I've been trying to write for many years. The trouble is that my aspie voice does not fit the standard conventions of what is commonly recognized as poetry or prose.
Recently there was a debate on this forum about what constitutes a poem versus prose. Someone made the statement, or said words to the effect, that a poem always has certain devices and conventions that must be contained within the poem so that the poem is not simply prose broken up into odd lines. As an aspie I know that I cannot write within the dictates of such established devices and conventions. I've had to make up my own rules in order to express my voice.
Here are ten poems that I've written, but they might just as well be called short stories. Each carefully worded paragraph is a poem or short story, whichever genre you prefer. In some cases the entire poem and/or story is only one sentence in length. In two of these poems I cite the hypertext theorists Tolva and Gandelman and then add my own comment because I believe that my theft of their words makes a poem. I also believe that a statement of fact, as in the tenth poem below, can also be a poem.
I believe I got this virulent strain of mouth disease from an old boyfriend who was addicted to needles and prostituted himself for drugs. Thus, I believe I have a prostitute’s disease inside my body. I sense the sublime in this problem, as though god were at work in it.
"We think space, therefore it is." - Tolva.
I fear empty spaces. My response in the pause before the click is a sense of dread. Also, I have a compulsion to move forward in a clear linear path inside my head. Lexia affords me this sudden change of direction. I experience lexia as a re-orienteering of space with each new word-group. I reread Tolva’s essay with the hope of making sense of my desire.
I want agency.
I went to the shopping mall the other day. The storekeeper and his wife spied on me from behind a metal rack full of postcards while I glanced over the packets of gourmet hot chocolate that were on sale in the store. I was gonna have some hot chocolate rather than my usual coffee. This change evidently alarmed the storekeeper. After several minutes of my browsing, I noticed the storekeeper and his wife exchange furtive looks from myself to each other behind the metal rack. They assumed I was a criminal because of my appearance that was on that day unkempt. I bought a bottle of coke as well as an apple juice for my daughters who were waiting at a nearby table in the food fair. I left and resolved never to enter that establishment again. The mall lights were too bright, also. The mall lights gave me a headache. Could it be that the shopkeeper and his wife, like me, were infused with a sense of guilt?
“As a verbal work, the mola web is nearly pure hyle, tantamount," Gandelman says of the aesthetics of unfinishedness, “to a foregrounding of disorder over order, or randomness and noise over organization.” What does it mean to indulge in the illusion, even momentarily, that one has become free? I experience a small sense of pleasure and relief from the fear instilled in the pause before the click.
Tolva writes: “We ask: what does it mean for words to approach the condition of visuality? Put another way, what is the consequence of poetry, poesis, functioning ut pictura, as a painting does?” Meaning depends on the reader’s experience, he says.
My children have a Mattell game called ‘Operation’ in which they attempt to extract the innards of a red-nosed clown with a pair of child-sized aluminum tweezers without being shocked by a small electric jolt that emanates from the crevices where the clown’s “organs” are placed inside its body. I emphasize that there is nothing life like about the clown whatsoever. My children, five and seven years old, are unable to coordinate their hand motions enough to play the game well. The boxed game sits unused on a closet shelf among other useless toys.
In hypertext: “(C)olors can be assigned by author or reader, though in the mola web their default values are used throughout. Thus, as readers move through the text spaces, circling back to previously visited lexias or encountering new “pages” that contain links to previously visited lexias, the once – monochromatic text fields slowly cleave and coalesce into a two-tone patchwork.” A child’s game. It seems clear that our tasks in hypertext are children’s games, without intrinsic or even any apparent external purpose except to exist. No new problems exist so we must choose complications instead.
Sources estimate that on the Ivory Coast 200,000 children are virtual slaves imprisoned on cocoa bean and coffee plantations.
31 Jul 2006, 2:40 pm
