We Are Listening
Last week, over a hundred people gathered to celebrate the gifts of nonspeaking poets and songwriters at the Neurolyrical Cafe. After listening to several poems from Hannah Emerson’s forthcoming chapbook, You Are Helping This Great Universe Explode, we heard from several other Neurolyrical mainstays, including several poets that have been featured in this newsletter: Imane Boukaila, Joshua Greiner, Sid Ghosh, and Dustin Duby-Koffman.
Among this incredible gathering of talent, I could readily perceive whole worlds of creativity pooling and popping through the digital realm. A poem was calling itself forth. A poem that could only be written by everyone at once. A poem that required the mutual insertion of multiple minds operating in concert. I made a small preamble, describing my original experience with Hannah’s writing, how she had described for me “the language of leaves.” I suggested that there might be countless languages languishing below the notice of typical ears. That together we might bring those under-regarded, yet no less deserving, languages to light. In the span of ten frantic, glorious, electric minutes these languages coalesced into the chat window, threading themselves into an epic collaborative poem:
From winks to wandering birds, from friends to fiefdoms, from ghosts to greeting songs of light, from stress to silence: we are listening to chorus upon chorus pouring itself into the air otherwise unheard. That’s what it means to be neurodivergent, to think otherwise. And a massive crew of neurodiverse individuals can think in so many otherwising ways that the gaps between what is thought and unthought, between what is heard and unheard, begin to disappear. This is true wisdom. Our difference brimming, our collective ear fathoms deeper than any of us alone might dare to guess.
Quiet Volcanoes,
Chris
PS: Join the dozens of people who have already pre-ordered Hannah’s mindblowing chapbook!