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I am in Columbus, Ohio at the annual convention of the American Council of the Blind. In a little over an hour from now I’m teaching a workshop on poetry and sound. What I’m thinking right now is just how little I know about anything. Poetry? I can’t tell you what it is! Sound? Wasn’t it Stravinsky said even a duck can hear? What makes something beautiful? Why does it matter? 

“Hinx, Minx, the Old Witch Stinks!” (That’s what Theodore Roethke liked, the percussive nonsense of a brilliant childhood.) I know this is what I also like. Like Pete Seeger I want to dance all around the kitchen to logo rhythms of exquisite gibberish–save for one thing, I want to reveal the stubborn and necessary joy of consciousness. 

Survival too. Did I forget to mention surviving? It’s a hard life and art doesn’t always help you live but it does most days and that’s a fact. 

Do you see? Poetry is the most serious fun I know of. 

Can a duck love poems? Only if it has crossed the street safely. (Blind joke.)

What makes something beautiful? Why does it matter? Because we’re all in this together. I love the fact that one of the organizations within the American Council of the Blind is called “Friends in Art”. 

What do I know? Not much it turns out. But I can stamp my feet and make expressive vocables jump. 

Old friends and new, we’re going to jump. 

 

 

Oh dog oh dog. Some day I too will put down this heavy burden. How do you do it, girl, all the particles of your body singing together?

 

(The Hill)
July 2, 2013

WASHINGTON, DC– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] Senate Democrats will try to resurrect a United Nations treaty on rights for the disabled that was rejected last year over GOP concerns it would imperil home-schooling.

The treaty fell five votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority in a 61-38 vote in December after former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) led a charge that it would give unelected UN bureaucrats the power to challenge U.S. home-schooling.

Treaty supporters say those worries were unfounded, and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations panel hopes to win approval of the treaty, a Senate Democratic aide said.

Menendez hopes to strike a deal on a way forward with the panel’s top Republican, Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, who voted against the treaty last year.

While last year’s vote took place after the presidential election, advocates believe the debate got tied up in election-year politics and that a revote this session could be successful.

Entire article:
Senate Dems to resurrect United Nations treaty opposed by home schoolers
http://tinyurl.com/ide0702131

 

The pears are coming. They are small as plover eggs.

Branches are heavy and uneven.

How green and sober everything is.

 

 

After a long walk I come into the garden. Under the trellis the shade has the quality of hands in a dance–I can’t explain this. I sit down and think about the past. I can’t explain this either. I want a renewal of love and the air is thick with the scent of roses. 

 

I know nature doesn’t care for me. “The pine tree,” says Basho, “another thing that will never be my friend.” 

 

But love is sidelong, insistent, other worldly, and the pigeon grass shines. 

 

The farmer rakes his path

Straight as a ruler–

spring onions, cups of amber,

carrots in rows 

like houses in London,

Egyptian beet root 

perfect as pyramids.

 

And Van Gogh over there–

examining the buttercups. 

One morning I am free like a prophet walking in wild flowers. A seedling falls in my hair. A dream comes back–shadows from another life. Beyond the darkness, Egyptian red…

In 1982 Robert Bly came to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at my invitation. I was a troubled Ph.D. student, more than half blind, in the wrong place, post-Fulbiright, post Iowa MFA, alone, neurasthenic, and recently injured by a freak accent: while reading a book of poems in bed, holding the book up close to my one good eye, a paper bookmark flipped out and sliced open my only functional reading orb. Carl Jung and Freud both said there are no accidents. The book was Linda Gregg’s terrific volume: Too Bright to See. 

One day I came home to my incredibly shabby grad student apartment and flipped on the light switch. The light bulb went out. I went to the next lamp and switched it on. The bulb popped. I went into the next room. Same thing.

I knew I was in the spell of synchronicity.

Walking across campus Robert looked at me and said: “There’s something about you; you remind me of James Wright; its in your rich face and open eyes.”

Bly saved my life on that day in that place. 

If you’re a poet, have you saved anyone lately?

Or have you spent your days advertising your failures, making sun flecked comic book pages out of ego?

I know these men who cannot speak. They have autism. I want to create a writing workshop for them. Do you understand?

Have you saved anyone lately?

Robert Bly: “How much labor is needed to live our four lives!”

 

 

Yesterday all the “abled” people fell apart. Worldwide. From Minsk to Cartagena, Duluth to Reykjavik, the unassuming normals became instantly (insert disability here). “It’s some kind of Death Ray or something,” said Vladimir Putin, Csar of all the Russias. Putin appeared before the press in a rolling beggar’s cart, but most of the press didn’t notice as they were hyper-active and busy counting the drupelets in the chandeliers.

See how it works? Jose Saramago ain’t got nothin’ on this baby! Schadenfreude is a limited province of course and the game is trivial, except for one thing: the exercise proves dis-articulation as metaphor is a loser’s game.

I’d like to see American writers who presently have no disabilities get along for a year without using blindness or deafness as metaphors.

 

 

There is more than one way to be blind. My pal Leo sees through his own periscope. He is the commander of a private submarine–the USN Leo Hauser and though his sighted options are limited, they’re still fair. He drives his car in a gated community in Arizona largely because he can still do it. Sometimes he honks his horn. And though he’s looking through a tube, the day is glossy and brilliant as a an old Kodachrome. Leo can tell you that while blindness is not always a preferred experience it’s often more interesting than sighted people suppose. For some of us the colors are beyond compare.

 

Another friend–I’ll call her Karen–(not everyone wants to be known for folly) runs through a field in Nebraska though she sees only light. But the light is so gold, so dappled and evanescent that her description makes you want to cry. The average sighted person can learn from her how daylight spins between brown and yellow tonic, the drafts she drinks between the clock and the sun. Just run beside her.

 

Sight is an immoderate thing, never static. It is, perhaps, the dearest sense. The flickering light of a fire, shadows on a hearthstone; the laughing element of sun on water; early morning eastern skies; the cold and steady light at mid ocean–many blind people know these things. Nowadays more blind people see something of the world than is commonly understood.

 

Why is this the case? Ophthalmology is more advanced than it was when I was a boy. If you’re a blind child who possesses some residual vision today the chances are excellent you will keep that vision. This is a powerful and uplifting fact. While limited sight is problematic in many ways its still a boon to those who have it. And though the daily fear we might lose it is present and even frightening, I treasure the light at my western window as the sun goes down.