Autumn Williams finds poetry in chronic illness
Myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME, is also known as chronic fatigue syndrome. Its symptoms include extreme exhaustion, memory problems, dizziness, and muscle and joint pain. It can also cause sleep problems. The cause is unknown, but it’s believed to result from a combination of factors, including genetics, infections, trauma, and body metabolism.
Poet Autumn Williams has ME. She’s had it for 11 years. In 2021, her condition worsened to the point where she became almost completely bedbound. She turned to writing poetry. It is not so much poetry about ME as it is poetry inspired by the condition. To date, she’s published two collections, a chapbook entitled Wave and Clouds on the Ground.
She organizes the collection around the seasons. Some poems are short, with only a few lines. Others are longer, extended by short, almost fleeting thoughts and fragments. The overall effect is something akin to a dream state, which you might expect if you wander through clouds on the ground.
The title poem describes what she means by the title and perhaps offer a definition of the condition she’s grappled with.
Clouds on the Ground
Drifting moments,
unable to sleep
To try and fly into dreams
is impossible—
the gravity in my mind
is too heavy—
pulling me down
I need a place
away from here,
to
escape
the restless waiting
I create clouds
on the ground—
soft
and surrounding—
welcoming me into darkness
and relief
Williams evokes a dreamlike impression in this poem, a drifting in and out of consciousness. The poem is almost hypnotic. Try reading it in the early morning when all is quiet. You turn the page, and you find this sole fragment:
There is
escape
in dreaming
Autumn Williams
Season follows season, and then Williams begins again with “Fall.” No matter what the season, all of the poems suggest quiet and solitude. At times you feel like you’re experiencing a dream. The poems are deceptively simple. Like the ME that inspires them, you see these poems for what they say, and for the beauty of the natural world they describe. But what they are grounded in is complicated, just like ME.
Williams’ poems have been published in a number of literary publications and journals. Clouds on the Ground was a finalist in The Wishing Shelf Book Awards. She lives in Texas with her husband and children.
ME is a condition such that it would be easy to give in to depression and despair. That’s not what this collection says, however. The circular nature of the seasons says that life goes on. There is great beauty in the world. You can move through those clouds on the ground, and you know there is hope.
Photo by Martin Fisch, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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