I am sitting idly, with the laptop on my lap.

The cat is snoozing beside his scratching post, and the bird is being a bit chatty. I take a few long slow breaths and settle more in my comfy chair.

The sound of a distant engine catches my attention. Then it fades.

The bird chirps again. I see, in my mind’s eye, a feather…

What We Have

We never have much to give : ordinary people
that we are. We only have everything. Whether

feather drifting in the mind or the sun moving
along in the sky. We have everything meaning

we have nothing. Isn’t this incredible I say to
our sleeping cat and our chirping bird who is

calm now for having made his way to a sprig
of millet. Just be grateful you are not fighting

your way with a flock of your kind in the wild I
want to say to the bird but don’t. In the wild

our saucy bird might be timid for belonging to
a flock. How can I assume. How can I imagine

something anything while carrying on as if I’ve
gotten somewhere. After all I have nothing.

Today I’ve read an article, an essay, and have made a new drawing while listening, in honor of his passing, to an old David Hockney lecture from 1988—a splendidly sassy and deeply insightful one called A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China.

I’ve also been getting texts from my spouse—who is at work—about sightings in our area of two black bears. (I had just mentioned the prospect of bears here in my previous post.)

As Jamie got ready for work this morning, I monologued about how I often think of the late John Ashbery alongside Hockney. Not sure why. And yet, by reflecting on two seemingly unrelated things (or people) it’s easy to begin making connections—and to begin noticing contrasts.

In the case of Ashbery and Hockney, both were gay and both were prolific makers passionately dedicated, respectively, to poetry and art. With Ashbery loving art and Hockney loving poetry.

However, Hockney’s passing has got me thinking about how, while Ashbery’s poems are situated within literary postmodernism, Hockney felt that modernism itself has not yet been realized—so how could there be something called postmodernism?

To me, Hockney’s view is interesting. Especially if we take a step back and consider the epistemes—with modernism occurring about 1890 to 1960 and postmodernism (let’s use the term) from about 1960 to the turn of the century. Then there’s the episteme we are in—that has been variously called post-postmodernism, late modernism, nonmodernism (Bruno Latour), and metamodernism (the term and POV I prefer).

Being at least three modernisms deep, it seems clear, as Hockney mentioned all the way back in the 80s, that we are still trying to come to terms with modernism.

Hockney’s encompassing and discerning view allowed him to work fluidly through these epistemes, producing artworks that flowed with shifts in the cultural zeitgeist without getting stuck along the way. By contrast, I feel Ashbery, with powerful ties to postmodernism, did—and was trying to get himself unstuck. He did so mostly by learning what he could from much younger poets like Emily Skillings and The Friend.

Anyway, rest in peace, David Hockney. Thank you for continuing the incomplete work of (the) modernism(s).

Our yard gets regular visits from rabbits, deer, raccoons, opossums, groundhogs, foxes, bobcats, and coyotes. Last year we saw what might have been bear scat in the orchard. And, in recent years, cougars have made their way into the region.

A few weeks ago, we were standing out on the back deck at night to watch the blue ghost and other fireflies that were out for the season. As we took in the magic, we heard a sound in a cluster of small trees on the neighbor’s side of the property line.
We waited intently for several minutes until a small figure emerged. It was, as we’d suspected, an armadillo. In the glow of an infrared flashlight, we watched the creature dig for morsels a long time before going back inside, as the ravenous thing continued digging.

The armadillo had come close to our yard. A few days later, I saw several shallow holes near our milkweed patch, just like the ones left near the small trees.

On weekdays, I write in a recliner in one corner of my office. This gives me a view from two large windows. I can see the large ash and the towering old walnut tree before the land slopes and seems to end in the distant rising trees.

My favorite thing about writing is discovering what I have to say. I never like knowing in advance, which feels so overwhelming. As human beings we are naturally full of ideas, fleeting thoughts, fleeting or more abiding emotions. Through them all, the natural depth of all things feels so close—like it might slip through the veil any given moment.

I began by writing poetry before venturing into the realm of the essay. Readers often expect poems will be deep. While they can, they don’t have to be. I’d say the same goes for essays.

Now I hear a vehicle idling and the sound of a door. So, I get up. While passing through the living room on the way to the kitchen, I see through the window our neighbor’s truck at the end of their driveway near the road. Anything could be happening. I don’t look further as splashes of bright color have caught my eye:

On my way to get

a cup of tea—I peer out

at the hollyhocks

The collection contains 100 poems—and more than half of them are written using the 14-line constraint. Maybe some are sonnets, depending on who’s reading a given poem, while others might not be, also depending.

At any rate, I’ve used this approach for more than a decade. In the vernacular, I fuck heavy with the sonnet—although I didn’t, at first, mean to. Rather I stumbled into this form, mostly due to a circumstantial aspect of my approach.

***

I start poems with the feeling that a poem may want to come out. Then, as the first words or phrases come to mind, I write them down. It scarcely matters what they are. Mostly what I am feeling out is how long will the first lines be and, from there, what shape might the poem take.

I work a lot with a relatively small number of poem shapes. The most glaring example that I’ve already mentioned is the 14-line poem, which can be narrower and in couplets, two 7-line stanzas, two 6-line stanzas with every other line staggered and two single lines in the middle, three 4-line stanzas followed by a couplet, a single 14-line poem with no stanzas (or is that 1 stanza?), and occasionally other variations.

And there are other poem shapes: 30-line poems in six 5-line stanzas or ten tercets, 20-line poems in couplets, poems in five tercets, etc. They all give me a shape to write into so I don’t have to wonder how long or short the poem should be while writing it.

If I don’t feel what shape the poem might take, I may nonetheless continue and end up with a more organic, less normcore poem. (I know, I know—normcore is a fashion term that, following Linda Ceriello and Greg Dember and despite my being a multiply-neurodivergent human, I like applying to cultural artifacts, especially poems.)

Maybe this sense of what shape the poem will be is like an outline in a coloring book. Once I have it, I just need to fill in by coloring inside the lines—unless I color outside of the lines, usually by coming up with a variation on the shape.

***

All of this is probably super autistic. Nonetheless, since I’m autistic, it’s what I do. And the relief of intuitively deciding on a poem’s shape within the first few lines is very real. So much so that I might try offering this approach as a class or workshop prompt at some point.

Meanwhile, you might get the jump on me by trying your hand at writing poems of your own this way or by offering a prompt while teaching. If you do, I hope you’ll let me know how things go and about the poems you write.

In my last post, I wrote about disappearing in the act of making poems and while living and doing all the other things we do in our lives. Disappearing is necessary because it connects us to our hidden self—the self contemplatives wish to find within.

To compliment our being someone with something to say, we need to understand how we are also no one with nothing to say.

At the heart of his teaching, the ancient philosopher Plotinus emphasized a triad of the One, Mind, and Soul.

There is nothing we can say about the One. At the same time, we want to consider it since, as Plotinus taught, all things emanate from the One, including ourselves. Not only this, somehow, in our depths, we are this One that is emanating us.

Of course this sounds strange and far removed. However, if we give a little time, we can understand how it isn’t. In order to be here, we have to simultaneously be absent.

This absence of self is the greatest depth of our hidden self. We come to know our hidden self, our nothing self with nothing to do or say, by resting in silence and stillness. And I have found through writing poems that writing poems is a perfect opportunity, even as we are being someone and saying something, to also recognized how we are a nobody saying nothing.

After the One Plotinus taught about Mind, although not mind in the way we would understand nowadays. According to Plotinus, a dedicated Platonist, Mind is the realm of the Demiurge and the Intellect.

Through the Demiurge, the One emanates Souls—yours and mine and everyone’s. After this, further emanation allows for things to appear.

Mind is the first ever-so-ephemeral something, then Soul is a little more of a something.

With these three aspects of Plotinus’s teaching in mind, we can understand that our hidden self is a subtle something (as regards Mind and Soul) and also a nothing (as regards the One).

This leaves the term emanated or emanation to be considered. Plotinus taught that the realms of somethings and the somethings themselves are not created. To indicate this, he used the figure of the sun, as the sun does not create light. It is light. And as light it sends light (itself) out.

To whatever degree we are someone with something to say, we are emanated. Simultaneously, as much as we are no one and a nothing with nothing to say, we are resting in and as the One. (Although, as with the sunlight, we can understand that every something, however distantly, is also the One.)

Plotinus taught that because the One emanates like the sun does, and because all someones are emanated, it is necessary to reorient and return to the One.

Here, it helps to provisionally think of these movements as descent and ascent. (In fact, here it can be good to acknowledge that all of this is provisional in the sense of being helpful if it is and just another something to pass by if it isn’t, as every authentic teaching on the hidden self and the One is, just like ourselves, a something indicating a nothing—or the Nothing.)

If what Plotinus taught is true, these are a few orienting notions that may help clarify why disappearing and being a nobody with nothing to say matters when we write poems. I have found this resting in being a nothing to be a bottomless well, leaving me always with more things to say, even as I let those things be what they are—since a poem belongs finally to its readers.

Nye writes, “…I would never scold an onion / for causing tears to fall” since tears need to fall for things “small and forgotten,” before noting how when we sit to eat stew, to which the onion has been added, we notice and comment on other ingredients—and not the onion “now limp, now divided.”

The poem ends with the lines, “For the sake of others, / disappear.”

I love the implication! And I love how this poem reminds us how lovely and necessary disappearing can be.

Sure, it can seem an unsettling prospect, easy as it is to want to be seen, to be known, to be me.

Yet, how can we know the flavor of others and how can our lives and our world become a savory stew, if we are always holding back by trying to be something, someone—anything, anyone? Don’t we have to give ourselves to life to learn what comes next? And for us to be as we truly—and somehow and already—are?

We can be so afraid of disappearing. But why? Do we really think disappearing is the end?

I don’t believe so. Not when disappearing in the way Nye recommends allows me or you or anyone to be transformed into fullness.

After a few years I thought I might have a chance at career growth. So I cross-trained on other roles within my department. And I applied. And I applied. And I applied. And, after the announcement that my role was moving abroad in the months prior to end date, I applied to so many roles open within the company.

I also pleaded and begged to be accommodated so that I could avoid the interview process. It is well-known that, while the interview is usually a chance to shine and strut your stuff, for autistic people the interview is a barrier. In fact, it is the main reason autistic adults face a staggering unemployment rate of 80 to 90 percent (in contrast to the national unemployment rate that’s in the mid to lower single digits.

I talked about how doing so would be providing a ramp—an accommodation.

Nobody could figure out how to do this. Not my manager. Not the HR manager. Not even the regional VP of HR.

It felt like they were all stuck in what fellow disabled poet and senior editor at the press that published my new poetry collection calls “compulsory normativity,” since any number of things could have been done. And easily.

I talked candidly about how I didn’t even get the role I was working by passing an interview and how often I had applied for other roles. Nobody could even mirror back to me what I was facing, I suspect because nobody had even stated things as directly before.

Instead, the more I talked the more uncomfortable leaders became. They stopped replying to my messages. And, when my last day arrived, all but one failed to take a moment to say thank you and good wishes.

The only people who accepted what I was saying were the two closest work friends I had made.

In the end, I was invited in with trepidation. A colleague confided later that after the meetings leading up to my first day, he felt scared, adding that he since realized how silly this was).

And now I have left feeling all but invisible to most of my colleagues.

This has been the year I was diagnosed with a deadly chronic illness—that has thankfully gone into remission, although I need ongoing access to healthcare and treatment.

This has been the year my new poetry collection was published.

This has been the year I survived an accident that totaled the car.

This has been the year that I gave three different presentations through Cultural Autism Studies at Yale.

This has been the year I lost my job on December 5th.

Not because I failed. I held the record for most requests processed in a single eight-hour shift (expectation is 96 and my record is 423—with no errors back for that day).

Maybe I lost my job, like other colleagues who lost their jobs with me, simply because the company moved our roles abroad.

Only I’ll never know for sure—because nobody accommodated my need to bypass the interview.

At least, it feels this way.

In school, when the teacher left the room, it was me against all the boys who bullied me. They shot paper wads at me with rubber bands. I returned fire. Only I folded my paper wads tightly and shot them fast—letting them go at just the right split second to inflict maximum effect. The bullies said, Ouch! That hurts. How did you do that? Then, they stopped ganging up on me.

Cut to now.

Give me a scrap of paper or an empty page in my phone’s Notes application and an idle moment and I’ll write a poem. I’ll roll the language tightly and let the magic that’s always waiting have a chance to fly.

While I disliked hurting the bully boys, I love, love, love delighting readers of poems.

And there’s more.

The philosopher Žižek integrates into his philosophy a line from Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener: I would prefer not to.

Different to a simple No, this is the affirmation of a negation.

As Žižek observes, saying No—while appearing on the face to be resisting—is still an embrace of the illusion of choice. Saying I would prefer not to, however, has the potential to open a new space in a given situation.

And so, back to neurodivergence and neurodivergent creativity. While non-neurodivergent folks more often need to work toward settling into I would prefer not to, neurodivergent people—for having different nervous systems and different ways of processing—are more readily able to open up new spaces, if for no other reason than the innately-disruptive reality of our differences.

We can never seem to do things the ‘right’ way. As if we are unruly by default.

From this default position, we can work to improve our unruliness. To make it glorious in ways that leave others smitten.

Which reminds me of at least one of these memes:

For me, a painting is energetic—a kind of athletic performance. A performance invented as it is enacted.

More about art and other things soon!

I’m so grateful to have this book on the way AND thrilled to be mentioned in relation to Ernesto Cardenal, a treasure of a poet whose centenary in this year!

More soon!

I love too many poets to list here, but will mention Eugenio Montale, William Stafford, John Ashbery Naomi Shihab Nye, Carl Phillips, and Sandeep Parmar.

Artists I love include Cy Twombly, Ashley Bryan, and Taraneh Mosadegh.

And, amid practicing and studying with communities and teachers in a number of schools and traditions—I work with others with the encouragement of a guru who is a lineage holder in a traditional sampradaya with roots in India and the United States.

Additionally, I am interested in neurodivergent culture and in creative works (including music, movies, TV shows, artworks, and literary works) expressive of the metamodern.

As a further Hello, here are links to some of my poems (most are included in my poetry collection, The Importance of Being Feeble-Minded, due out later this month!

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/nathan-spoon

https://poets.org/poet/nathan-spoon

https://grateful.org/author/nathan-spoon/

https://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/the-republic-of-tenderness