Planet of the Blind

Shame at The New Yorker

The latest issue of The New Yorker magazine features a poem by Marie Howe entitled "The Star Market". In the poem the omniscient narrator sees numerous disabled people in a supermarket. The poem’s narrator is disgusted by these deformed shoppers and goes on to speculate about the forbearance that Jesus must have owned to live among such people.

You can check out the poem yourself.

I am not an advocate of censorship, and in general I tend to believe that the world isn’t harmed by bad poetry. Howe’s poem is trite, rendered without wit, and though it tries to offer a speculative nod to the trials of Christian compassion, in point of fact the poet misses the mark even with this slow pitch Judeo-Christian theme. In short: the poem is just plain bad.

I don’t know Marie Howe. I do know a good deal about poetry though. Therefore I understand implicitly that the narrator of the poem is not precisely the poet herself.

I "get it". The narrator is a cultural figure just as the lame and the deformed are culturally suggestive figures within the proscenium arch of the poem.

But it’s a stupid poem. There’s an easy decadence about it. Contemporary American poetry is rife with this kind of thing these days. Wallace Stevens once wrote, famously, that "the world is ugly and the people are sad"—but he didn’t mean to suggest that he should earn "Brownie points" because he could see it.

And that’s the problem with Howe’s poem. The narrator thinks she’s smart. The reader is left to interpret that narrator’s degree of discernment and empathy.

At the end of the poem we’re told that Jesus, turning around to see one of these terrible unfortunates from the supermarket would likely have a problem himself.

And so the poem is execrable and it uses disability in all the clichéd ways that bad writing has always employed: these are the stigmatized and ostracized children, these cripples, who haunt the roads outside of Thebes.

Spare us.

I don’t read The New Yorker very often, and I seldom read the poetry there when I do pick it up. The magazine has never been famous for its capacities where poetry is concerned.

But now I will not read it at all.

Shame on them.

S.K.

Stay Festive

The Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski wrote three books of poems toward the end of his life–books that he conceived of as a trilogy. In turn the poems in each of these three collections "talk to one another" much as the extended poetry of Ezra Pound is conversant from one of his "Cantos" to another.

The first of Saarikoski’s volumes was titled: "Dance Floor on the Mountain"–and the image this evokes is impossible to draw or paint in a simple representational way.

There is a mountain. Now there’s a dance floor. How does one build a dancing place on the sheer side of the mountain?

Perhaps it extends "out" with lots of jerry rigged four by four sections of lumber? It probably sags a bit if too many Bacchic celebrants climb on at once.

You can’t get to the dance floor by and ordinary path.

Here is a hint from the poet about the nature of the path:

Snakes with their small tongues

licked my ears clean

once again I can hear

the sounds of the world

Festive

the rowan-berries

I want to keep this peace

in which I have creatures sit on my shoulders

and a dance floor on the mountain

Translated from the Finnish by Anselm Hollo

Continue reading “Stay Festive”

My Dynamic Duo

Here they are, Steve and "Nira" – stepping lively.

Once they’re home, I’ll be jogging behind just to keep up! ~ Connie

P.S. Thanks to Graham Buck, of Guiding Eyes for the Blind, for the photos.

Photo description: yellow Labrador, Nira, is in harness and guiding Steve down the sidewalk.

Blind Date

Here she is. "Nira". Steve’s ultimate blind date.

Photo description: Nira, a yellow Labrador, is in a down position. She and Steve are doing obedience. Although we can’t see Steve, we can see the leash he’s holding attached to Nira’s collar. She is looking up in his direction. It’s a great head shot, compliments of Graham Buck of Guiding Eyes for the Blind.

Be Careful What You Call Yourself

I have been thinking a good deal lately about the psychological and, for lack of a better term, the spiritual cost of being a person with a disability. NO one needs or wants to hear the tiresome statistics about unemployment among PWDs or the discouraging lack of progress enforcing the Americans with Disabilities Act. These are narratives of abjection (to borrow a term from the French critic Julia Kristeva) and over time the mere act of talking about the conditions of marginalization becomes a secondary form of abjection. To paraphrase the old sixties maxim: "You are what you talk about."

No sensible person would advocate avoiding the use of civil rights language, whether we’re talking about women’s rights or Latina rights or African-American rights, or children’s rights. Yet it seems to me that I am increasingly uncomfortable as a representative of "the disabled community" or "the blind community"—not because I would eschew these political realities, but because the insistence that these are my subjects prevents me from being publicly a more reflective or complex person. I have a sensibility that’s different from what you might suppose.

I’ve been walking down the street during my guide dog training with a baseball cap on my head that says "NAVY" and veterans call out to me as I work with my guide dog. I am not a war veteran. I care however very deeply about the plight of our war veterans. I was never in the NAVY but I recognize that the Navy protects our freedoms. I am opposed to the war in Iraq but I support our troops and our sailors. I am patriotic but I don’t believe in imperialism. I am fiercely loyal to the Democratic Party but I think we need a tough foreign policy candidate in these difficult times which is why I was for Chris Dodd and am now for Hillary Clinton.

I am not a blind person when I listen to the opera or swim in the Baltic. I am not a knee-jerk Democrat. As I said some time ago in these pages, I sided with the GOP in their efforts to defend the life of Terry Schiavo.

My feeling is that we must go beyond identification based on race or disability or ethnic origin or gender or sexual orientation for only in so doing can we rebuild a progressive and thoughtful means of public engagement in our nation.

This is what civics used to teach. I want to live beyond our Balkanized era. The cultural critic Lennard Davis calls this idea "dis-modernism" by which he means that the idea of disability is essentially a cultural or social construction. If you build the right architectures and accommodations no one is disabled. Just so, if you assure genuine equal rights then marginalized identities should conceivably no longer exist.

Imagine the better conversations we all would be having.

This is my morning soapbox. Perhaps I’ve taken too much sinus medication. I’m a utopian Sudafed addict.

People don’t like it when you suggest that their Balkanized political identities are not entirely productive. I know. But if you need to have a social society you can join the Optimists Club. Or a good labor union.

S.K.!

Walking Swiftly

The Iowa folk singer Greg Brown has a line in one of his songs: "The world ain’t what you think it is/It’s just what it is."

How different I am when I remember to let the world open itself to me rather than trying to dominate experience with preconceptions.

There’s something about having a new guide dog that puts me in mind of this quiet lesson.

We walk together and trust that we will mutually take care of each other. We do this in the expectation that what’s ahead will be more interesting and viable than anything we might have supposed.

That’s poetry. If you were to write an equation it would be:

Experience minus expectation equals progress plus bliss

I know. It’s not the sixties anymore. No one is supposed to talk about bliss.

But I’m all for it.

S.K.

Stepping Lively

Today was a balmy day for New York State with temperatures in the low 60’s and there was even some sunlight. I walked "in harness" this morning for the first time and again in the afternoon with Guiding Eyes "Nira" (whose photo I will soon upload to our blog) and as we strode together down a busy sidewalk in White Plains, a woman who was relishing the sight of this fast yellow Lab and a broadly smiling man said: "That dog sure likes its job!" We were sailing past her at a good clip. And I waved as we were sailing away with the pleasure both of recognition and of being recognized. Nira was expertly slowing, steering, working her way among pedestrians, head held high and wagging her tail. Me? I was wearing a U.S. Navy baseball cap that says: NAVY: Accelerate Your Life". We were surely accelerating today. It was a marvelous time "out on the ocean" and I can’t wait for tomorrow.

S.K.

Oprah, If Only You Had Read the Book!

In 1998 I published a memoir entitled “Planet of the Blind” and much to my delight some good reviewers praised the book. The memoir received strong reviews in The New York Times and USA Today and suddenly I was invited to be a guest on National Public Radio’s superb program “Talk of the Nation”.

This was heady stuff for a guy who had been writing poetry for 18 years. In the poetry world you are very lucky if you have a hundred readers and let me tell you, 100 readers is pretty much beyond the wildest dreams of most of the talented and deserving poets I’ve met along the road.

Each time something good happened where the book was concerned my wife would say, jokingly, “Yeah, that’s great; just let me know when Oprah calls” We would chuckle about that.

The reason we’d laugh about Oprah is that “Planet of the Blind” is not the kind of book that haunts the bestseller lists. The book isn’t lurid; it’s not angry; it doesn’t even have much of a plot. In fact it’s such an odd book that it’s difficult to describe. It’s in part a history of blindness in America and part a “coming of age” story by a writer who largely grew up feeling ashamed of his blindness. The story isn’t particularly unusual and even worse from a sales standpoint; I have an addiction for big words.

Continue reading “Oprah, If Only You Had Read the Book!”

Dog Day Afternoon

I am pleased to announce that my new guide dog is "Nira"–a female yellow Labrador. I will be meeting her for the first time in about ten minutes.

All I know for sure is that she’s a tall, fast, and poised guide dog.

I feel a little like an adoptive parent waiting in the anteroom of the orphanage. Or maybe I feel a little like a Sweepstakes winner.

One thing’s for sure: I feel very lucky to be making her acquaintance.

S.K.

Make It Strong, Please.

Over breakfast at Guiding Eyes I hear assorted stories about blindness. How often one hears the refrain: "My eye doctor said, well now you’re blind, go home, there’s nothing more we can do for you." I think that the national ophthalmologic societies should be having breakfast at the guide dog school. Blindness isn’t a calamity unless the "professionals" make it so. I drink coffee with people who have recently lost their eye sight and I’m reminded all over again just how clotted and befuddled our "normative" society is when it comes to blindness or disability in general. Good God. You’d think that these ophthalmologists are getting their scripts for communicating with their patients from Victorian novels. "I’m sorry but you’ve been struck blind by a force mightier than humankind. You must now go and wander the forests of Germany."

Thank the Lord there’s strong coffee here at Guiding Eyes.

S.K.