What Makes Us Pathetic

KARAN

Christian, I'm floored by “you cannot write an autism poem”—it reads like a manifesto disguised as an indictment. “Call this anaphora or echolalia. you’ll never know when to shut the fuck up.” I love that ending. The poem refuses every frame (diagnostic, inspirational, tragic) while enacting the very thing it claims is impossible. How do you approach writing about autism when the available narratives are so compromised? What made you want to write this poem?

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CHRISTIAN 

First off, I just want to say THANK YOU for such gorgeous and incisive questions! It’s a rare and surreal honor to have this space to speak and be heard, and I’m just very very very grateful for all the work involved in ONLY POEMS!!!

I’m autistic and I love being autistic. I love my autisticness as I stim, as I ramble, as I stare into foreheads, as I list-rank every lipsync on RuPaul’s Drag Race (and yes, that includes all the international franchises). I must start with love, because the world trains autistics to hate ourselves, to know ourselves as unloveable, to earn love through self-surveillance and discipline. Hate is hard to quantify, but a 2021 study from Autism in Adulthood found that neurotypicals can near-instantly identify autistics not as autistics, but as the people they like the least. Applied Behavioral Analysis, the modern default for autism therapy, not only trains us to mask autistic traits; it was the direct inspiration for gay conversion therapy. We have some the highest rates of depression, domestic violence, addiction, unemployment, and suicide I’ve ever seen. The suicide stats in particular haunt me. And now our political administration wants to defund Special Ed and cure us with colloidal silver. It’s very, very heavy to live in that context. So, I have to write every autism poem with love, for myself and all the autistics I’ll ever know. 

For me, poetry offers both a natural and transgressive space to talk about autism. In the cultural and clinical imagination, autism’s an inherent impediment to narrative capacity or rhetorical agency. Medical journals call us incoherent and unaware. Silent or unlistenable. Diagnostic tests quite literally use “the ability to tell a story” as a metric to rule out autism. Search AUTISTIC NOUN in an English Language Corpus; the most common NOUN is CHILD and that CHILD rarely speaks. Apparently, we need think-tanks and mommy-bloggers to translate our inner selves, but also, we’re hollow chasms, so really they can say whatever they want. It’s super telling that when RFK Jr. mourned the alleged autism epidemic. He said, “these kids (...) they’ll never write a poem.” He literally said: you cannot write an autism poem. But I did! And I do! The act of writing an autism poem is always an act of refutation, which is equal parts thrilling and intimidating!

The crucial irony of “You cannot write an autism poem” is that it’s an INCREDIBLY autistic poem, and I mean that on the mechanical level. The poem’s a taxonomy, a literal list of explicit instructions with comically-even line lengths written in a fixed form (it’s lowkey a sonnet!) and couplets that directly mirror the last. Look at the argument. I refute the cultural narratives surrounding autism simply by repeating them back to you. How’s that for echolalia?? All this to say, I don’t just write about autism, I write autistically. I’m obsessed with the book Theorizing Autism Poetics by Julia Miele Rodas, which invites us to think about autistic language as a literary aesthetic, one of iteration, invention and pattern. Think about Whitman’s Song of Myself, rambly-lined list. Scholars call it inventorial anaphora, but a speech-language pathologist might call it obsessive parroting. (I want to ramble about this further, but I’m already three paragraphs in, so here’s a quick Autistic Lit Crit explainer speech I wrote for all those interested). For me, Autism is craft, and I like to think I’m part of a whole canon of autistic storytellers. I don’t write in spite of autism or regardless of autism. I write because I’m autistic.

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KARAN 

Your formal range here is wild—from the Seuss-influenced lineated poem about Doomsday Preppers to the Susan Sontag-epigraphed experimental piece about snuff films to that gorgeous Wikipedia list poem. “Pornography is a theatre of types” uses white space and indentation in choreographed, cinematic ways. I’m curious how your debate training shapes the way you compose poems on the page?

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CHRISTIAN 

Funnily enough, I’ve always worried that my speech/debate background makes me slightly less adept on the page, so that’s such a reassuring question! I competed in and currently coach public speaking competitions, a form which really trains you to value sound and concision. The audience cannot hear your line-breaks or re-read your sentences, so I spent years learning to consciously prioritize the ear over the eye. My poems read like conversations and rambles because I quite literally talk to myself as I write (Sometimes, I fear I add emotional subtext via delivery that doesn’t/cannot exist on the page). The resulting poems tend to be immediate on the idea-level and silly on the sound-level, like a weird combo of Diane Seuss and Dr. Seuss).

In the speech event called Poetry Interpretation, the performer transmits the visual/formal element of poetry through complex blocking and pantomime. It’s interpretive dance for theater kids who can’t dance. At its best, the visual choreography directly supplements the argument, and while I’m not a particularly strong mover, I abstract that lesson to mean that the visual composition fits the narrative/argumentative function of the poem. As a weird little quirk, I often default to absurdly-even line-lengths (to the point where I obsess over which fonts shorten italicized text), but in the pornography poem, I wanted to make the line-breaks all willy-nilly, like I was the Jackson Pollock of my indent button, and then I realized the poem looked like lightning or a slashed-up body. I also felt like a slashed-up body, so that seemed pretty appropriate. 

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KARAN 

“The Wikipedia List of Unsolvable Problems” wrecked me. You’re answering impossible philosophical questions (consciousness, black holes, the Cambrian explosion) with your father’s death, and the juxtaposition is devastating. “Want to know what really killed Dad? Try a fistful of cigarettes. Untreated diabetes and end-stage renal failure. Decades of Rush Limbaugh.” The Ouija board sections are funny and heartbreaking at once. How do you think about humor when you're writing about grief?

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CHRISTIAN 

Well, I think about humor when I write about anything. On the structural/mechanical level, any joke is a poetic act. The best poets are stand-up comedians. Humor is often my entryway into a poem; I write to make myself giggle (and I’m great at giggling). The question inevitably becomes more complicated as it pertains to grief, because it’s hard to know if my humor gets me closer or farther from feeling what I feel. It’s hard to even know what I feel, but I do know what I find funny. I’ll just say this: Poetry is one of the only places I really let myself engage with my father’s memory. I know him more as a craft than anything else. He was a mean man with an incredibly mean-funny sense of humor. I think I’ve inherited his laugh, and if I’m being honest, it’s sort-of a mean laugh. I like to think he’d laugh at my poems in the good way.

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KARAN 

Several poems here obsess over apocalypse—the childhood hyperfixation on Doomsday Preppers, the Angel in America persona poem, your dad’s backyard bunker full of spoiled peaches. “I wanted the world to end without an ending,” you write. In my head, apocalypse fantasy somehow connects to queerness, to neurodivergence, to wanting a reset button on the whole broken system. What drew you to the apocalypse as a recurring subject? 

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CHRISTIAN 

Maria Gray has this marvelous interview-quip about how every chapbook’s titled Blood Knife. I’m convinced the sequel’s titled: Nuclear Blood Knife (at the End of the World). It feels like all the poets are poeming about Doomsday-with-a-capital-D for all the obvious terrible reasons. I’m a sucker for apocalypse-content in all forms, and I think apocalypse poems are near-guaranteed bangers; they’re inherently evocative and political and imagery-laden. But that ready-made urgency also makes me skeptical about my impulse towards apocalypticism in my own writing. The act of pointing desperately at the burning building can feel like a worthy substitute for actually dousing the flame, and that’s when you realize you’re not a firefighter at all. In other words, I live in constant fear that my apocalypse poems are Nuclear Blood Knife (at the End of the World) poems. 

Here’s a hot take; when you’re insecure about your own future, it’s almost easier to imagine The World Ending than your world ending (or worse, being mediocre). It’s a reset-button; we imagine that the apocalypse would somehow change us, and I’m most interested in the type of people who daydream about a reset-button, even if the reset-button happens to be the nuclear missile button. All this to say, there’s a fascinating undercurrent of corniness to the apocalyptic imagination. I often think about the first chapter of Severance by Ling Ma, or that one scene in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead where the zombie apocalypse gifts all the rednecks an infinite hunting season. My poems center the mundane invocations of the apocalypse, that escapism into something worse because hey, it’s still an escape.

I wrote “& Another Apocalypse” to implicate myself in that corniness. My other apocalypse references reflected other people or earlier selves, but this poem is present-tense. I wrote it the night Trump got elected while walking for miles to a 24hr taco shop at 3 AM. I’d just watched the Angels in America HBO Miniseries for my American Lit class, and I was thinking about how we’re all constantly living in a series of doomsdays-with-a-lowercase-d, and the moment where Prior looks to the Angel and thinks— God, now I gotta be a prophet? It was the most self-centered apocalypse poem I could write, quite literally hinging on the I, and I think that’s the most honest thing I could say. I’d been treating the apocalypse as a hypothetical rather than a lived experience. I’m not a firefighter and I’m not brave. I kept writing about the anti-apocalypse, but I’m not sure I could tell you exactly what that means and certainly not how to do it. You expect the end of the world to be terrifying, but it also makes you feel a little pathetic. From a craft standpoint, I’m terribly fascinated by what makes us pathetic. 

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KARAN 

The “Meryl Streep” poem is a masterpiece of camp metaphysics. “I ask Meryl Streep if she’s actually God & of course Meryl Streep is God. Meryl Streep plays everyone including God & including Me.” It’s absurd, earnest, sleep-deprived, and somehow deeply moving. How do you balance irony and sincerity in your work? When does camp become prayer?

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CHRISTIAN 

Oh I’m OBSESSED with this question!!! Masterpiece of camp metaphysics—that’s golden; I’m pasting that line onto my author website and tombstone and maybe my Grindr profile??? I think I’m such an unserious person that my internal line between irony and sincerity gets blurred. A great joke is fundamentally honest. Exaggeration amplifies the underlying truth. Irony (ironically enough) is what allows me to be sincere. 

I’ll be so real; the question when does camp become prayer is itself hilariously camp. To quote Karlie Kloss, we’re looking camp right in the eye, and to quote Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp:” Camp taste is a mode of enjoyment (...) Camp is generous. It wants to (...) find the success in passionate human failures. Camp taste is a kind of love.— 

That emotional orientation towards life feels something like reverence. I’m not a spiritually-driven person. I’ve always filed Somatic Rituals under “artistic practices for people who know how chakras work,” but laughter is a type of bodily ritual, an opening up of the self. I’m typically a very nitpicky writer, but there’s this frantic manic motion-filled feeling I get in my chest when I’m getting really silly with it. There’s a giddy intensity in the action itself, as if monologuing to the Google Doc about Teletubby Meryl Streep shoving melatonin gummies in my mouth is the most serious business ever. I don’t know what I’m praying for/towards, but maybe that’s prayer???

I think my autisticness also informs how/why I engage with camp/absurdism in my work. Of course camp is a queer practice, but I’d say it’s also a neuroqueer practice. I mean, what better way to describe autistic masking as an overearnest, easily-clocked parody of the self. Like Sontag says, we “see the world in quotation marks” and ourselves as a live performance. There’s a reason all the autistics I’ve met love The Muppets; any celebration of naive/intentional camp is inherently a celebration of the labor and potential joy to be found in the overearnest self. And poetry, even when it tries to be subtle, is an intensely earnest art. In my own life, I’ve worked really hard to embrace the flamboyant and whimsical and childish parts of myself, and I think that mentality bleeds onto the page as I write. 

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KARAN

I love “Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals,” for how it explores the intersections of desire, violence, abjection, performance. “I method-act as my corpse & the academy awards me best supporting actor.” The poem keeps collapsing sex and death, intimacy and annihilation. Where did this poem come/arise from? 

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CHRISTIAN

When I started this poem, it was actually persona-poem about Drew Barrymore in the opening scene of Scream, but (like many many things), I decided to make it all about me. I was seventeen and I’d just discovered Richard Siken, so, of course, I wrote a poem that collapsed sex and death even though I’d never died or had sex. That’s not an original story. As I grew up, the poem became about me. Without going into detail, I treated myself like a dumpster for many years, and life gave me material. It’s weird to write a poem so young, then see it get truer as I lived. T. Kira Madden wrote this incredible craft essay, “Against Catharsis: Writing is Not Therapy,” where she debunks the idea that autobiography about trauma is inherently therapeutic. For me, this poem was the first time I had to reckon with that impulse, since I wrote it as I lived it. The film-logic of the poem helped me distance myself from the poetic speaker. In those moments and afterwards, it’s easier to depict myself as a sometimes self-defeating character rather than a sometimes self-defeating Me, auditioning for My murder scene. So, I’m not saying I’m not the speaker of my poems, but I think it’s always a version of me playing myself on a soundstage. In other words, I’m always auditioning for something. 

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KARAN 

“Sonnet Written In Person-First Language” is one of the smartest formal moves I’ve seen in a while. The poem enacts the linguistic trap: “Person With implies a Person Without, implies person nursed into personhood.” You’re using the sonnet form (that container of personhood, of selfhood) to argue against being severed from your own identity. Where do you stand on person-first versus identity-first language?

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CHRISTIAN 

I’m autistic and I love being autistic and like many autistics, I often repeat myself. How’s that for echolalia! I prefer identity-first language, but I also respect the history of person-first language; it arose at a time of deep cultural ableism where people needed to know that a disabled person was still a person. The alternative then wasn’t identity-first language; it was the r-slur. Autistic people should use whatever phrasing they want; I say I’m autistic, but I also say I have autism, so it all gets muddy quick. I will say, non-autistic advocates/charities shouldn’t have any say in this discourse, because person-first does often feel like a standard set by well-meaning people who aren’t autistic. 

The poem itself frames identity-first as a response to an ableist logic imposed by person-first, but identity-first language is itself a gorgeous practice; I’m honored to be autistic in everything I do. In a poetry workshop, another autistic poet asked why all my autism poems are so fixated on ableism. Fair question! Sometimes, I forget to write the autistic-joy poem because every poem I write is an autistic-joy poem. Hell, I am the autistic-joy poem!

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KARAN

In “Ars Poetica???” you give us a list of rules: “Avoid absolutes. avoid the absolution of metaphor... so that’s the last time i’ll ever use the word body or trauma or cleave or any metaphor involving a bird.” Then the poem ends with you collapsing in on yourself, becoming exactly the void you’re trying to avoid. What is your relationship with form/formal experimentation?

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CHRISTIAN 

Here’s a secret (and imagine me whispering this answer for max-secrecy purposes). I’ve never told anybody this before, but all my poems start off as practical jokes, one I play on myself and the reader. My poems begin with the thought… I wonder if I can get away with this? 

Can I get away with sprawling-lines about a Meryl Streep head??? A sonnet with a single beginning-rhyme??? What if I solve the Wikipedia List of Unsolvable Problems??? “Ars Poetica?” started because an undergrad poetry professor wrote “limit your use of to-be verbs” on a poem and I wanted to be shady. All this to say, I typically begin a poem with a specific form and a specific function, and I love inventing/disrupting forms in the process. I often rely on some self-imposed constraints to write, and I hope to make those constraints aesthetically and rhetorically evocative, like a pair of bedazzled handcuffs. Traditional poetic forms all carry implied meanings (sonnet = love, abecedarian = childhood, sestina = obsession, etc), and when you break/shift those forms, the poem itself begins with a subversion, which is always generative. Other than titles, the reader sees the visual form of a poem before anything else, and I really like my visual forms to give the reader a show! That syntactic razzle-dazzle!

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KARAN

Loneliness moves through these poems like a bass line. “I was a lonely child. I’m a lonelier adult.” In the Doomsday Preppers poem, in the person-first language sonnet, in the Meryl Streep hallucination. You write about being “deferred to houseparty wallpaper, wallflower in reverse-bloom.” How does loneliness function in your work—as subject, as occasion, as formal principle?

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CHRISTIAN 

Can I be honest? This question makes me a little sad. 

That’s not at all to critique the question! It’s a stellar question because it’s true. Loneliness moves through my poems like a bassline because it moves through my life like a bassline. Perhaps listening to Nobody by Mitski on repeat in 10th grade changed my neurochemistry? There’s this great line from Madeleine Cravens’ Alba: “My aloneness is spectacular,” and I’m still figuring out how to turn my loneliness into aloneness, let alone make it spectacular. 

As a lonely kid, I believed that if you could just say something well-enough, people would magically care to listen. This was half-true. Poetry offers such emotional density; it’s like the energy-drink of language, which is really lovely for when you very desperately want to be heard. Many poets distance themselves from their speaker, but all my sentences start with I, even when they start with You. In fact, I rewrote many of these interview sentences in passive voice to avoid starting every sentence with I. My poems gravitate towards loneliness-as-direct-subject because loneliness is an inherently complex/evocative emotion, a feeling both personal and culturally endemic. But loneliness-as-occasion? It’s every occasion. Writing’s often considered a lonely art; we hole away at our coffee-shops or libraries to stare into a Google Doc. But that loneliness also ensures accessibility; I found poetry in large part because it’s an art-form I could always afford to practice. To return to that line from Cravens, I think poetry is what helps me turn my loneliness into aloneness. When I put myself onto the page, I can keep myself company. 

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KARAN 

This is a question we ask all our poets, though the answers are always wildly different: there’s a theory that a poet’s work tends toward one of four major axes—poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, or poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work, if at all?

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CHRISTIAN 

It’d be funny to say poet-of-the-body after “Ars Poetica??” but I can’t help but think of that Fiona Apple lyric— He said it’s all in your head and I said so’s everything but he didn’t get it. In that sense, I’d say I’m a poet-of-the-mind, and I think that rings true for both product and process.

My poems are near-invariably narratives or arguments. I’m basically an essayist cosplaying as a poet. To steal the language of Gregory Orr’s Four Temperaments of Poetry, I stay very firmly in the land of Story and Structure. I’m literal-minded; I can’t tell the difference between arbitrary and ephemeral. As for my process, I’m honestly a teensy-bit terrified of language that metaphorizes/mythologizes the craft process. I get tripped up on taxonomies. What’s the difference between heart and soul? Does writing about the body mean subject matter or writing process or simply being the type of person who meditates? Like I said, I’m writing about fucking up my life before I’m old enough to stop fucking up my life. It’s tempting to view sadness as a generative device, and I think my solution to that is remembering the poems all happen in my brain. The work of poetry is a mental task: taking what I know and rendering it with the right form and syntax and imagery, which lets the work be joyful even when the subject isn’t.

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KARAN 

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively: what would you tell other young writers who are trying to write about subjects that feel risky or stigmatized?

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CHRISTIAN 

Revise Towards Strangeness — from Twenty-Two Poetry Hacks by Carmen Giménez. I’d get that line tattooed if I weren’t so scared of pain.

In a workshop with the BRILLIANT Airea D. Matthews, she offered an incredible decolonization of the traditional MFA style workshop, where the writer stays silent while the audience hurls prescriptive feedback. In the workshop, we took most of our time just listing descriptive statements about each poem, and then engaged with specific questions from the poet. I’m really taken with that generous mode of reading, and something she said really stuck with me: (I’m paraphrasing here) The goal of a workshop is to develop your internal editor enough to not need to workshop. That permission to trust your own voice really stuck with me.

As for advice I’d give? Don’t obfuscate yourself. Whatever you need to say, just say it. 

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KARAN 

Would you offer our readers a poetry prompt—something simple, strange, or rigorous—to help them begin a new poem?

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CHRISTIAN 

Write a poem that takes an unserious subject seriously and/or takes a serious subject unseriously. For inspiration, watch and transcribe a stand-up comedy special. Find your favorite jokes and study the syntax. 

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KARAN

Please recommend a piece of art (a film, a song, a TV show, anything other than a poem) that’s sustained you lately or that you wish everyone could experience.

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CHRISTIAN 

Polyester by John Waters! 

‍Authoring Autism by M. Remi Yergeau & Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe by Julia Miele Rodas!

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KARAN 

And finally, Christian, since we believe in studying masters’ masters, who are the poets or artists who’ve most shaped your sense of what’s possible in language? Who taught you that poems could be funny and devastating at once?

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CHRISTIAN

This question is SO intimidating because I worry about who I’ll miss! Micaela Camracho-Tenreiro’s Poetry Playlist really resonates with me. For this answer, I’d love to specifically thank the poems that gave me permission to write my poems. 

For a brief bout of childhood… — Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss

Pornography is a theater of types… — Dirty Valentine by Richard Siken

Ars Poetica? — Night Bird by Danusha Lameris

you cannot write an autism poem — Social Skills Training by Solmaz Sharif

The Wikipedia List of Unsolved Problems… — Kyoto by Phoebe Bridgers

Meryl Streep — First of December by Natalie Shapero

Sonnet Written In Person-First Language — Duplex (I begin with love) by Jericho Brown 

& Another Apocalypse — less hope by Danez Smith