This poem featured in today's New York Times, something I rarely see in that newspaper, or any daily, for that matter. Maybe seven issues out of the year. But isn't it good to see that some newspapers take the art seriously enough (not to mention their readers) to publish work like this for all to read and ponder?
Speaking of pondering, I am not sure what to make of the feature's repeated editorial qualifier of "autistic" poet. I respect the multiplicity and diversity on display here.* I am invited to consider a point of view that's worth reading and reflecting on because it is other than mine.
Of course, all poems not written by me are worth reading for the same reason.
I don't get the wavy blue line that the editor inscribed through the text, looping itself around the poem's key word, "pace." To me, that's a case of not letting the poem speak for itself, of prettifying the autonomous work of art, and worse, of edit-splaining. According to the editorial text, the poet "collaborated with the editors" to create this visual effect. Why?
But about the poem, or about my take on it. "I am the pace of my body, and not language," its title and central image, means something more when I know that the author of it is autistic. Not being autistic, I can't account precisely what the poet means by "the pace of my body"; but the image helps me consider my own body in terms of "pace" (and that word's many associations), at least as a way to calculate the author's meaning.
* I am using a loaded term here. There is no consensus, I have read, on the proper term: autistic person, person with autism, person on the autism spectrum (I find this last one particularly awkward). The debate has to do with whether one understands autism as "central" to a person's identity, one trait among many of a person, like a characteristic, or as a disorder or disability. This poem suggests to me (and the editorial text reinforces the idea) that it is composed by an autistic person, not someone "suffering from autism."
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