, twallowing: these forms all stay in conversation when we’re with Adam. In between his sustained waves of typing, which sometimes last for a hundred words or more, only punctuated by the spaces that separate them, he pauses to replenish himself and welcomes reflections on what he’s just written. Or just as often a reflection on how he’s just written, as together we revel in the patterns of sound and sense Adam is drawing forth.

Our ideas as writers and artists bring us into a thrilling intellectual tango, which happens alongside the tactile dance of Adam’s fingers on the keys. As Adam types, I take the words down in a shared Google Doc. As his fluid sentences emerge, voiced one word at a time by the vocal synthesizer connected to his iPad, my mind attempts to keep pace and my heart leaps to think in this way, doing the poetry love that brings us all into a swell of fellow feeling. It is in these swells and waves that we continuously welcome each other into the ongoing dance of collaboration, interdependence, and neurodiversity.²

Poetry love can be a hard thing to explain to people who are not in the practice of it, people who have often been alienated from the possibilities of it by their previous experiences, most commonly the experiences they had in high school. Poetry is an art form that can be difficult to pin down, and when people try too hard to pin it down, they often ruin everything that makes poetry magical. When you focus on what poetry is, or worse, should be, you instantly lose the most important thing about the practice of making a poem: what could be. What could and can and does happen in a poem is the light at the heart of its practice. If the poet uses constraints or rules or restrictive patterns in a poem, it is always to open up something larger: a feeling, an experience, a connection.

And if it’s hard to explain poetry, it would seem even more difficult to explain the remarkable reciprocity poetry shares with autism or autistic minds or autistic ways of moving through the world. Is it the way patterns—rhyme, line count, meter—so crucially embed themselves into the visual and sonic framework of each poem? Do the poem’s formal elements—line breaks, stanzas, repetitions—delineate a space where creative decisions are more readily perceived and undertaken? Is there an almost architectural element to building poems that lets autistic writers inhabit their particular ways of making language? Does the hand of the poem open to the writer (and reader) in a way that leaves space for the breadth and depth of autistic intensity? Whatever it is, I have watched my students, time and again, grasp the hand of poetry and begin dancing like they’ve been doing it their whole lives.

It’s my pleasure to welcome you into the dance also—the dance that’s all so thrillingly expanding around us as we move into a future characterized by movement. I write these words on the winter solstice of 2020, at a time when cultural and political movements have unveiled so much of the destructive machinery that treats certain bodies as negligible, silenceable, and disposable. I am writing from Minneapolis, where the murder of George Floyd, ten minutes away from my house, led to global uprising, an emergent movement that seeks accountability, reckoning, and a pathway to liberation. These movements resonate alongside the neurodiversity movement, which is changing the way that we understand cognitive and sensorimotor difference, shifting us away from a pathology model, where people are judged by how independently they can hew to some unknown quantity of normal or neurotypical, and toward an ethics of interdependence, where our differences allow us to support one another while finding the particular supports we each need to thrive.³ To support and be supported in mutual, consensual measure. To find reciprocity among our neighbors. To find belonging.

For me to answer Adam’s question, I would need to better understand how we belonged together. What was the source of our dance’s ease? To what abundance of belonging had we mutually attuned? In the moment, I said something about our shared love of patterns and language, of what Adam calls languaging. And of course I thanked him for inviting me into the rallying dance, which I also find deeply meaningful—as a teacher, but also as a poet and as a friend. I thanked him for supporting me with his thoughts, which helped so much to clarify my own. Clarify, but also recognize. Adam’s languaging always helps me to rethink my own manner of moving through the world and to recognize myself as a neurodivergent dancer, one who seeks always to extend the choreography, as Adam has written. To put it another way, the work I do tends to remind me of who I am.

This kind of self-recognition has been hard-won. I was born near the end of a violent decade near the end of a violent century near the end of a violent millennium. And I was born into a body that resembled the bodies of those who have historically wielded the most power with the most violence toward the most oppressive ends. I am a White male who can selectively pass as cis, straight, able, and neurotypical. This is what Sonya Renee Taylor calls the default body, and its cover has given me tremendous advantages, including the ability to move through a neurotypical world with something approximating ease.⁴ But this false ease is nothing like what I feel when Adam and I are in conversation. The truth is that I have never felt like I belonged in the neurotypical world, much less amidst the callous materialism and masculinity that seek ever to make me complicit in their conditioning. The truth is that I now question all these aspects of my identity, desiring to know where the enforcement of normativity ends and I begin.

I don’t recall the first time I was called sensitive, but as a child the word seemed always sewn onto my shirt pocket like an invisible name tag. I wasn’t an overtly emotional child, but that didn’t stop teachers, family friends, or even strangers from picking up on it instantly: Christopher is very sensitive, isn’t he?⁵ As the adjective predictably spilled from their lips, their faces angled in concern, I could tell it was meant to both flatter and fret. It was a gift, this sensitivity, something that distinguished me from others, but it was also, I inferred, a source of vulnerability, especially for a boy. As I prepared to move to New York City in my early twenties, a seasoned writer warned me, "You’re sensitive Chris, the city will eat you alive."⁶

We didn’t have words like neurodivergent in the 1980s, especially not in Colorado Springs, but I had the great fortune of being raised by two very successful neurodivergent parents. My dyslexic father was a nationally recognized bankruptcy lawyer, and my mother, despite an undiagnosed attentional disorder, was a keen social worker who cofounded what is now the longest running women-focused film festival in the world. Looking back, I can see clearly that the neurodivergent parts of their personalities were not what held them back, but what made them extraordinary.

Their sensitive son was also extraordinary, what we’d now call twice-exceptional, the kind of student who struggles and excels in equal measure, often to the consternation of their teachers. When I wasn’t sitting on the dreaded green bench outside the principal’s office, having again disrupted class with my unwieldy and exuberant body, I was exceeding all my academic benchmarks. Ms. Johnson, my second grade teacher and an early champion, routinely had to demand my attention because I was singing aloud at my desk without realizing it. We made a compromise: after I sped through the weekly math test, I could head directly to the library, where I’d spend the rest of the period tracing maps and drawing wolfmen. I could sense some things easily, like intuitive ways to solve problems, but I couldn’t seem to register or regulate my own relentless energy. I was confident, unwary, buzzing and bounding through the world like a big blond bee seeking pollen. Looking back, I have to imagine how my experience of school (and the world) would have been different if I hadn’t had the cultural insulation of whiteness and its boys will be boys rhetoric to protect me. As a high school senior, prompted by my mother, who would soon seek out her own diagnosis, I would officially become diagnosed with ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder). The diagnosis was revealing in many ways, accounting for many of the circumstances in which I didn’t fit in, but it also left me unsatisfied. And for good reason; over the years it has become clear that my atypicality is not limited to those letters alone.

I have come to foreground neurodivergence in my way of moving through the world, but in the ’90s there were no positive associations with the deficits inherent to my disorder, nor was there a community of support.⁷ Instead, I found another label that seemed to suit how I thought and who I wanted to be in the world: poet. I found writing poems exceptionally difficult, and I loved it. Poems could hold all my boundless energy and, with practice, direct it toward an endless palette of linguistic opportunities. In a poem I was encouraged to do things differently, to forge the creative and unexpected pathways that were my intrinsic strength. In college I dove headlong into the world of contemporary poetry, seeking out work that signaled new expressive horizons and poets who challenged the way I thought. I had discovered a multiverse where my racing, discursive, associative intellect was channeled into buzzing focus. I felt like I could be all of who I was.⁸

While many of my peers were jumping into MFA programs with an eye toward teaching in academia, I was looking for a less obvious route. Inspired by poet-teachers like Ron Padgett, I wanted to work with younger students. I got my first chance in an after-school program at a middle school in Brooklyn, where I found myself working with a young man, named Matteo, who wanted nothing more than to explore the movie Planet of the Apes. The joy I took in working with Matteo, and other students whom I would later recognize as autistic, was natural. My gifts as a sensitive boy, now a man living in the epicenter of American poetry, served me well in collaborating with neurodivergent students. I listened closely and relished the creative effort of helping these unique students access their own gifts, which I found startling and self-evident.

Over time I began to discern how poetry’s patterned structure uniquely serves neurodivergent thinking—and vice versa—something I’d discovered in my own creative investigations. Initially drawn to poetry because of its rhymes and rules, I soon discovered that inventing new patterns pleased me even more than recapitulating standard ones. As a baby poet living in San Francisco, having already tried sestinas and villanelles and contrapuntals and any other form I could find, I tasked myself with inventing a new poetic form every day for a year. Not to impress anyone, or attract social media attention, but simply to revel in the possibilities and deepen my understanding of what poetry can do. Even now, having published four full-length collections of poetry, I find that those patterns and constraints continue to give me a unique thrill: part tuning fork and part obstacle course, part piggyback and part three-legged race. They whisk me forward while simultaneously holding me back, creating the generative friction necessary to hone language and thought as they emerge. Patterns work to organize, challenge, and divert my words, forging a whetstone over which they can grow sharp and smooth.

Many of the writers you will meet in this book don’t need to seek out constraints. When they haven’t been negotiating the constraints of their own sensorimotor complexity, they have been struggling against the constraints of a society built to minimize the complexity of their intellect and expression.⁹ Whether it’s through staggeringly low expectations or lack of access to communication support, these students and their insights are often held back by a dam of societal neglect. I can’t tell you the number of times I have sat down with a nonspeaking writer and they have begun our session with a phrase like, I’ve been waiting for this or I am so excited you are here. Then comes the flood, even if it appears to trickle out one painstakingly typed letter at a time. When given the opportunity to express themselves creatively, I have seen nonspeaking writers summon the kind of focused stamina that puts free climbers to shame.

Which is not to say that patterns don’t still serve a crucial role. In their poem I Use Patterns to Survive, nonspeaking autist Max Eati¹⁰ advises the reader: Feel it and follow it. They continue:

My life follows a pattern

of many other autistics

so I learn from them

Our lives are products

of invincible codes

that create invincible patterns

I write and update them

I design and fuel them

into real life circumstances

and add simplicity

to educate myself

To feel and follow the pattern is to educate ourselves and create access points that help navigate a path forward. So many of the autists I know are autodidacts, self-taught apprehenders of the world’s complex and largely unseen systems. And like so much that we do in life—for ourselves, by ourselves, outside of any school (or tuition)—this kind of self-education is largely an act of intuition. We feel our way through the flesh and texture of an abundant world toward the focus of frequency, seeking, above all else, a sense of simplicity, of attunement. Instead of memorizing facts to prepare for some uncertain future life, we become autodidacts of the now, a manifold of objects and creatures and atmospheres that call us into perception. This is the dance Adam writes about so vibrantly, a flow made possible by our abiding relation to a nearly impossible world, so bursting it is with sensory detail. Patterns help us tune in to the inherent simplicity we seek, a wayfaring line amid the spectacular chaos of contemporary life. They move us from the babbling patter of life, as Adam would say, to the pattern of it, tuning in to meaningful ways of languaging.

This practice of pattern formed the foundation of my early work as a teaching-writer. I encountered student after student thrilled by the idea of inventing poetic forms that perfectly suited their particular passions. In a workshop at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, I helped a young man elaborate his vision for a poetry of swooping, unbroken parallel lines, enabling him to write an epic tribute to telephone wires, since he liked nothing more than to draw from memory the pattern of those lines crisscrossing the desert landscape. Another time, I spoke to a teaching-artist whose client had dislocated her knee five times and now began every conversation by asking her interlocutor about their own experience with dislocations. In ten minutes, with the help of other teaching-artists in our pedagogy workshop, we brainstormed a poetic form replete with echoes of her client’s fascination: a five-stanza poem wherein each stanza would feature a dislocation (using the tab key) at the exact point when a kn word appeared (know, knit, knuckle, knockout, and of course knee).

There are hundreds of these examples and the list is growing. When I work with schools, we often print anthologies where the recipes for these new forms are included so that other teachers and students can utilize them moving forward. The sonnet form will always captivate me, but for a twelve-year-old who wants nothing more than to endlessly pour over anime comics, what form could be more thrillingly relevant than an aniME, a self-portrait that alternatively focuses on four of your favorite anime characters? Poems have the potential to tailor, fine-tune, and pattern passion into form. The forms that result establish a creative feedback loop with the content.

Formal suggestions are one way to scaffold the creative process for students, especially when they are just learning the possibilities of poetic writing or the motor technique of an AAC (alternative and augmentative communication) method or both.¹¹ I learned quickly that no standardized approach can satisfy the diversity of needs and abilities my students inhabit. Each student requires their own unique supports and a leading role in shaping those supports. Since we meet once a week, many students spend several of the interceding days cultivating poems internally. Other students like to begin the session with a brief conversation, discovering there the linguistic impetus for their own writing. I come to each session prepared to prompt a student in the direction of writing, but I always ask them if they have something in mind before I do. It’s a dance: forever angling toward the autonomy of the student while ensuring that they are not alone.

Once the writing begins, I am listening as closely as possible, dictating the lines into a Google Doc. For a writer like Adam, letting the writing flow and unfold without interruption is paramount. For many alternatively communicating writers, the hard-won fluidity of typing leads to sustained thinking that ranges past traditional grammatical structures. Stopping to insert punctuation would threaten the expression itself. Correct sentences do not capture what Adam wants to express and how he goes about it. His long lines often emerge with three or more waves of language, delineating a swerve in thought while maintaining connection to what came before. While Adam is typing, I map out these swerves, and we discuss the structure when each set of waves carried by his typing is complete. Some students prefer to break lines themselves, either while they are writing or afterward. Some students create an initial pattern that they ask me to follow as the rest of the poem emerges. If I am tasked with finding a preliminary shape for the poem, I will reflect what is happening to the student several times during the process, both to confirm that the shape fits their vision and to let their writing bend the shape to its intentions.

Some students welcome feedback on their work as they compose, while others can’t entertain even a single suggestion until they feel the poem is complete, lest it tangle their process or instigate self-doubt. Sometimes my most important role as teacher is doing nothing. And doing nothing, as I’ve learned, can very much be doing something. The very fact of my availability, my way of being intensely present, holds open a space that the student feels sufficiently welcomed to fill. This is the hardest part to write about, because it is largely unspoken. I am actively receptive, holding one side of an invisible tether, ready