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Thank You Jeffrey Brown of PBS News Hour

Stephen Kuusisto to appear on PBS News Hour
Image: Logo of PBS News Hour

Tonight the PBS NewsHour will air a segment about my new book Have Dog, Will Travel. The piece features an interview with Jeffrey Brown whose reporting on literature and poetry is well known to book lovers across the nation. Jeffrey is also a poet whose first collection The News is available from Copper Canyon Press. In our time together we talked about poetry, civil rights, disability culture, dogs for the blind, the field of disability studies, and the power of literature to bring people together around social justice movements. And yes, there’s a lovely dog, Caitlyn, a sweetie pie yellow Labrador from Guiding Eyes for the Blind.

The program airs locally, in Syracuse at 7 PM. Check your local listings.

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Stephen Kuusisto and HarleyABOUT: Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the memoirs Have Dog, Will Travel; Planet of the Blind (a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”); and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening and of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light and Letters to Borges. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Fulbright Scholar, he has taught at the University of Iowa, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Ohio State University. He currently teaches at Syracuse University where he holds a University Professorship in Disability Studies. He is a frequent speaker in the US and abroad. His website is StephenKuusisto.com.

Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey is now available:
Amazon
Prairie Lights
Grammercy Books
Barnes and Noble
IndieBound.org

Have Dog, Will Travel by Stephen Kuusisto

(Photo picturing the cover of Stephen Kuusisto’s new memoir “Have Dog, Will Travel” along with his former guide dogs Nira (top) and Corky, bottom.) Bottom photo by Marion Ettlinger 

Oedipus

Oedipus

When you blinded yourself you became a walking advert for thievery. It was customary in Thebes to blind criminals. You stole truth from dust clouds. You stole love from everything including the grass. Those who pretend to love must grope their ways through orchards and stumble in dry riverbeds. Sometimes you lay down in a woody place and without skill braided your own hair.

Late Chapter

Late Chapter

One migrates backwards
Into the emptying self

Of course the family is no help
Mother stands before the mirroring sea

Father climbs up and down the rope
Left to him by his own father

Now and then, when I think I’m alone
I sing a lullaby to sunlight

I will lie down without trembling

There are so many things I don’t believe…

There are so many things I don’t believe…

There are so many things I don’t believe. As in, when rose petals fall on my dead mother’s hair my shadow is more real than my body—mommy is under the ground, go on Stephen, shake your fist, your real fist, shake it and demand a voice you can live with.

I don’t believe pictures on the water. My sister sees gods and angels there. I intend to eat the small fish. I was spoiled for much of life by reading Mallarme when I was young and in the hospital.

And in the evenings I loll like a wooden ship, a weak lantern can be seen if the weather is just right.

Tracks

Tracks

 

I have a friend from boyhood who is still alive

Though he was (and is) wholly imaginary 

And sometimes he’s my dead brother

Sometimes he’s a small crow 

Oh sometimes…

And I have to make up my mind what to do

What with longing and necessity 

Displaying their sagacity

Remaining alone, so very alone 

 

 

 

Photo of the poet Edith Sodergran holding her cat...

A Small Homemade Whistle

This morning, early, bending to tie my sneakers I thought about the dead, how they do us no harm. It was a small freedom like pipe smoke. Also, I realized I never want to tell others how to live.

**

I arrive too seldom at kindness. Oh I talk about it. Point to it, like a child at the zoo who sees hippopotami. One day kindness will shove me out of the nest.

**

When I went to the school for the blind my roommate, who had prosthetic eyes, kept dropping them on the floor. Together we would crawl around groping for them. The moon rose outside the window.

**

There are so many folktales where the old man traveling never gets home. Homer wasn’t interested in those. The Odyssey is fine, but I prefer an old Finnish story called “Let’s Pretend We’re Eating.”

**

Its lovely to be nearing death without ambitions. I have a small homemade wooden whistle.

I’ve lost many friends in this life…

I’ve lost many friends in this life, some from illness, others from painful experiences. Of the latter I was often the one responsible for the breakup. I was hot headed in my youth.
Nowadays I wish I could repair some of the past damage but not enough to track people down. That’s the stuff of novels and I don’t want to enter the world of unpleasant sentimentality. I certainly don’t want to find that those with whom I once fell out have never developed emotional intelligence. But then I have to ask “how much E.Q. do I have?” The question is a bit like asking “how seasick are you when you’re seasick?” I’m more stable than that man puking over the rail. Then again I’m not feeling entirely well.

OK. I’m lonely. As a disabled child I was also lonely. When I was in my early teens I tried to kill myself. I was lonesome in college. I’m still not feeling entirely well.

Once in awhile you have to interview yourself This is especially true if you had a disabled childhood. A preliminary question: when did you first realize you were a stray raindrop?
The answer should include what you were sensing on the day of your primal loneliness…like Eliot’s objective correlative…I remember as other children mocked me for my blindness there was a blue jay crying out the names of his flock…

Rain journeys road calls bird walks small blind child turns knob on radio…

Open and Closed Space

I ask you what it means to be a sufferer in this life, O Lord, but you keep silent in your golden storm. The Leonora Overture plays on my radio. A few leaves hang on in the garden.

My life is being blown toward a far shore and I’m laughing, O Lord. It doesn’t help. I’m fully conscious.

Its a trick of the poets to say the lamp is lonely in its corner.
Its a joke of the gods to give us so little talent.
Its words like heart, soul, and fate that say we’re still evolving.

I turn up the radio, anticipating the off stage trumpet.

Soothsayer

At twenty she came to me
Saying: you will write books
And some will read them
But you’ll not be happy
Life will be
A muffled clamor
You’ll be foreign
To yourself
Like one
Who speaks
The glaucous dialects
Of herdsmen
And all I heard
Was “books”
Authorship—
Not understanding
The loneliness
To come
And the crying out
For trees
To save me