Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University

Disability and the Spring Birds

There is no easy way to describe birds though poets have tried throughout human history. The essential reason that birds cannot be described is that we see them always as metaphors, which is a problem if what you want is the art of the bird, the essence of birdness. So we write of the bird as spirit. Even our tribal ancestors did so. A famous Ojibway poem describes feeling sorry for oneself—until the narrator announces that all the while he is being carried across the sky on great wings. We understand the bird as a symbolic coefficient of mind and wish. But Lord help you if you try to put one in words.

I was in mind of this early today when walking with my guide dog Nira, and owing to recent eye surgeries, I was able to discern a very large, startled goose corkscrew into the air from its hiding place beneath a foot bridge. All feathers and ligatures, muscle memory and atavistic spasms it was. The bird was alive and ungainly and improbable and offered the only kind of beauty I am attracted to. And of course the bird had been asleep and then it was alive like a sentient bee hive. And because I was walking and properly meditative I saw that my blindness and the bird’s unlikeliness as a figure for poetry were in fact the same thing. Poets can only write about the occasion of the bird. Even good poets must imagine a mise en scene wherein the bird is oddly remarkable, which is to say that they don’t write about the birds at all. Here is a poem by Wendell Berry that illustrates what I’m observing:

 

Sparrow

 

A sparrow is

His hunger organized.

Filled, he flies

Before he knows he’s going to.

And he dies by the same movement: filled

With himself, he goes

by the eye-quick

reflex of his flesh

out of sight,

leaving his perfect

absence without a thought.

 

Aha! You see my point of course. Birds are no more describable than the other imponderables which are instinctual, mysterious, accidental, risky, beyond the scope of will. In point of fact Wendell Berry’s terrific little poem about the sparrow is an accurate narrative of disabling dislocations—“eye quick”; “reflex of his flesh”; inchoate as vanishing itself.

All this because of a goose under a bridge, early morning in Iowa City.

Meantime one can only narrate disabilities by what they are as glimpses, like shadows flying through the trees.

 

S.K. 

Watching Spike Sit Down

Spike Lee Wearing Knicks Gear

 

There may be more annoying things than the sight of Spike Lee dolled up in his New York Knicks regalia but not for me. Please note that I’m not confusing annoying with sinister. There are worse things in this world than Spike’s juvenalia. Robert Mugabe comes to mind. Or the horrible Burgundy Goliath Bird Eating Tarantula. I should add that I’m an admirer of Spike Lee’s films and his political work. But enough said. He’s irritating. And so last night’s win by the Boston Celtics over the Knicks was especially satisfying inasmuch as Spike had to sit down. Where be your gibes now, Spike? Maybe you shouldn’t bait Kevin Garnett? Taunting players on the other team can backfire.

So alright. I admit it. I’m a Celtics fan. And once in awhile I can stray from my gray library, the mordancy of my arm chair—academic pursuits, whatever takes the place of the philosophers’ stone for some old fashioned peanuts and cigar smoke. I enjoyed Kevin Garnett’s performance at the Boston Garden last night.

Schadenfreude aside, Spike Lee is a winner. His work on behalf of the city of New Orleans is admirable. We like him outside the gym.

 

S.K.

What Became of Me

I haven’t been blogging lately. The truth is that I’ve been trying to categorize the distinctions between the rhetoric of the budget cutters in Washington and the real world scenarios that will face people with disabilities no matter what deficit reduction plan is adopted. While the American Association for People with Disabilities was quick to applaud President Obama’s declaration that he will not cut federal spending on the backs of the elderly and the disabled, the President’s plan does in fact entail cuts to programs for PWDs. While Obama’s cuts (which are still undisclosed) may be less draconian that those proposed by the GOP they are still likely to escalate a nationwide stampede toward gutting social services. Accordingly the hypothesis is that one can accept smaller penalties from one undisclosed scenario or appalling penalties from the other. In turn I’ve been silent for a week because I can’t seem to digest the meats that have been brought cold to the table.

I ask how much would it hurt the U.S. to cancel the construction of a single submarine in favor of funding adequate in home care and special education for all our citizens who have profound mental disabilities?

What matters is the proper analysis of the gulf between rhetoric and reality as it may affect real people.

In this regard I’d like more leadership from the President and the Democrats.

Why haven’t I been writing? Because I’ve been pulling out my hair.

S.K.

Break You

Head of Bacchus-Dionysus

 

By Andrea Scarpino

Poetry can break you. Its tenderness, brutality. Its moments of lyricism so beautiful you forget where you are. Who you are. Emily Dickinson said, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” And Robert Bly: “For this is a world in which everything is lost.”

Poetry can break you. Day after day, the blank page, thousands of words that need to be arranged in exactly the right order, exactly the right shape. Exactly the right punctuation or lack of punctuation. Thousands of words clamoring for your attention and you must choose carefully, correctly. You must choose their life. The weight of that charge insurmountable.

Poetry can break you. Hours spent sending it into the world, trying to find it good homes, kind readers, and day after day, rejection letters, silences. “Thanks, I really liked these,” one editor wrote in blue pen on my rejection slip. “This is lovely,” another wrote about my personal essay, “but too personal for our journal.” Again and again, defeat. “You can’t take it personally,” I tell my students, and in that moment, I believe. Gregory Orr: “love/ Is also a shattering.”

Poetry can break you. But then, it can put you back together. I moved across the country at 17 after my mother lost custody of my younger brother. I moved alone, no idea where I would stay, if I would finish high school. Days before I left, my favorite doctor gave me a book of poems by Mary Oliver. He read “The Journey” out loud to me while I lay in a hospital bed getting my final pain treatment: “determined to do/ the only thing you could do–/ determined to save/ the only life you could save.” That moment, that poem, saved my life. And also, Charles Simic, after my father died: “Then, I remember my shoes,/ How I have to put them on, / How bending over to tie them up/ I will look into the earth.”

And then it can put you back together. “It is either the beginning or the end/ of the world,” Carolyn Forché said, “and the choice is ourselves/ or nothing.” Poetry can break you. Again and again. Break everything you think you know into pieces. And then it will hold out its hand. “Ourselves or nothing,” it will say. And it will help you choose.

 

Poet and essayist Andrea Scarpino is a frequent contributor to POTB. You can visit her at: www.andreascarpino.com

Disabled, But Looking For Work

carrot-and-stick

 

 

If you’re a person with a disability who is presently looking for work, or if you’re like me and have been unemployed and told that you’re case is hopeless then this article in the NY Times should resonate. It’s also a reminder that President Obama’s declaration in his speech to the nation yesterday that he won’t abandon people with disabilities in the current budget cutting climate is an important call to action for liberal and progressive citizens to stand up for social programs.

  
(New York Times)

Excerpt from Inclusion Daily
April 12, 2011
BATESVILLE, ARKANSAS– [Excerpt] Christopher Howard suffers from herniated discs in his back, knee problems and hepatitis C. As a result, Social Security sends him $574 every month and will until he reaches retirement age — unless he can find a job.

Though he has been collecting disability checks for three years, Mr. Howard, who is just 36, desperately wants to work, recalling dredging for gravel rather fondly and repairing cell towers less fondly.

"It makes me feel like I am doing something," said Mr. Howard, a burly man with a honey-colored goatee. "Instead of just being a bum, pretty much."

Programs intended to steer people with more moderate disabilities back into jobs have managed to take only a small sliver of beneficiaries off the Social Security rolls.

Yet, at a time when employers are struggling to create spots for the 13.5 million people actively looking for jobs, helping people like Mr. Howard find employment — or keeping them working in the first place — is becoming increasingly important to the nation’s fiscal health.

Entire article:
Disabled, but Looking for Work
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2011/red/0412a.htm

Quandary of Dynamic Diffusion

I’ve been thinking for a long time about the phenomenological space between being seen and the art of being seen. Like Foucault I believe that our smallest gestures are both performed by us and of us. People with disabilities must traverse this acculturated labyrinth with a good deal of emotional intelligence or what we like to call comic irony in the English Department.

But what interests me as I get older is the space between performing an identity and the pre-disposed cultural script, for that’s a vast space, like the distance between wearing your first pair of shoes and putting on your old man slippers. What I mean is that there’s a revery or imaginative dynamic to standing or rolling in the world that’s not sufficiently identified by performance theories no matter what we say. I think the poetics of disability is still in its infancy, but the point is clear that diversity, especially physical or neurological diversity holds enormous promise for the cultural imagination and for the imaginer. Our friend Anne Finger has written brilliantly about the tight and rich fusion between embodied strangenesses and imaginative opportunity and I urge you to read all her work but especially her recent short stories.

Sometimes when I talk about the poetics of disability people think I’m romanticizing disablement, thereby reinscribing compensatory metaphors of giftedness but this is not what I’m suggesting at all. Instead I mean to say that the conditions of diffused mentation that physical difference manifests makes possible the kinds of rich, lyric points of imagination–a circumstance that many people with disabilities know quite well.

A fine arts program that extends and explores the imaginations of physical differences is a dream I continue to hold to.

Just some thoughts on a day of high wind here in Iowa City.

S.K.

From Our Friends at Ohio State

Remember Disability Rights In April
Protests and civil disobedience forced the signing of Section 504’s implementing regulations 34 years ago this month

On September 25th of 1973 President Nixon signed Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. In D.C. the Department of Health Education and Welfare began writing the regulations to ensure that the civil rights objectives of Section 504 could be enforced.

On April 5, 1977, thousands of “the disabled” converged on Department of Health, Education and Welfare offices around the country to demand that the equal rights legislation Congress had passed 5 years earlier be implemented. In San Francisco they took over the HEW Office and started what became the longest sit-in occupation of a federal building in U.S. history

At 7:30 A.M. on April 28, 1977 they celebrated victory. The rules implementing Section 504 were signed by HEW Secretary Joseph A. Califano. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 is a civil-rights provision. It does not provide funding for any programs or activities; rather, it is a requirement that accompanies federal funding to organizations such as schools and universities. Any organization that receives federal funds – for any purpose – must comply with section 504. Section 504 laid the ground work for the American’s With Disabilities Act of 1990 which established broad civil rights protections for individuals with disabilities. Between 1990 and 2008 the courts narrowed the protections of the ADA. Congress responded by passing the ADA Amendments Act Clarifying its intent that the ADA extend Section 504’s Federal fund dependent protections as broad civil rights for individuals with disabilities. In the past few months we have seen new regulations covering employment, commerce, public programs and government services

Justice William J. Brennan said that with Section 504

“Congress acknowledged that society’s accumulated myths and fears about disability and disease are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment.” Arline v. Nassau County, 1987

“The San Francisco 504 sit-in did not succeed because of a brilliant strategy by a few disability leaders. It succeeded because the Deaf people set up a communication system from the 4th floor windows inside the building to the plaza down below; because the Black Panther Party brought a hot dinner to all 150 participants every single night; because people from community organizing backgrounds taught us how to make collaborative decisions; because friends came and washed our hair in the janitor’s closet sink. The people doing disability rights work in the 1970s rarely agreed on policies, or even on approaches. The successes came because people viewed each other as invaluable resources working towards a common goal.” (Corbett Joan O’Toole, Ragged Edge Online October 19, 2005)

Resources
A Look Back at ‘Section 504’: San Francisco Sit-In a Defining Moment
http://www.npr.org/programs/wesun/features/2002/504/

The 25 Day Siege That Brought Us 504
http://www.independentliving.org/docs4/ervin1986.html
The Section 504 rules: More to the story
http://www.ragged-edge-mag.com/0102/0102ft6.html

A History: Disability at Ohio State
http://digitalunion.osu.edu/r2/summer06/kmetz/index.html

Disability Studies At OSU
http://disabiltystudies.osu.edu/