Interview with poet Chris Martin about Multiverse, a new poetry series from Milkweed

Earlier this year, Milkweed Editions, an independent non-profit publisher based in Minneapolis, launched Multiverse, a literary series devoted to different ways of languaging, curated by neurodivergent poet Chris Martin, whose new book May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism, and Our Neurodiverse Future just came out from Harper One. The first book in the Multiverse series was Hannah Emerson’s debut poetry collection The Kissing of Kissing, which fulfills a key tenet of the imprint: To showcase editorial voices that emerge “from the practices and creativity of neurodivergent, autistic, neuroqueer, mad, nonspeaking and disabled cultures.” Creating this kind of series is a transformative act that enriches, enhances and transforms our current literary landscape. I interviewed Chris Martin about how Multiverse will open up a chorus of voices and sensibilities that our medical humanities community needs to hear and witness. 

Thank you for getting together to talk about Milkweed’s Multiverse series that explores different ways of languaging. Could you explain that term and also speak about how the clinical community can learn from this core concept of your series.

‘Languaging’ is a term I got from Adam Wolfond, who is a non-speaking autistic writer from Toronto; his book “The Wanting Way” will be the series’ second title coming out in the fall. Adam likes to emphasize movement, emphasize how something is rather than what it is. One of Multiverse’s intentions is to disrupt the monolithic ways of seeing people and conditions and to bring out the wild variety of forms that language and autism and neurodivergence and disability take. When we’re speaking of non-speaking autistic writers, there is a tendency to think of them as ‘exceptions’ and have one stand in for everybody, whether it’s Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay or a book like “The Reason I Jump” by Naoki Higashida. But when one or two people stand in for everyone else, we forget there’s this amazing amount of variety. By giving a range of neurodivergent writers, we give them a platform to express themselves exactly how they express themselves and show how much they diverge from each other. [It’s limiting to] think we sum up a condition or way of life with one particular set of ideas.

The Kissing of Kissing by Hannah Emerson is the first in Milkweed’s Multiverse series, curated by Chris Martin.

That’s one of the challenges for the clinical community: Learning to differentiate and do a ‘close reading’ of each patient provides a chance for clinicians to be creative and open, rather than relying just on symptoms, tests, data. Most clinicians are taught to be so by the book and what feels embedded in Multiverse as a concept, and in Hannah Emerson’s poetic universe as well, is learning to be open to a different language or point of view. The question is if clinicians can adapt to that discipline of puzzling out a new language in the hospital room or ER—poetry teaches patience and openness to a different language but will that skill be transferable when confronted by a patient’s weird blood count or cough that won’t go away?

When you say ‘by the book,’ it’s such a powerful phrase, because it is by the book! If Multiverse could be by the book writ large as a resource for different voices, that is amazing. The more nonspeaking writers I engage with the more my understanding of autism grows, and the more my understanding of myself grows, learning about what it means to be me, a human animal. The difficulty you point to is really interesting, and we often misapprehend where that difficulty arises. Primarily, it is that the language isn’t transactional, it doesn’t follow neuro-normative patterns that allow it to be instantly consumed and that arises in medicine too. We’re living in a capitalist ableist society, a neuro-normative society trying to get everyone on a conveyor belt where they will be, inevitably, crushed, at least the way I see it. But who’s to say we have to move at that pace? There are other ways to communicate, other ways to be together, and if those ways feel challenging at first, it’s because they’re pushing in the opposite direction of the conveyor belt. We have to work hard to step away and to take things on their own terms rather than follow preconceived ways of how language should work or how people should work and I think there couldn’t be anything more important than that.

One concept taught in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University by Dr. Rita Charon, is co-constructing a narrative. Along with close reading and understanding tone of voice and point of view, there’s also how the self and the other construct a shared story in the clinical encounter. There’s the doctor’s point of view and the patient’s – and the idea of coming together to create this story involves a ‘shared power’ – not just, ‘I’m the doctor, the authority figure, and I hold the power here.’ How does your series speak to this concept?

One of the things we think about at Multiverse is “can we foster and cultivate consensual futures together?” By that, we’re going back to the roots of that word to think about how we feel together in the world that emerges between us. We’re also interested in consent—a consent that is a constant process, to involve the writer on their own terms or at least in a place where we can ‘find’ each other instead of making them answer things in a neurotypical way. Like with Adam: His visual acuity doesn’t allow him to fix the words on the screen—they swim on it—so when it came to making line breaks we had to think of the accommodations to allow Adam to do this. From the beginning Adam totally questioned the authority that comes with authorship –so he also commissioned about a dozen poets, writers and thinkers to participate in this experiment of line breaking. Then he figured out which ones he preferred – his own or theirs. Also, he doesn’t see them as breaks but as windings like a river – so he would have writers unwind the poems, then rewind them and bring their own sensitivity. Other writers liked the idea and adopted the practice of commissioning others (not me, I love doing line breaks, it’s one of my favorite things). But what started out as an accommodation became this methodology that others did too.

“Unwinding” as a way of disrupting in a creative way – it’s a great metaphor that clinicians and caregivers can use when feeling out of control of a situation. The idea of looking at a clinical encounter and unwinding it in order to make the breaks (or rewind the circumstances) is useful.

May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism, and Our Neurodiverse Future by Chris Martin was just published by Harper One.

It’s so important to ask ourselves what we’re trying to fix, because of the non-normative linguistic approaches these writers have. In Hannah’s book, there’s a lot of repetition, there’s no punctuation, there’s a lot of anaphora, starting lines with the same words, ending lines with the same word, those are literary devices used by many people, but I think Hannah does it in a particular way that it takes one awhile to figure out how the poems move, and once you do, it becomes really seamless. There is a way of reteaching yourself how to read and for each of these books, I hope that’s the experience on some level, the sense of ‘Oh I have to relearn how to read because I’m encountering something so true to its own patterns that I have to listen very closely and be humble and figure out how this is moving.’

That’s the experience a doctor has when meeting a new patient. That level of engagement is what NM tries to teach so clinicians feel comfortable instead of bothered by newness. Speaking of new, let’s focus on The Kissing of Kissing. How should someone new to poetry and to Hannah Emerson’s work engage with this new collection? 

Read it out loud. One of the amazing paradoxes of Hannah’s work is it’s so incredibly, entrancingly lyrical it begs to be read aloud. When it’s read aloud, you’re experiencing it and that’s the best possible thing to do.  Also, trust that the book will meet you in the middle. If you spend a little time with it you’ll find yourself being addressed in really direct ways. That’s what I love about Hannah’s book: while on some level it’s difficult, there’s also this incredible connectivity and directness toward the reader and those who do connect will get hit with a lightning bolt.

In an interview you did with Hannah, she voices the following remarkable passage:

“Nothing is the stillness that is the moment that is now yes yes. Please try to go to the place that is in all of our dark places that we try to run away from every moment of our great great great beautiful lives yes yes. Please try to understand that these thoughts go directly to the place that we need to go to deconstruct the freedom that we think is the way to a comfortable life that has brought us to the brink of extinction yes yes.”

Talk about how readers, especially clinicians, can be open to the ‘nothing’ Hannah speaks of when many have been trained in suppositions about normalcy.

For one thing, resist that quick grasping or groping after categories and the way we want to fill the space quickly with things we think are productive but may instead cover up and smother an authentic connection with someone that would lead to authentically learning who they are. I was just reading “How to Do Nothing,” a remarkable book by Jenny Odell who talks about the philosopher Martin Buber, and his idea of the I-it relationship – one of instrumentality where you’re treating someone like an it so you can get what you want when moving through your own experience, and I-thou relationships, where you truly behold someone on an equal plane, and are ready to learn from who they are. I feel like that’s the space of the ‘nothing’ and one thing Hannah is saying is there’s a kind of plane where we can meet each without those preconceptions and humbly slowly carefully learn about each other and what arises there will have an authenticity and realness to it that will be nourishing and hopefully, in clinical terms, will be incredibly useful.

Why is poetry such a potent tool to disrupt our ways of thinking?

One of the things I’ve tried to figure out is what is this incredible reciprocity between autism and poetry. Hannah writes a lot about freedom – it’s not a traditional idea of freedom, but rather it’s that “dreaming kissing life.” One of the things that carries that freedom is, I would almost say, a love—the pattern of love. For me, every poem is a love poem, no matter what it’s about. The patterns you infuse that poem with communicate a number of things. One is that the author cares about how the poem meets you; in prose, there are a lot of patterns but a writer is often so hemmed in by grammar, right? It’s sometimes hard to feel the care in the way language is shaped, whereas with a poem there are so many strategic choices being made you really feel like someone has made something for you—there’s such an intimacy to that. And the word poesis, the origin of poem, is ‘to build or compose, to make.’

In The Kissing of Kissing, there’s such an intimacy in the way a poem meets you, greets you, kisses you, that’s hard to find in other places. But it’s also a place where you can take off everything that’s extraneous, you can drop all the standardizations or make all your own choices— whether it’s punctuation, capitalization, the shape of the poem, there are just so many potential choices you can make. It’s analogous to moving through the world and something I’ve had to learn—how do I unmask as I move through the world as a neurodivergent person, a disabled person, how do I allow who I really am to meet other people and where do I find spaces that are safe enough. A poem I feel takes all those aspirations of unmasking and meeting people in direct and consensual spaces, and it combines with our love of song.

You’ll find that all through Hannah’s work, and one of the things clinicians might be interested in is that Hannah is echolalic – she’s nonspeaking but she’s often always singing. Song, I believe, is where language originates, language began as song, and then coalesced in other forms associated with story and then written language. But poetry returns us to the original impulse of song, which is something we use to celebrate and come together in communities, something that enjoins us.—Donna Bulseco

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Donna Bulseco, MA, MS, is a graduate of the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University. After getting her BA at UCLA in creative writing and American poetry, the L.A. native studied English literature at Brown University for a Master's degree, then moved to New York City. She has been an editor and journalist for the past 25 years at publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Women's Wear Daily, W, Self and InStyle, and has written articles for Health, More and The New York Times. She is editor-in-chief of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, a literary journal recognized as a leader in the medical humanities world.

Places I've Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown

Molly McCully Brown has cerebral palsy, “which is a little like a stroke that happens when you are born” as she has to explain nearly every day to someone, somewhere. In Places I’ve Taken My Body, a collection of personal essays and her third book, she reveals her incessant, conflicted relationship with the body that she has carried since birth through to maturity as an accomplished poet, author and professor at Kenyon College. Several of these essays have been published elsewhere, but as collected set they provide an overlapping, ongoing conversation between body and voice that invites us into the experience of living a life in which the body can never be taken for granted.

The seventeen essays in the collection contemplate daily life that demands she accept the limitations that her cerebral palsy dictates on her ability to walk and maintain balance. Her life has been broken into four distinct epochs defined by her broken body: the original body before medical interventions, the body after extensive spinal surgery as a child, the body that by revolted during puberty, and her now slowly aging body that she believes will never improve. Woven across recollections of these epochs are seminal life events, including the loss of her twin sister shortly after birth, surgeries and terrifying medical interventions of various types, new academic and professional opportunities, deaths of family members, successes and failures. These essays were clearly written independently as basic introductory and situational information is often reiterated, but together the quilting of the essays creates a rich, multidimensional discussion into the nature of embodiment of self, voice and passion filtered through her uncooperative physicality.

Martha McCully Brown

As she moves through her many travels fueled by an urge to challenge her body’s literal limits, she grapples with identity as defined by her disability. She lays bare her grief and rage with the injustice of it all. She cannot escape her body, and sometimes does not even know if she wants to, but yet... all life must be experienced through the discolored lens of her body defined by medical lexicon and the disability politics she wants to shed. She is hindered by “this sense that I have to pay so much attention to my body, the ground right in front of me.” (pg.18) The necessary hyper-focus on the body creates physical and emotional barriers that impair her ability to enjoy what she achieves. This grief weighs heavily over us as readers. We feel her frustration at being moored to the earth while she wants to float free.

Ms. Brown’s collection of essays is a deep and graceful contemplation of her ongoing search for a stable identity that is powerful and authentic. She has her broken body, “I have needed fixing from the moment I was born. I can feel myself falling apart.” (pg. 81), but desperately does not want this body to define her, all the while honestly acknowledging the myriad ways it does. Ms. Brown is generous and forgiving of those who initially see only her body, including those doctors and surgeons who treat her over the years, and hardest on herself for wanting to deny that body.

“…I put on a nice dress and went to a bar I don’t usually frequent, but that I knew was accessible. I parked my Segway against the back wall and chose a table close enough that I could see it, but far enough away that it wasn’t obviously mine. I sat in the semi-dark and drank a bourbon, and enjoyed the thought that, looking at me, nobody would know that sitting at the table right now I could be any pretty young woman with a book in a bar. For all they knew, I could go dance. I could get up and walk right out of there, painless and fluid and unremarkable. I wouldn’t need to field a single comment or question, or get a single sorry look.
This lasted a few minutes, and then I felt guilty as hell for trying to crawl out of my skin.” (pg.88)

The collection includes “Bent Body, Lamb,” which is an elegant description of the comfort she has found in Catholicism, despite the paradox of not being able to partake in the rituals of mass due to her physical limitations. She identifies with the broken figure of Christ on the cross which highlights the mutual necessity of body and self. This is the strongest free-standing piece of the collection, and was very well received when published in Image Journal for its unfiltered exposure of her confrontation with God at the injustice of her reality paired with a path forward to hope and resolution. She concludes quite beautifully with “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” (pg. 45) Is this not what everyone searches, regardless of the packaging we carry?

While these essays were not necessarily intended for a healthcare readership, I will be recommending this as necessary reading for my trainees in Neurology from now on. The totality of the overlapping essays crossing time and space provide a moving and powerful narrative of the lived experience of a patient who always demands to be more than a patient. —Lara K. Ronan

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Lara K. Ronan

Lara Ronan, MD is an Associate Professor of Neurology and Medicine at Geisel School of Medicine, Dartmouth College and Vice-Chair for Education in the Department of Neurology at Dartmouth Hitchcock in Lebanon, NH. She directs the DH Neurology Residency Program and has research interests in the intersection between the Arts and Humanities and Medicine. She is currently completing the Columbia Narrative Medicine Certificate Program and writing about the effects of individual narratives on the telling of the legacy of a single story.

Articulations: The Body and Illness in Poetry by Dr. Jon Mukand

Articulations: The Body and Illness in Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 1994) is a collection of over four hundred poems compiled and edited by poet and physician Dr. Jon Mukand. This is the second medical poetry collection assembled by Mukand, the first being Sutured Words (Aviva Pr, 1987).

What makes Articulations remarkable is the accessibility of the material, primarily through the diversity in the perspective it offers, beyond that of just the physician. The collection is divided into categories that include Patients’ Views of Illness: The Darkness Within Me Is Growing, Views of Caregivers: Gentleness and the Scalpel, By Healthcare Workers: Dissecting the Good Lines from the Bad and Family and Friends: Afraid to Name This Dying. There is also poetry from more marginalized perspectives within the healthcare system with categories entitled, Women: Flowers of Ether in My Hair, Mental Illness: The Shadow of the Obsessive Idea, Disability: Their Lockstep Tight as Lilac Buds and Social Issues: Hungry and Frightened by Namelessness. The inclusion of these latter categories of poetry is especially meaningful and somewhat revolutionary—given that the collection was originally published over twenty-five years ago. These diverse categorical titles are also displayed on the book’s cover art; they circumnavigate an image of a jointed skeletal hand, likely symbolizing the distinct perspectives or “articulations” present within the field of healthcare.

There is a poem for everyone in Dr. Mukand’s book. Some are more generally relatable like “Waiting for the Doctor” and “Blood Pressure.” Others are more specific, like “After Being Paralyzed from the Neck down for Twenty Years, Mr. Wallace Gets a Chin-Operated Motorized Wheelchair.” Some are tinged with dry humor— like “The Urine Specimen,” while many veer far from the lighthearted, including “Rape” and “To A Young Woman Considering Suicide.” No poem in the series is particularly verbose ,and most are no more than a page. This brevity contributes to the poems’ digestibility and accessibility.

Even poems peppered with medical references can still be appreciated by the majority of layman readers. An example is a poem entitled “Peau d’Orange” from Marcia Lynch about a patient with inflammatory breast cancer. Anyone who has completed medical school training will recall the poem’s title as a nod to the dimpling skin changes seen in inflammatory breast cancer, characteristically described as “peau d’orange,” which is French for “skin of an orange.”. In it Lynch writes, “I accept you calling my breast an orange peel, let you lay hands on this fruit.”. While this imagery enhances the piece, it is not a prerequisite to understand and appreciate the poem’s message; it is merely an additional treat for the medically savvy reader. Even without knowing the specific textbook nomenclature, the poem still hits hard with pleading lines like “If you lift the chill, that unravels my spine, I will send you stars from the Milky Way. Sending them spinning down, dancing a thousand-fold. Please let me grow old.”

In Mukand’s introduction to Articulations, he explains that he hopes “these poetic articulations will help patients to cope with illness, friends and family to understand the patient’s condition and healthcare professionals in their challenging work.” The collection achieves this through offering a diversity of well- packaged perspectives from all walks of the healthcare spectrum. It is poetry that is accessible not only by the seasoned physician who regularly reads The New England Journal of Medicine but also by the people in that very physician’s waiting room who have never even heard of such a publication. —Fredrick Martyn

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Fredrick Martyn

Fredrick Martyn is a Canadian writer, poet and medical student at The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Washington, D.C. His poetry has appeared in Pulp Poets Press, Spillwords Press, Bonnie’s Crew and The Online Journal Community and Person-Centered Dermatology, among other places. He is a contributing writer for the medical satire website Gomerblog, as well as other online humor publications including Points In Case, The Establishment, Slackjaw and Little Old Lady Comedy. He also acts as a director for his medical school’s comedy show and can sometimes be found performing his poetry at Busboys & Poets, in D.C.

Gather the Night by Katherine DiBella Seluja

“A schizophrenic is no longer a schizophrenic…when he feels understood by someone else” reads the epigraph on this quietly powerful book of poetry by pediatric nurse practitioner Katherine DiBella Seluja. The words come from Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung and introduce the reader to the emotional heart of the book, which movingly reflects the facets of the writer’s life, as a clinician, poet and understanding sister to a brother named Lou who lived with schizophrenia and substance addiction.

The slim volume, published by the University of New Mexico Press, is divided into four sections: Time Travel; Free Concert; Sing to Me; and Stars Speak. Each section starts with a short free-form prose poem in an imagined voice, perhaps that of Lou’s, drawing a vivid visual tableau. In terms of overall structure, the book has a narrative arc that spans from childhood through adulthood, from beginnings to endings. Some poems are tales of families and communities dealing with mental illness in everyday life and in startling moments of illness and death. Throughout, Seluja, whose poem about Parkinson’s, “Not Every Homemade Thing,” appeared in our Spring 2017 issue, brings her vivid language, compassionate affection, deeply-felt visions and clinical observations into poems that transport readers close to the tragedies and the moments of inspiration, as well as the experience of grief and acceptance, as she receives and perceives them.

One of the most original and skillful aspects of this collection is that we hear more than the poet’s voice on these pages: Seluja has said that Gather the Night includes “prose poems and persona poems that express the voice of psychosis, the voice of addiction and Lou’s imagined voice.” While each poem stands solidly on its own, reading from beginning to end increases the intensity of the connection with the people, places and things in it. In Time Travel, for instance, we see neighborhoods and neighbors, some sly and seductive (Reynaldo in “Chiquita”) and some down-to-earth and welcoming (Scottie, the grocer and Mrs. Gratzel, the baker’s wife in “Local Grown.”). We see the pummeling a sister gets from a brother in the name of karate practice in “Kata,” or the way a mother delivers bad news in “Storm Hymn”:

One thin crack in the plastic sign

on the locked ward door

Winds its way through

Authorized Personnel Only

like a branch of the Hackensack River

where we used to play.

Dried mud thick on our shoes

split in so many places,

our mother’s face when she said,

We just admitted your brother;

he told us his crystals were melting.

Waiting for the orderly to turn his key

I turn back to our winter childhood refuge

under the cellar stairs.

We were base camp

guardians of snow

charted drift and temperature

graphed hope for Sunday night storms.

Now gray clouds

and Thorazine doses increase,

he wanders the blizzard alone

no guide rope tied to the door,

unique as each stellar dendrite

no two of him alike.

Along with the concrete, graceful imagery of the poems, we also receive information about illness and madness—and how the clinical world handles it, especially in the second section, Free Concert. We hear from a doctor in “The Psychiatrist Said” (“It’s [the schizophrenia] all a matter of proteins/We’ll have it cracked in three to four years”), while we glimpse inside a medical facility in “Spinning with Thorazine.” We witness Seluja’s ambitious way of contemplating and confronting the big-picture issues of care in poems such as the ironic “The History of Healing” (“It began as a huddle of knowers, passed through oral tradition/those who could ‘heal’ and those who at least attempted”). The chilling “When Your Son is Diagnosed in the 1960s” notes an earlier era’s method of treatment and causes (“His psychosis is tied to your mothering/and it’s time to cut the chord, be careful of the sting”).

Katherine DiBella Seluja

Throughout it all, we get to know her brother Lou, a musician whose mandolin is elegantly described in “She Wore Opals at Her Neck” (“He fell in love with the mahogany curve/her hip and polish/the rosewood waist/and the way her neck fit to his palm”). Seluja expresses not only the affection and love she feels for him but also the wounds and wreckage that comes from a closeness with someone experiencing schizophrenia. There’s a complex layer of emotions at work here, that spans from caring and fearful to raging and raw, especially in the short “Telephone, 4 a.m.” where the resignation and anger in lines like “What if there were a box to keep him in/somewhere to store him away/to bring out with rainy weather/Then you’d have time to listen, unravel every line” comes through. In many of the poems in the Sing to Me third section, we intensely feel the frustration and fear for a loved one in peril.

In the final section, Stars Speak, poems turn elegiac, mourning Lou’s death. Again, the poet displays a skillfulness is accessing and expressing the complexity of emotions that accompany the death of a sibling. In “News of a Brother’s Death,” we feel the matter-of-fact reality of it (“Don’t kid yourself/it’s nothing like a movie”) while “Wanderlust” explores the way that Lou lives on in the tiny details of a life (“Find me/in the weave of my brother’s shirt/in the tread of mud on the floor”). Seluja mines sadness and strength in startlingly beautiful poems, “Here Among the Ruins” and “If You Need a Wall.” And it feels as if she’s composing a way to live in the world when there’s a significant loss in “Do Our Ancestors Listen When Called” that ends:

My heart is occupied with the ones I’ve lost, each with its own

celestial sphere, their pulse echoes the meridian.

I keep rearranging you like a favorite satellite, dragging you

into good orbit, your solar panels deployed to the stars.

Gather the Night ambitiously takes on the task of speaking about loss, addiction, madness, grief and love, bringing us into its intimate confrontations. We emerge from reading it with a deeper understanding of all of the above, a sense of wonder at the way we get through the harder, harsher aspects of our lives, and an appreciation for poets and nurses like Seluja who guide the way.—Donna Bulseco

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Donna Bulseco, MA, MS, is a graduate of the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University. After getting her BA at UCLA in creative writing and American poetry, the L.A. native studied English literature at Brown University for a Master's degree, then moved to New York City. She has been an editor and journalist for the past 25 years at publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Women's Wear Daily, W, Self, and InStyle, and has written articles for Health, More and the New York Times. She is Managing Editor of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.