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Ask yourself how many beauties you subvert during the course of a day. No one is brave enough for this. Capitalism helps or does not help reflection where essential joy is concerned. I recall a trip to the Soviet Union when I was 26 years old. I saw that possession of the wrong book was the invitation to a cavity search. This past week, reading of tortures directed by the Central Intelligence Agency, and in particular of “rectal feeding” I’ve remembered rather vividly being searched by the Soviet border guards when I attempted to enter the Soviet Union during the first Reagan term. If governments are generally untrustworthy, so too are they generally resistant to human dignity. At this stage of my life I won’t be convinced otherwise. 

 

Who lives a life of happiness, the pursuit thereof? I prefer free markets and capitalism to what I saw recently in China where I spoke with writers who must gather in secret; where the freedom to speak against the suppression of egalitarian ideas is still far off. I’m not confused. Yet freedom demands I say what I believe to be true: namely that state supported dehumanization is aberrant. The United States has not stood up for freedom and human dignity in the years since 9/11.

 

How many beauties do you subvert during the course of a day? I know I’m small. My arms are relatively weak. I’m a blind poet. An intellectual. I’m the man likely to carry the wrong book when crossing a border. I will not stand against poetry. I won’t flinch. This means I won’t salute the cruelty and barbarous violations of human rights perpetrated by the United States government. Back in 1983 I had Soviet fingers up my ass. I’ve not forgotten. When I hear Dick Cheney justify torture I laugh. I really do. He’s a man with no appreciation of essential joy; a man who doesn’t understand what freedom is.

 

  

Kyoto Fedora

 

—for Diane Wiener

 

 

Rain, winter, me a tourist

Blind, tapping with cane—

Thinking “one must practice reality”

Sweeping stick in curves,

A series of arcs, as blindness 

Is like rings on water—

 

Thinking honey on tongue,

Leafage in cemetery, 

Undecipherable voice

Reaching cold ears

 

Behind closed eyes

Wishing for hat.

She appeared—

Glittering lightly

 

Hat seller but not,

Waving me into shop,

not—simple

One rare angel. 

 

 

Kyoto Fedora

 

—for Diane Wiener

 

 

Rain, winter, me a tourist

Blind, tapping with cane—

Thinking “one must practice reality”

Sweeping stick in curves,

A series of arcs, as blindness 

Is like rings on water—

 

Thinking honey on tongue,

Leafage in cemetery, 

Undecipherable voice

Reaching cold ears

 

Behind closed eyes

Wishing for hat.

She appeared—

Glittering lightly

 

Hat seller but not,

Waving me into shop,

not—simple

One rare angel. 

 

 

Freaky Angels

In one of his early poems entitled “Contagion” James Tate wrote: So this is the dark street/where only an angel lives/I never saw anything like it. I read that poem when I was twenty and saw the “dark street” as Emerson—saw the angel as Emerson’s strange angel which is also D.H. Lawrence’s strange angel, the wings are too much like ours; the wings are possibly sinister. In any case, we never saw anything like it and yet we always knew they were there—the wings, the humanoid specter, and our expectation they are a completion, one answer to the betrayals of phenomenology. Such a view is not Romantic, though plenty have said so. Its tougher. It took Freud and Jung to show us what the figurines mean: they’re neither enemy or friend, but fact. How you will live, in what manner you will live, depends on what you can challenge yourself to admit about the angels. The ones I’m talking about are freakish angels and not the sanitized “idea” of the angel that Wallace Stevens preferred. Stevens’ angels are like those paper wrapped seats in the washroom—sanitized for your protection—and so they are not angels at all. Here is what the angels felt like to Lawrence:

 

 

The Song of a Man Who has Come Through

 

 

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!

A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.

If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!

If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!

If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed

By the fine, fine wind that takes its course though the chaos of the world

Like a fine, and exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted;

If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge

Driven by invisible split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.

 

Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,

I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,

Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.

 

What is the knocking?

What is the knocking at the door in the night?

It’s somebody wants to do us harm.

 

No, no, it is the three strange angels.

Admit them, admit them.

 

 

Notice Lawrence’s angel is both the man or woman who feels wind blowing inside the body and then the angel is, when more fully realized, like a fine chisel, a wedge that rents chaos—a dangerous tool to be sure. Lawrence’s angel is a wire that pierces. Oh its imagination alright. Its your dream. Its your fear about the future. Its your regret about the past. Its your dead father tuning a piano in the underworld. As Robert Bly would say: Its the distance between the head and the feet as we lie down. The freaky angel is us and not us unless we reckon with time. Its our ambition. Our completion. Its the hard work of consciousness which must admit what’s under the boat. (Ahab) or cry because space has pierced us with a sharp tip (Emerson’s cosmological Boston Commons). I like the word “freaky” better than strange. Freaky can’t be domesticated though we build churches or sideshows and put angels on pedestals so the frightened gazers can gaze and then go home saying, “well, I saw it—good thing it is not me.” 

 

But of course the “freaky angel” turns up. It knocks if you’re lucky. Lawrence was lucky. His angels passed right through his carapace of fear, the lobster back of the psyche, and then he was stronger, undoubtedly weirder, perhaps thinner, maybe with the taste of honey and excrement in his mouth, happy to the point of rending his garments, and sharp, very sharp. 

 

  

 

Freaky Angels

In one of his early poems entitled “Contagion” James Tate wrote: So this is the dark street/where only an angel lives/I never saw anything like it. I read that poem when I was twenty and saw the “dark street” as Emerson—saw the angel as Emerson’s strange angel which is also D.H. Lawrence’s strange angel, the wings are too much like ours; the wings are possibly sinister. In any case, we never saw anything like it and yet we always knew they were there—the wings, the humanoid specter, and our expectation they are a completion, one answer to the betrayals of phenomenology. Such a view is not Romantic, though plenty have said so. Its tougher. It took Freud and Jung to show us what the figurines mean: they’re neither enemy or friend, but fact. How you will live, in what manner you will live, depends on what you can challenge yourself to admit about the angels. The ones I’m talking about are freakish angels and not the sanitized “idea” of the angel that Wallace Stevens preferred. Stevens’ angels are like those paper wrapped seats in the washroom—sanitized for your protection—and so they are not angels at all. Here is what the angels felt like to Lawrence:

 

 

The Song of a Man Who has Come Through

 

 

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!

A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.

If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!

If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!

If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed

By the fine, fine wind that takes its course though the chaos of the world

Like a fine, and exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted;

If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge

Driven by invisible split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.

 

Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,

I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,

Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.

 

What is the knocking?

What is the knocking at the door in the night?

It’s somebody wants to do us harm.

 

No, no, it is the three strange angels.

Admit them, admit them.

 

 

Notice Lawrence’s angel is both the man or woman who feels wind blowing inside the body and then the angel is, when more fully realized, like a fine chisel, a wedge that rents chaos—a dangerous tool to be sure. Lawrence’s angel is a wire that pierces. Oh its imagination alright. Its your dream. Its your fear about the future. Its your regret about the past. Its your dead father tuning a piano in the underworld. As Robert Bly would say: Its the distance between the head and the feet as we lie down. The freaky angel is us and not us unless we reckon with time. Its our ambition. Our completion. Its the hard work of consciousness which must admit what’s under the boat. (Ahab) or cry because space has pierced us with a sharp tip (Emerson’s cosmological Boston Commons). I like the word “freaky” better than strange. Freaky can’t be domesticated though we build churches or sideshows and put angels on pedestals so the frightened gazers can gaze and then go home saying, “well, I saw it—good thing it is not me.” 

 

But of course the “freaky angel” turns up. It knocks if you’re lucky. Lawrence was lucky. His angels passed right through his carapace of fear, the lobster back of the psyche, and then he was stronger, undoubtedly weirder, perhaps thinner, maybe with the taste of honey and excrement in his mouth, happy to the point of rending his garments, and sharp, very sharp. 

 

  

 

Poet David Simpson: The Way Love Comes to Me

 

I don’t know how many poetry readings I’ve attended over the past forty years. The actual number would be pretty high. I went to a poetry-centric liberal arts college and the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa. The number doesn’t matter. Its enough to say I’ve heard some great poets read their poems so movingly I’ve walked into the nights filled with milk and iodine; feeling wide and tall with stars for a cloak; windswept and in love with love; frightened and rich. But last night in New York City, at the NYU Creative Writing Center on West 10th Street I heard the poet David Simpson read from his newly published book to a room filled with poetry admirers and friends and I believe he gave the finest reading I’ve ever heard. I do not say this lightly. I will remember last night’s reading for the rest of my days. David Simpson is a complex man: he’s a musician, poet, playwright, classical organist, and he’s performed with numerous symphony orchestras, including The Boston, Pittsburgh, and Atlanta symphonies, as well as The New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra. But last night he was a poet. He was a poet who gave a reading so pure and lyrical I wanted to cry. Poetry can do that to me—perhaps to you as well—usually when the tears are about to come its because the poems are driven by emotional candor with a compassionate softness of of tone, an urgent softness, the kind that only a clear spirit can obtain and communicate. Enough to say that after David Simpson read last night, a young man in the audience said to me: “Man! That was the real thing! Old School!” I said, “yeah, not ideas about the thing but the thing itself” and he said, “‘That’s it!” I didn’t tell him the phrase came from Wallace Stevens—enough that Simpson’s poems had reached so many in the room. The night would be different for everyone. Poetry can do that. 

 

Listening to David I felt the cusp of tears and tenderness I associate with Hart Crane’s famous poem about finding his grandmother’s letters in the attic. I get this feeling also from Whitman’s 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. 

 

How many poets do you know who have a twin brother or sister who also writes poetry? David’s brother Dan Simpson was also in attendance. 

 

How many twin poets do you know who are also blind? And as I say, have so much talent one suspects they could move furniture by means of telekinesis. 

 

Here’s an ars poetica if ever there was one, a poem in which David Simpson recalls riding a ferris wheel with Dan when they were around ten years old: 

 

 

Bond

 

The bond of our wildest cooperation–
riding with my twin brother on the big ferris wheel
just before puberty
when such a thing would have embarrassed us.
It was our fabulous luck to get stuck at the top
for five free minutes. Locking arms,
counting to three, we made our cage spin
until we could flip it upside down
so that everything fell out of our pockets
and we were laughing hard.

The first time I made love with a woman
who taught me how ungentled love could be,
the whole bed felt as if it were tilting heads-up
heads-down, our cheeks, shoulders,
bellies, ankles all of one body,
our duet of love sounds as natural as birdsong.

 

Oh, my dear brother, ever since
the river spilled us out onto this dry land
and we have had to, mostly on our own,
find our legs and paths into different worlds,
I have missed you.

 

 

The poet Molly Peacock writes of David Simpson’s book The Way Love Comes to Me:

 

Poetry to turn to on a sleepless night, poetry to open with breakfast on a snow day, poetry to seek when stabbed by memory: this is the work of David Simpson in The Way Love Comes to Me. Here are poems lucid and many-layered, at once cold fathoms deep and warm as skin. From line to line they sort their way through the jumbled paradoxes of existence. With music at once sacred and sassy the poet captivates, comforts, and makes us feel wiser. The brilliance of Simpson’s poems is that they answer a call we did not realize we had uttered. 

 

 

The poet Kuusisto says: 

 

Buy this collection.

 

Click here 

Poet David Simpson: The Way Love Comes to Me

 

I don’t know how many poetry readings I’ve attended over the past forty years. The actual number would be pretty high. I went to a poetry-centric liberal arts college and the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa. The number doesn’t matter. Its enough to say I’ve heard some great poets read their poems so movingly I’ve walked into the nights filled with milk and iodine; feeling wide and tall with stars for a cloak; windswept and in love with love; frightened and rich. But last night in New York City, at the NYU Creative Writing Center on West 10th Street I heard the poet David Simpson read from his newly published book to a room filled with poetry admirers and friends and I believe he gave the finest reading I’ve ever heard. I do not say this lightly. I will remember last night’s reading for the rest of my days. David Simpson is a complex man: he’s a musician, poet, playwright, classical organist, and he’s performed with numerous symphony orchestras, including The Boston, Pittsburgh, and Atlanta symphonies, as well as The New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra. But last night he was a poet. He was a poet who gave a reading so pure and lyrical I wanted to cry. Poetry can do that to me—perhaps to you as well—usually when the tears are about to come its because the poems are driven by emotional candor with a compassionate softness of of tone, an urgent softness, the kind that only a clear spirit can obtain and communicate. Enough to say that after David Simpson read last night, a young man in the audience said to me: “Man! That was the real thing! Old School!” I said, “yeah, not ideas about the thing but the thing itself” and he said, “‘That’s it!” I didn’t tell him the phrase came from Wallace Stevens—enough that Simpson’s poems had reached so many in the room. The night would be different for everyone. Poetry can do that. 

 

Listening to David I felt the cusp of tears and tenderness I associate with Hart Crane’s famous poem about finding his grandmother’s letters in the attic. I get this feeling also from Whitman’s 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. 

 

How many poets do you know who have a twin brother or sister who also writes poetry? David’s brother Dan Simpson was also in attendance. 

 

How many twin poets do you know who are also blind? And as I say, have so much talent one suspects they could move furniture by means of telekinesis. 

 

Here’s an ars poetica if ever there was one, a poem in which David Simpson recalls riding a ferris wheel with Dan when they were around ten years old: 

 

 

Bond

 

The bond of our wildest cooperation–
riding with my twin brother on the big ferris wheel
just before puberty
when such a thing would have embarrassed us.
It was our fabulous luck to get stuck at the top
for five free minutes. Locking arms,
counting to three, we made our cage spin
until we could flip it upside down
so that everything fell out of our pockets
and we were laughing hard.

The first time I made love with a woman
who taught me how ungentled love could be,
the whole bed felt as if it were tilting heads-up
heads-down, our cheeks, shoulders,
bellies, ankles all of one body,
our duet of love sounds as natural as birdsong.

 

Oh, my dear brother, ever since
the river spilled us out onto this dry land
and we have had to, mostly on our own,
find our legs and paths into different worlds,
I have missed you.

 

 

The poet Molly Peacock writes of David Simpson’s book The Way Love Comes to Me:

 

Poetry to turn to on a sleepless night, poetry to open with breakfast on a snow day, poetry to seek when stabbed by memory: this is the work of David Simpson in The Way Love Comes to Me. Here are poems lucid and many-layered, at once cold fathoms deep and warm as skin. From line to line they sort their way through the jumbled paradoxes of existence. With music at once sacred and sassy the poet captivates, comforts, and makes us feel wiser. The brilliance of Simpson’s poems is that they answer a call we did not realize we had uttered. 

 

 

The poet Kuusisto says: 

 

Buy this collection.

 

Click here 

What's Up With College?

Even if you're a cursory reader of newspapers or magazines you probably know that books decrying the contemporary state of American higher education are legion. Reading some of these volumes or the reviews may lead casual perusers to believe colleges and universities are circling the drain. Generally speaking a signature of democracy is the freedom to criticize anything and why should post-secondary Ed be exempt from the fray?

One day almost thirty years ago I had lunch with the Soviet poet Andrei Voznesensky. We were talking about the joy of idiomatic expressions. I said in the US we can tell the President of the United States to go to hell in a hand basket. We agreed the trouble with idiomatic utterances is of course they seldom make a difference.

My feeling is that suspicion of higher education is healthy. Contrarianism is healthy. When colleges are subjected to scrutiny they can change in productive ways. Lord knows we wouldn't want anyone studying the Harvard “white man's burden” curriculum that so disastrously influenced Theodore Roosevelt's genocidal occupation of the Philippines. A healthy democracy grows and progresses and so too the healthy university.

Is college too expensive? Yes. Is this solely the fault of college presidents? No. Investing in student assistance and bringing down the crippling effects of loans ought to be a bi-partisan slam dunk.

There is much that's right with higher education. As we critique so should we celebrate.

Here are, for my money the best three books about higher education I've read lately:

Andrew DelBanco: College: What It Was, Is, And Should Be

Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux: Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post-Civl Rights Era

Ellen Condlifee Lagemann and Harry Lewis: What is College For? The Public Purpose of Higher Education

 

Web Accessibility and Higher Education

U.S. Department of Education

Office of Communications & Outreach, Press Office

400 Maryland Ave., S.W.

Washington, D.C. 20202

FOR RELEASE:

Dec. 12, 2014

 

CONTACT:

Press Office, (202) 401-1576 or press@ed.gov

 

 

U.S. Education Department Reaches Agreement with Youngstown State University to Ensure Equal Access to its Websites for Individuals with Disabilities

 

 

The U.S. Department of Education announced today that its Office for Civil Rights has entered into an agreement with Youngstown State University in Ohio to ensure that the school’s websites comply with federal civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of disability.

 

The agreement ends an OCR investigation and commits the 13,000-student public institution in northeast Ohio to providing equal access to educational opportunities for students with disabilities and to ensuring that the school’s websites are accessible to persons with disabilities, including students, prospective students, employees and visitors.

 

“I applaud Youngstown State University for agreeing to make its websites – through which it increasingly provides information to employees, applicants, students and others – fully accessible to all, including to individuals with disabilities,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, assistant secretary for civil rights. “Web inaccessibility could significantly deter applications and participation from students with disabilities; this resolution ensures that Youngstown State can fully serve its entire student population, consistent with the law.”

 

As part of this investigation, OCR examined the accessibility of the university’s websites to persons with disabilities, particularly those with sensory impairments who may require the use of assistive technology to access the sites.

 

OCR determined that the school was not in compliance with two federal laws that the office enforces—Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. In the first instance, Youngstown State’s websites were not readily accessible to persons with disabilities. And in the second, OCR found that the university was not fully in compliance with the regulatory requirements regarding the publication of a notice of nondiscrimination in relevant documents.

 

In response to these determinations, the university entered into a resolution agreement to ensure that content on its websites is accessible to individuals with disabilities and that it is providing an equal opportunity for individuals with disabilities to participate in and benefit from its online learning environment.

 

Under terms of the agreement, the Youngstown State will:

 

· Develop and publish one consistent notice of nondiscrimination that includes contact information for the person(s) designated to ensure compliance with Section 504 and Title II.

 

· Develop, adopt and provide notice of a Web accessibility policy and an implementation and remediation plan to ensure adherence to the policy, including particular attention to a prioritized conversion of image-based documents to accessible materials.

 

· Provide training to staff responsible for webpage and content development, including faculty and students, as appropriate.

 

· Review its website and e-learning platform(s) to identify and fix any accessibility problems, as well as to put in place mechanisms to ensure that the sites continue to be accessible.

 

· Provide certification from a third-party web accessibility consultant or an employee of the university with sufficient knowledge, skill and experience that the university’s electronic and information technologies meet the technical standard(s) adopted by the school.

 

· Provide OCR with reports describing its efforts for multiple subsequent school years to comply with its Web accessibility policy and plan, including information documenting any compliance issues discovered through the monitoring, audits, or complaints and the actions taken to correct those issues. And,

 

· Ensure that access to computer labs, especially regarding provision of assistive technology, is comparable to that of students without disabilities, and that accurate notice is given to students, faculty, staff, and other beneficiaries able to utilize university computer labs that these services are available.

 

A copy of the resolution letter can be found here, and the agreement is posted here.

 

OCR’s mission is to ensure equal access to education and to promote educational excellence throughout the nation through vigorous enforcement of civil rights. OCR is responsible for enforcing federal civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination by educational institutions on the bases of disability, race, color, national origin, sex, and age, as well as the Boy Scouts of America Equal Access Act of 2001.

 

For details on how the office handles civil rights cases, please click here.

Good News in Dog Land

Some weeks ago I wrote at Huntington Post about several guide dog schools in the United States that have been cutting veteran staff, an alarming thing, and something that dismays blind people who travel with professionally trained service dogs. I care about the people who train guide dogs and the folks who support that mission. I wrote:

If you’re blind and travel with a guide dog you count on veteran staff: folks who know the complex and challenging circumstances of vision loss and safe mobility. Moreover you want to be assured those who work with you — support you — are being taken care of.

Then I wrote something else:

Now “Guiding Eyes for the Blind” — the guide dog school from which I’ve received three guide dogs, and where I once worked, where in fact I played a role in hiring some extraordinary people, has announced summarily, without warning, they’re eliminating their retirement benefits plan in favor of a second rate 403B.

I made a mistake. I learned this by speaking with Guiding Eyes new CEO and President, Tom Panek, who, like me is a guide dog user and is committed to excellence in the field of service dog work. The retirement plan changes at Guiding Eyes were neither hasty nor second rate. Tom, who is a serious advocate for the disabled has assured me that under the new plan, senior staff will actually benefit as contributions rise from 5% to 14% based on years of service. This is a big deal because the plan seeks to reward devoted service. Additionally Guiding Eyes continues to have a very generous medical plan.

Tom and I had a great conversation. We discussed the fact that there’s a lot of fear among non-profit employees generally, and, given the layoffs I described at other guide dog schools, people are frightened.

The retirement plan at my beloved guide dog alma mater is not a source for fear. In fact it even allows same sex couples to designate benefits.

I’m writing this today in mid December because there are some good things in guide dog land. And because it costs nearly $40,000 to breed, raise, and train each guide dog, let me close by saying this is a good season to support the kind of charitable and humanitarian work I’ve described.

In a few short months I will publish a new memoir with Simon and Schuster. It’s about my life with my first guide dog ” Corky” and it details the remarkable gift–a daily gift–that a guide dog really is. Here is how I describe our first meeting:

She entered like a clown. I sat in an arm chair and they told me to call her and damned if she didn’t run full steam into my arms. She placed her front paws on my shoulders and washed my face and then, as if she knew her job would require comedy, she nibbled my nose but gently like a horse looking for a peppermint. She gave me just the slightest touch of her teeth. Later I’d learn from the family who raised her she was famous for the “nosey nibble” but I felt special and laughed—it felt like the first laugh I’d had in years. Corky had comedy in her veins.

**

She was brilliant and silly. I couldn’t believe my fortune. Back in our room Corky licked my eyes. She wanted me to invite her on the bed. I told her to remember the rules. Dogs on the floor, people on the beds. The trainers had been clear about guide dog etiquette and I was going to follow the regimen. Guide dogs aren’t encouraged to climb on the furniture. “You stay on the floor,” I said, and she nibbled my nose again as if to say, “I’ll wear you down brother.” I saw in our first moments we were having the manifold dance of relationship—we were joyous and communicating. I talked in a running wave. She bounced, literally bounced, cocked her head, backed up, ran in circles, and came back. All the while I kept talking. “Oh let’s go any place we choose,” I said, feeling I was on the verge of tears.

I like Tom Panek. Like me he believes we should go anywhere we choose.

Stephen Kuusisto