“Gatherer’s Blog” is an invited feature that provides emergent as well as seasoned writers with opportunities to reflect upon aspects of their own writing processes.
A Version of Writing Neuroqueerly
by Nathan Spoon
Being ADHD, autistic, dyslexic, and more, I understand myself as a neuroqueer person. Neuroqueer is a term indicating that a cognitively disabled person will approach things in inherently different and non-normative ways and that this person will also be working to make things intentionally more non-normative. Neurological queerness or neuroqueering is, as Nick Walker has observed, a verb as much as a noun. I believe it is a variation of queering that is also a variation of cripping.
Neuroqueering is relevant to the way I write poems. On the surface the process is simple: I begin writing a line or two. As I am writing these lines, I will usually get a sense of what kind of poem I want to write and what shape it will take on the page. Some approaches I have used in recent years are centered on using 14 or 30 lines. Poems that are 30 lines are usually written in 10 tercets or 5 stanzas of 6 lines. Poems that are 14 lines are usually divided into 2 stanzas of 7 lines or written in couplets. These couplet sonnets are usually skinnier than the others. Additionally, I use a variety of other approaches, typically involving stanzas with the same number of lines. Less often the poem will be a block of lines or organized more organically.
Once I know the approach I want to use, I keep writing the next thing, pausing as often as needed, and even closing my laptop or notebook to get away from the developing text, so I can think of what to say next. The poems are almost always written beginning to end in one sitting as a single draft, as I do not understand how to draft and work on poems. Also, my ADHD factors in such a way that I would probably become uninterested by working on poems. So, the process is more athletic in that I will get the poem in one motion (albeit a kind of elastic motion where I pause along the way), or not at all.
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To give the best possible example, let’s say I want to write a poem now.
I am at present looking at a glass dish with salt in it. Right away I am thinking of the texture and smell of salt and write:
Removing the metal top from the cool glass container
Here I decide this will be written in 2 stanzas of 7 lines, and I continue:
I catch the smell of salt as one finger touches it. [pause] This
late in the evening I wonder how the moon looks. How
[pause] would it feel to be on the moon with salt. [pause] If I wonder
and imagine it so am I : is there here. [pause] The air of the room
I am standing in is also cool. [pause] I am breathing in and out
believe it or not on the moon. It will begin raining at anymoment. Once when I was a child I got lost in the woods.
I was wandering between hollowed remains of the stumps
of trees that had fallen quietly over and died leaving their
bones for no one : not even me. [pause] I imagine the [pause] remains I
saw then are still there now and I am still walking between
them. They look like dinosaurs as I remove the bubble of
my helmet and remove my gloves to withdraw a salty finger.
As a dyslexic I type slowly. But, after five minutes of mostly pausing, I have at last arrived at the end. Now I can read back over what I have written and pause again before settling on what to title this poem. “A Room on the Moon” seems perfect. With this poem finished, I am ready to move on.
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However, before moving on, there are some interesting things to note about this poem. To begin, the first, penultimate and last lines contain the words ‘removing’ and ‘remove.’ It appears in the poem as a mantra that provides a kind of bookending. The first and last lines also seem to bookend the poem by imperfectly rhyming ‘container’ with ‘finger.’ At the middle of the poem there is also a stretchy aspect to the stanza break ‘any // moment’ that slows down the anticipation of rain, like a held breath. The previous sentence had mentioned ‘breathing in and out.’
Sonnets typically contain at least one volta or turn. In this poem the volta comes after the word ‘moment,’ just as the poem has been slowed down by the caesura of the stanza break, there is a single word before it turns. While the first stanza moves between the room and the moon, bridging the distance between them and connecting them, the second stanza has the narrator telling a story about being lost in the woods as a child. Essentially, after the mention of breathing in and out, the poem enacts bringing attention to the breath by working to slow breathing and perhaps thinking, too. Then the narrator tells a story about being lost as a child, in a setting likely to be scary even without the specter of tree trunk remnants, before the span of time between childhood and adulthood (presumably) is collapsed.
Lastly, regarding the title “A Room on the Moon,” I think it is worth mentioning that the word ‘stanza’ is Italian for ‘room.’ It seems to me that the two stanzas, or rooms, of this poem that each contain two things, relating to distance in the first and time in the second, are brought together by the whole poem. In addition to ‘removing’ and ‘remove,’ there are also ‘salt’ and ‘finger’ in the second line, ‘salt’ in the fourth line, and ‘salty finger’ as the poem’s final words. The first stanza uses the word ‘moon’ three times and ‘cool’ twice. There is, too, the assonance between ‘cool,’ ‘moon,’ and ‘room.’ While the musicality of the second stanza, after the breathing, is quieter, perhaps even ‘quietly fallen.’ And to finish with this these last loose thoughts, the funniest part of the poem, I think, is the final sentence for the way it connects ‘dinosaurs’ to the ‘helmet’ and ‘gloves’ of a space suit, before ending by somewhat abstractly bringing back the finger touching the salt, so that the stanzas (or rooms) merge, as the poem ends with the ‘lost’ narrator standing on the moon, in this way answering the poem’s early question (while only using the period and the colon for punctuation) ‘How would it feel to be on the moon with salt?’
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Of course, I did not have time to think about these connections, or much of anything else that may be seen in this poem, while writing it down. My pauses were mostly mini breaks, as I mentioned, little chances to get away and give myself space to not overthink what I might say next. It may have a lot to do with being ADHD, or even AuDHD (both ADHD and autistic), but I always feel thinking too much about a poem can ruin it. What helps my poems be poems (if they even are) is the way my variations of neurological queerness collide, and how they turbocharge each other, sometimes for the better and in a 2e kind of way, as seems most clear to me in the elastic moments of writing them.
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Here, again, minus interruptions and with the title above it, is the poem:
A Room on the Moon
Removing the metal top from the cool glass container
I catch the smell of salt as one finger touches it. This
late in the evening I wonder how the moon looks. How
would it feel to be on the moon with salt. If I wonder
and imagine it so am I : is there here. The air of the room
I am standing in is also cool. I am breathing in and out
believe it or not on the moon. It will begin raining at anymoment. Once when I was a child I got lost in the woods.
I was wandering between hollowed remains of the stumps
of trees that had fallen quietly over and died leaving their
bones for no one : not even me. I imagine the remains I
saw then are still there now and I am still walking between
them. They look like dinosaurs as I remove the bubble of
my helmet and remove my gloves to withdraw a salty finger.
Listen to the poem “A Room on the Moon” read by the author–with added commentary
Transcript of Commentary by Nathan Spoon, accompanying Nathan’s reading of the poem, “A Room on the Moon”:
This is Nathan Spoon, reading for the Wordgathering Gatherer’s Blog, reading a poem I wrote during the course of writing my essay, “A Version of Writing Neuroqueerly,” just to demonstrate my process of writing, pausing, and writing the next thing until a poem is complete. And at first, this poem has no title and includes pauses to indicate the times I paused while writing it.
Removing the metal top from the cool glass container
I catch the smell of salt as one finger touches it. [pause] This
late in the evening I wonder how the moon looks. How
[pause] would it feel to be on the moon with salt. [pause] If I wonder
and imagine it so am I : is there here. [pause] The air of the room
I am standing in is also cool. [pause] I am breathing in and out
believe it or not on the moon. It will begin raining at any
moment. Once when I was a child I got lost in the woods.
I was wandering between hollowed remains of the stumps
of trees that had fallen quietly over and died leaving their
bones for no one : not even me. [pause] I imagine the [pause] remains I
saw then are still there now and I am still walking between
them. They look like dinosaurs as I remove the bubble of
my helmet and remove my gloves to withdraw a salty finger.
And then after writing the poem, I reread it and pause it again before giving it a title. And here is the completed poem with a title.
A Room on the Moon
Removing the metal top from the cool glass container
I catch the smell of salt as one finger touches it. This
late in the evening I wonder how the moon looks. How
would it feel to be on the moon with salt. If I wonder
and imagine it so am I : is there here. The air of the room
I am standing in is also cool. I am breathing in and out
believe it or not on the moon. It will begin raining at any
moment. Once when I was a child I got lost in the woods.
I was wandering between hollowed remains of the stumps
of trees that had fallen quietly over and died leaving their
bones for no one : not even me. I imagine the remains I
saw then are still there now and I am still walking between
them. They look like dinosaurs as I remove the bubble of
my helmet and remove my gloves to withdraw a salty finger.
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About the Author
Nathan Spoon is an autistic poet with learning disabilities and the author of the debut collection Doomsday Bunker (Swan World) and the limited-edition chapbook Fail Better! Feel Great!! (Third Man Books). His poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, Poem-a-Day, Poetry, Poetry Daily, and swamp pink, as well as the anthologies How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, Sonnets from the American: An Anthology of Poems and Essays, and What Have You Lost? He is editor of Queerly and an ally of timemedicine.org.