stevekuusisto

And the Wind a Grain of Salt

I’m going to let the kitty out of the wrapper and admit I’ve never believed the teaching of creative writing is more than a pastime. Like baseball, academic discussions of poetry and fiction, nonfiction and playwriting tend toward exquisite minutiae and nostalgia but without regard for what’s happening outside the stadiums or sports bars. I’m employing nostalgia with irony of course—using it in the Greek sense meaning returning home in pain. Odysseus is nostalgic. In turn he’s single minded.

Odysseus is more than nostalgic. He’s religious in the worst way, Huck Finn praying for a fishing hook. Athena is his familiar and gets him “home” on rage. Most religious pastimes are about nothing more than this.

Justice is absent from Homer save for divine vengeance that good old Olympian smack down.

We better know what we mean about the effects of poetry, what we mean by justice, where the study of poetry or literature stands in relation to human rights.

At the poetry conferences save for very few, human rights are not discussed at all. It is assumed by the writing workshop crowd that just thinking about writing elevates.

I told a fine poet last evening that I’m running out of time. At 63 I need to turn my prow toward the far shore, away from time, to that place where coins are useless. That I’ve long been in the fight for disability rights (which are all human rights insofar as disability admits everyone) means I’ve had to sculpt and shape my anger into productivity. Just anger admits justice and eschews vengeance. Just anger is not nostalgic. It’s also a form of ambition. Pentti Saarikoski wrote: “I want to be the sort of poet whose words build houses for people….” Amen. Meanwhile, how to let go of anger, or just enough of it to die happy?

“Life is a hospital where all the patients want to change beds,” said Baudelaire. I want to pick up my bed and walk—not because I’m cured but because I learned (am learning) to make my burdens light and my rest easy. I want this for you and you.

So I gravitated away from the teaching of creative writing to work in the eddies of human rights. 80% of the disabled remain unemployed in the United States. Some will tell you its only 70%. Some will tell you they’re a drain on society. (Hitler: the disabled are useless eaters.)

If human rights mean anything they stand for the manifest opportunity to think, believe, examine, eat, sleep, all unencumbered. And as I think about the bow of my boat I’m remembering these lines by the Norwegian poet Olav Hauge:

“Don’t give me the whole truth,
don’t give me the sea for my thirst,
don’t give me the sky when I ask for light,
but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote
as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing
and the wind a grain of salt.”

Thinking of the Brothers K in Room 212 of the Fairfield Inn

“That’s quite true, I’m not a king. And just imagine, Pyotr Alexandrovich, I even knew it myself, by God! You see, I’m always saying something out of place! Your reverence,” he exclaimed with a sort of instant pathos, “you see before you a buffoon! Verily, a buffoon! Thus I introduce myself! It’s an old habit, alas! And if I sometimes tell lies inappropriately, I do it even on purpose, on purpose to be pleasant and make people laugh. One ought to be pleasant, isn’t that so?”

—“The Brothers Karamazov.”

I’m in Cincinnati where tonight I’ll give a reading and I woke early this morning thinking of the Brothers K and pathological lying. Donald Trump is pere Karamazov with all his oily business, his disdain for women, his 24-7 social lying, and yes, his old habits, learned at the knee of Roy Cohn.

It’s a shame really to wake this way.

Good thing I have a dog with me.

Why Trump doesn’t have a dog:

“If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience.”

― Woodrow Wilson

With my friend John Drury last evening, remembering what a brilliant poet James Merrill was.
A true genius of light and air. Just try writing about light and air.

Dreamt last night I was in Finland at the Velamo Monastery. I once ate strawberries there in summer with a 100 year old monk.

I’m in Cincy where there are many many good poets.

If you’re in the market for a solid, smart read, I recommend “Teaching Plato in Palestine” by Michael Walzer.

The Marriott has a brochure here on my desk entitled “Arrive”—irony sub-rosa but received.

On Being a Dirty Utopian

Non-disabled people think ableism is part of a hierarchy—as if treating others poorly or illegally is indexible. I’ve heard it said that “the disabled are just the latest to be (insert phrase here) “necessary for us to think about….” (does nicely) and along with this comes “you best get in line” as if human rights are a kind of supermarket.

I realize I’m just banging my head against a tree by talking about this. I’ve been talkin’ about this all my life. I’ll go to my grave talkin’ ‘bout it.

On the roadside are mushrooms and crimson leaves.
On the mountain of imagination are extraordinary beings with equally extraordinary wings.

Silly utopian. Why can’t he admit the grime of human relations is the lion’s share?

Gandhi: “I make no hobgoblin of consistency. If I am true to myself from moment to moment, I do not mind all the inconsistencies that may be flung in my face.”

My consistency is my hobby horse if not my hobgoblin.

I believe when universities, businesses, public occasions purport to be open to the public they must include the disabled public seamlessly and without grudge.

No inconsistency there.

It’s the grime of insistence makes one—well, gritty.

I’m a dirty utopian.

ABOUT: 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 for pre-order:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
IndieBound.org

(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

From the Good, Old, Melancholy Breakfast Department

It’s morning and the roses, still work it
Whisper to the dog. Some nights
I’m out since I need music
Or broken threads in me
Necessitate a word stitch.
I know you know.
Skepsis is in the bread.

The Discords

I could tell you things
But I’m not old enough—
Just walking over a large and shining ice patch

Did I eat Prufrock’s peach yesterday?

Of the bumblebee Lars Gustafsson writes:

“A flying man who lives far within the wood
Has folded up his wings and sleeps in the rain.”

Up river and down
My childhood
But unlike Huck
No Jim, no friends

“So that’s what made you a poet!”

In the forest there are still signs of the old mill.

Terry Eagleton says pessimism is the most difficult moral condition to obtain.
Silly. He never ate frozen strawberries with a 100 year old monk in rural Finland in winter darkness. In general academics need to get out more.

If I knew so much parataxis would occupy me
I’d have (instead) invented the shoe horn.

Everyone has a debt to death
But on clear mornings you can hear them thar pianos…

I didn’t exactly begin my life. I suppose I was always riding out
From the big bang; show time dust; the carbon democracies.
Vedas say we’ve been here before but I don’t think it.
We were here and then gone and there’s no analogy.
This morning on the first cold day of autumn
I “saw” (the way blind people do….very close….
On hands and knees….)
A tiny wasp emerge unsteadily
From a frost apple—
Though I was only in the grass
Looking for my keys
Sorry for myself.

The Cage We’re Forced to Watch

My neighbor is eating good ham. He drives a nice car. He voted for Trump. He’s a stand up guy. Just ask him. He’ll tell you he loves America. In fact he loves it more than you do. You describe problems with the USA. He only sees timeless verities: cowboys and Indians; slaughter on behalf of the railroads; local jobs based on environmental destruction. While the Colorado River basin runs out of water he says global warming is a hoax.

Sleeping he dreams of a wide cushiony bed where no one has sex, it’s a white, protestant cloud if you will.

When he wakes he turns on Fox News and tells himself America is great again because “those people” are getting their comeuppance.

Yesterday I hosted film maker Federico Muchnik and poets Doug Anderson and Preston Hood at the 15th annual Syracuse International Film Festival.

Federico’s film “Hunter in the Blackness: Veterans, Hope, and Recovery” details the experiences of American soldiers—veterans with traumatic brain injury, PTSD, and other poly-traumas. Doug Anderson and Preston Hood, both veterans of the Viet Nam War are featured in the movie alongside vets from America’s involvement in Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It is a haunting film. The lack of awareness of civilians is a recurring theme. We send boys and girls to wars while America shops at the mall. When troops return with grievous conditions many Americans don’t want to know.

22 veterans commit suicide daily in these United States.

Last evening, after I bid farewell to my new found friends, I took an Uber home. My driver was a veteran of the war in Iraq. He has PTSD and traumatic brain injury. He told me how his best friend from his time in the military recently committed suicide.

And there we were, riding in a Dodge pickup, through the gritty nighttime rainy streets of Syracuse, NY, and it was impossible for me to blink away the machinations of my country. My driver told me about his TBI, his facial disfigurement, his stress condition, and the ongoing difficulties he has had with the VA to get the help he needs.

Rain spattered the windshield.

Swedish poet Lars Gustafson writes: “And a cage/which never held a bird can easily give/a feeling of disorder.”

I’ve not been to war. But I know the cage we’re forced to stare at.

Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey is now available for pre-order:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
IndieBound.org

(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

A Valediction of Fainting

The surgeon plucked at my eye with a forceps. I said I was fainting. Then I fainted.

It was a textbook instance of the “vasovagal reflex”. You can ask the CIA. Touch the lenses of the eyes and you can induce loss of consciousness.

Reader: perhaps you’re a frequent fainter and are familiar with the poetry of the matter. I doff my hat to you.

I woke in a chair. Although I couldn’t see I heard a nurse say: “I can’t hear his pulse.”

The neo-cortex (mine) which thinks fast (yours does too) said inwardly: “Merd! Je suis mort!”

(The neo-cortex it turns out, speaks only French, as it was in fact discovered by Denis Diderot. You don’t have to know French to understand the neo-cortex. The translation process is automatic. It does not matter if you are a Finn or a Croat or Laotian.)

(Theory: the French language was invented by and for dead people.)

(Proof of above: Diderot: “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”)

The nurse said next: “Okay. I can hear his pulse but it is very faint.”

Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey is now available for pre-order:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
IndieBound.org

(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

Blank Landscape

Irony—a live crow carrying a dead one
Flies into a house you might say
“Nature” and you’d be right.
Up river beyond the city
People die at the same rate
Some singing at the end—
You might say “nature”
And you’d be right.
My neighbor comes to me
With his old books.
He’s a lonesome man
Who believes words matter.
Sometimes I want to end a poem
Too soon, what with the pain.

Stop With Your Ableist Lazy Rage

Over the course of the last two years (post election and the year prior) I’ve watched people throw ableist insults. From the right the favored term is “libtard” and from the left one hears “moron” “idiot” and “imbecile” all echoing eugenics both in Germany and the United States when the disabled were marked for elimination.

When disability must be employed to register rage then its nothing more than lazy rage. Rather than call a Trump supporter an imbecile why not say: “there’s a person who doesn’t understand his shadow.” Not so much fun as ableizing him or calling him a pig or weasel.

Lazy rage is fun rage. Even in their discontent Americans like to have fun. Trump knows this. Its perhaps the only thing he knows.

We’re got rape culture to worry about; children in cages; wholesale destruction of the environment at hand; black men in the school to prison pipeline; eroding medical services for veterans and the poor; unending American involvement in ruinous wars; the collapse of public education; big Pharma slinging opioids in every corner of the nation; religious extremism attacking science; an outright war on the Americans with Disabilities Act—I’m just getting started.

And all I see on facebook is callow name calling with an especially able bodied smugness.

As John Lennon might say: here’s another clue for you all. You are as much the problem as the problem.

Read Carl Jung on “the shadow” and know your own deep despairs before saying someone else is “lame” and for god’s sake join a volunteer organization of some kind.