Abstract/Statement
The autistic experience has been widely medicalized, pathologized, mischaracterized, and misunderstood. Through this series of essays, I attempt to paint an alternative picture of (an) autistic life—one not defined by deficits, but (at the risk of sounding cliché) differences—by re-storying autism through an Autistic Poetic.
Autistic Poetics, or the poetry of autistic existence, offers to our imagination a new way of relating to the world—alternative pictures of what it means to be human and all the possibilities therein. Autists, as human beings who often express being more at home with the earth-others and more-than-human world, can offer our writings as a bridge between the categorizing language of the nonautistic neuromajority and the sensing, silent language of the natural world. Through my autistic readings and reflections on poems from Mary Oliver's Dream Work, I explore what an Autistic Poetic has to reveal about our relationship to one another and the earth.
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Recommended Citation
Blue, Torri
(2024)
"My Mind is a Forest: An Autistic Wandering Through the Language of Silence and the Poems of Mary Oliver,"
Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture: Vol. 5:
Iss.
2, Article 10.
DOI: 10.9707/2833-1508.1168
Available at:
https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/ought/vol5/iss2/10