Insights from the Planet of the Blind: An Interview. Part 1.

After reading Planet of the Blind, Kathleen Avery, Senior Director of Marketing at Cleinman Performance Partners, had occasion to talk with the author (Stephen Kuusisto) about his story and all that he’s come to understand. Thank you, Kathleen, for allowing us to share this with our readers.

Kathleen: Your book is so rich with visual metaphor, just the most vivid descriptions. I’m curious how you are able to reference such diverse imagery. Comparing a man in a rain coat to the sails of Tristan’s ship or an elephant’s ear, for instance…

Stephen: Well, the first answer to that question is about language. All nouns are images. If you say strawberry…or horse…or wheat field…or lighthouse in Maine – you automatically see these things in your mind. This is why ancient people believed that poets were magical. They could make you see things.. They once had a radio advertisement on NPR: “Listen to the Theater of your Mind.” That’s how poetry works. It throws off powerful nouns and the reader sees them; they’re called power nouns.

Kathleen: But how do you know what a lighthouse in Maine looks like?

Stephen: I either do or do not (laughs). And that’s the second answer. There is a way in which imagination approximates things. You can actually create things with language that don’t exist. The poet Charles Simic says, “Go inside a stone, that would be my way…” He takes you inside the stone and it is the universe all over again. The truth is you can’t see that at all, but you can trick the mind into seeing what can’t be seen. This is also why ancient people thought poets were magical.

And, of course, people describe things to me.

You know, people think that blindness is like living in a vacuum. The general public tends to think that blind people are trapped inside the stone. They will ask me how I could possibly go to an art museum. Well, you pick your friends. You go with friends who will describe what they see. Is it an immediate experience? No. But I like it, because there is poetry in it. It is mediated.

Kathleen: Oh, how interesting would it be to listen to different people describe the same Picasso?

Stephen: That would be a fabulous NPR piece!

You can read Kathleen Avery’s interview in its’ entirety by visiting www.cleinman.com/insights-from-the-planet-of-the-blind

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Professor Stephen Kuusisto is the author of “Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening” and the acclaimed memoir “Planet of the Blind”, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”. His second collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press, “Letters to Borges“, is scheduled for release in October 2012. As director of the Renee Crown University Honors Program and a University Professor at Syracuse University, Steve speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy. www.stephenkuusisto.com, www.planet-of-the-blind.com

What a Dog Can Do: An excerpt

No one knows when the forerunner of today’s guide dogs first appeared. Drawings of blind people accompanied by dogs date back to the 17th century. Those early pairings were most likely memorization teams, one pictures the dog leading its partner through the village square. It’s clear no substantial training was involved. But we can imagine the tremendous bond with dogs that developed between the uncharted and lonely blind people of prior ages. It is a safe bet that dogs solved the puzzle of solitude for blind travelers who lived in a time when sightlessness was a great calamity. (The idea that blind men and women could be taught to read was a late development in cultural history, as Diderot’s essay Lettre sur les aveugles published in 1749 offered the first speculation that raised letters might be possible.) The world of the blind has been a dismal place throughout much of history. It’s possible to say, along with the poet Pablo Neruda that pure faith cannot withstand the assaults of winter, but your survival is more likely with a dog. Sometimes when I think about the ancient blind with their lives of begging and fiddle playing, their relentless wandering, homelessness, sickness, I weep to imagine the righteous loyalty of those early dogs.

From: What a Dog Can Do: A Memoir of Life with Guide Dogs, by Stephen Kuusisto, forthcoming from Simon and Schuster

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Poetry as artful plagiarism

“Poetry is an artful plagiarism sometimes, where odd combinations of words influence our language and heightens our experience.” – Stephen Kuusisto

Things are moving along with Copper Canyon Press

Just got the copy edited manuscript of my new book “Letters to Borges” coming soon from Copper Canyon Press. Michael Wiegers has done a fabulous job. Who says editing is dead? Not in Port Townsend!

When Bob Marley Saved My Life

Photo description: black and white photo of a smiling Bob Marley. He’s standing outside and almost appears to be leaning on a guitar, the neck of which he’s holding in his right hand.

First let me say that anyone who has known discrimination also knows that going forward is steep. You have, after all, been told you don’t belong and worse, you’ve been instructed to get the hell out of town. As a blind person I’ve been in that spot throughout my life. Grade school teachers, high school principals, college professors, graduate school instructors–even a college president–have told me that because of my visual impairment I should go away. Perhaps the worst moment was in 1985 when I was enrolled in the Ph.D. program in English at the University of Iowa and two senior faculty along with the department chair told me I didn’t fit, that my need for extra time to complete assignments was ridiculous, and that I was a whiner.

This is a familiar story among people with disabilities. Even today (over 20 years after the passage if the ADA) only one in four college students with a disability will graduate. The unemployment rate for pwds is still estimated at 70%.

If you’re blind you can’t wait tables, drive a cab, or do most of the available jobs that are perfectly honorable. In 1985 all I could imagine was reading and writing vs. nothing. Nothing would mean living on Social Security Disability checks and moving in with my parents. If i embraced Nothing it would be an admission of failure so great that I would have to retire from my life, live as a kind of back room invalid, a prospect that terrified me since my mother was an alcoholic and slept all day with the shades drawn– would that be my life?

As it happened, I did move home and lived for quite some time in my parents’ basement. I had a beat up typewriter, an exercise bike, and a tape machine and that’s when I began listening to Bob Marley in earnest. I’d been gently listening to Bob ever since his first US album “Catch a Fire” appeared in 1973 but now I was soaking in his rare and utterly astonishing combination of rage and redemption, a combination you will not customarily find in the arts–a combo like milk and iodine. In poetry very few possess this–Yeats comes to mind and Nazim Hikmet, and Neruda. In popular music almost no one has Marley’s quality of the sword in the cloud–the rage is just rage or the milk is just syrup.

In my basement with the volume up I began working. Bob Marley’s voice and lyrics moved through me and I felt a half weightless sense of a pending disembodiment and then the authentic tears of deep deep discrimination salted with hope came to me. I could go on and on about the songs, the lyrics stitched from sublime wing shadows of the soul that fans the body, but it’s enough to say that Bob Marley remains for me the most authentic voice of “becoming” that I have ever heard.

Previously published on Steve’s other blog, Planet of the Blind

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Professor Stephen Kuusisto, blind since birth, is the author of “Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening” and the acclaimed memoir “Planet of the Blind”, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”. He has also published “Only Bread, Only Light“, a collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press. As director of the Renee Crown University Honors Program and a University Professor at Syracuse University, Steve speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy.

Kudos to NPR on the Subject of Chen Guancheng's Blindness

Thanks to Alan Greenblatt of NPR for writing today about the issue of Chen Guancheng’s blindness and the overtly dynamic positioning of the “b” word in the press coverage of the Chinese dissident. Greenblatt’s piece, entitled “A Factor in a Much Larger Life: Debating Chen Guancheng’s Blindness” does a nice job of arguing that people with disabilities are not, in fact defined by those disabilities, and I’m glad to have been asked for some comments on the subject. Kudos to the folks at NPR for bucking the media’s fixation on the blindness as a determinant symbol of what is indeed a much larger life.

Previously published on Steve’s other blog, Planet of the Blind

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World Premier in Iowa City: See you there, Friday night, Feb 5th!

Imagine your world going dark. Contemplate the fading sight of a loved one. Grapple with the responsibility of delivering a diagnosis. Renowned
theater artist and UI graduate Rinde Eckert takes you behind the eyes
and into the heads and hearts of those surrounded by the shadows of
blindness. Crafted from interviews collected via an unusual
collaboration between Eckert and the University of Iowa Carver Family
Center for Macular Degeneration, Eye Piece
will feature performers from the UI Theatre Arts and Dance departments
and the School of Music as well as Eckert himself. With humor and
compassion Eckert will lead us on a journey through darkness toward a
different kind of illumination.

Rinde Eckert, Eye Piece

Friday and Saturday, February 5 and 6, 8 pm
Sunday, February 7, 2 pm
Friday and Saturday, February 12 and 13, 8 pm
Sunday, February 14, 2 pm
Mabie Theatre

A HANCHER COMMISSION AND WORLD PREMIERE

RELATED EVENTS
Monday, January 25, 5:30 pm / 1289 Carver Biomedical Research Building,
Kelch Conference Room. Panel discussion about the creation of Eye Piece with Rinde Eckert, Dr. Ed Stone, Steve Kuusisto, and two cast members. Open to the public.

Tuesday, January 26, 12-1 pm / Braley Auditorium in UIHC’s Pomerantz Family Pavilion. Discussion about the impact of vision loss on family members with Rinde Eckert, Dr. Mark Wilkinson, and others. Open to the public.

This
project is made possible in part by a grant from the Association of
Performing Arts Presenters Creative Campus Innovations Grant Program, a
component of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

It
is presented in collaboration with the UI Theatre Arts Department’s
Partnership in the Arts and the UI Division of Performing Arts’
Creating the Future Initiative. It is also presented in collaboration
with the University of Iowa Carver Family Center for Macular
Degeneration and the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine
Writing Program.

Top Ten Reasons Why the Blind Can't Get Ahead

10. The public still thinks blindness is a great misfortune.

9. Vocational and orientation-mobility training are horrifically funded—that is, its left up to the states and nonprofit organizations when it should be offered by every eye clinic and billable to Medicare.

8. Blindness advocacy organizations fight amongst themselves like the characters in “Gulliver’s Travels” who start a civil war over the question of which end of the hard boiled egg to break first—the big or small one.

7. Just try using a cell phone or a Macintosh pc. I mean “off the shelf” “ready to go”—just try it.

6. Just try using a PC “off the shelf” without expensive “third party software”—just try.

5. Just try going to a movie and asking for audio description.

4. TV can’t be watched—probably a good thing.

3. Bank machines; vending machines; signage; endless roulette of incomprehensions…

2. Blind students drop out of college at higher rates than other disabled student groups. See above problems.

1. Access to printed or electronic information remains highly provisional. Thank you Google; Microsoft; Apple; Adobe; Mozilla; Sun Micro Systems; and all the rest of you bongo whacking Information Technology designers who continue to think of the blind as “add on” people. In Disability Studies we call this principle “the defective people industry”.

Why am I posting such a riposte on Memorial Day? Ask the Blinded Veterans of America.

S.K.

Iowa blind advocates (Steve being one of them) disagree over court ruling on paper money

Advocates Disagree…(click for complete article)

Updated May 20. 2008 6:04PM
By Diane Heldt
The Gazette
diane.heldt@gazettecommunications.com

A federal appeals court ruling Tuesday that paper money — indistinguishable by touch — is discriminatory to blind people was hailed by some advocates as a long-awaited step forward, while others said a change is unnecessary and plays into negative stereotypes about the blind.

Blind people have adapted and often fold money to distinguish the bills, but no longer would have to rely on others to help them if the Treasury Department makes bills of different sizes or prints them with raised markings, supporters of a change said.

"What’s at issue here is the ability to identify money without other people helping you," University of Iowa English Professor Steve Kuusisto, who is blind, said. "My view is, the most accommodations possible help the most people. To be opposed to accommodations that help people is narrow."

The American Council of the Blind sued for such changes, but the government has been fighting the case for about six years. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruling could force the Treasury Department to alter money, though the ruling is subject to appeal.

Continue reading “Iowa blind advocates (Steve being one of them) disagree over court ruling on paper money”

May 16, 2008

EDUCATION
Opening others’ eyes
Blind professor helping UI students, doctors see
disabilities in a new light

By Diane Heldt

The Gazette

IOWA CITY — Blindness is thought by many to be a great calamity,
still viewed in 19th-century Dickensian terms, says University of Iowa
professor Steve Kuusisto.

But the reality, says Kuusisto, who has been blind since birth, is that
his talking computer, his guide dog and public transportation allow him to do
most anything sighted people can.

“It’s not an obstacle to having a good job and a full life,” he said.
“Nobody has to have a second-class life. Really, the sky’s the limit.” That
philosophy, the 53-year-old Kuusisto said, fuels a new vision of disability
that is emerging. That vision moves away from viewing people with disabilities
as “defective,” he said, to finding ways for technology and society to help
them lead the richest, fullest lives.

It’s a vision Kuusisto (pronounced COO-sis-toe) brought to the UI last
fall when he joined the faculty as an English professor with a joint
appointment in the Carver College of Medicine.

At the medical college he is a “humanizing agent” who helps educate
doctors about disability issues. UI officials hope Kuusisto bridges the goals
of disability advocates and health professionals.

“I’m probably the firstever poet named to a faculty of ophthalmology,”
Kuusisto says with a smile.

Continue reading “”