Stephen Kuusisto Reads from Letters to Borges, His New Book of Poems
JUST RELEASED! Best-selling memoirist Stephen Kuusisto uses the themes of travel, place, religion, music, art, and loneliness to explore the relationship between seeing, blindness, and being. In poems addressed to Jorge Luis Borges—another poet who lived with blindness—Kuusisto leverages seeing as negative capability, creating intimacy with deep imagination and uncommon perceptions.
If you enjoyed this reading and would like to listen to several more poems from Letters to Borges, it’s easy enough to arrange. This FREE recording is yours to enjoy at your leisure, preferably from your favorite cozy chair with a cup of coffee or a nice glass of wine in hand. Simply fill in the “Join me for a cozy ‘fireside’ poetry reading…” form found to the right of this blog post or make your request below.
REVIEWS:
Seth Abramson, Poet
Kuusisto’s is a life one wants to know, detailed sparingly by a man one wants to know, inscribed in a generic form one finds oneself not merely compelled but honored to read. Letters to Borges is highly recommended for those who still find honor and beauty in both simplicity and–can it be?–actually having something to say. Read more of Seth Abramson’s reviewfrom the Huffington Post, Huff Post Books, November 2012
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If we account for Kuusisto’s restricted sight, the brilliance of his verse acquires deeper resonance, for his work imagines a realm between sight and sound composed of the sensory stimuli we all know and recognize, but split, fractured, and juxtaposed to inhabit the mind’s ear of his readers, a feat unique to this truly gifted poet. — Diego Báez, Booklist Advanced Review
All day I’ve been trying to slip the tag of these blues–the baseball analogy seems right–the blues has the ball and I’m sliding slowly and painfully into his hard touch. It takes hours to slide.
When I got up today I was rounding third, fresh from a dream where I was lost in a far city, some place in China. People kept pointing to my face, my wandering, ineffective eyes–they’d point and laugh and no one would answer my questions.
I know it was my childhood and adolescence. Since the unconscious likes novelty it threw in some strange Asian people, but they were really just the principal and students of my high school who didn’t want me in the classroom–any classroom–the irritating blind kid. How they hated my very existence. And there was the track coach who wouldn’t let me run on his team because a blind kid was a liability. He and some of the students in his circle laughed at me, demanding I return the track suit. Laughed and pointed.
I have a disability. Some days I’m running in three worlds: the open field of my imagination (where I entertain optimism), the daily hurdles of American life (where I’m prevented from riding in a taxi because of my guide dog) and the city of deep memory (where I will always be a humiliated boy who simply wanted to fit in). All of the running is difficult, sub-aquatic, and slow, horribly slow.
When I read yesterday that Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa has decided not to seek reelection after forty years of public service I felt like weeping. I was sitting on an Amtrak train on my way home to Syracuse and somewhere around Poughkeepsie I found the article with my talking iPad. I felt just then a sense of deep and profound loss for Senator Harkin has often been the only friend of Americans with disabilities in the US senate. I do not feel I’m exaggerating here. While other senators have voted for measures designed to help people with disabilities no other man or woman on Capitol Hill has been so consistent, brave, undaunted and fierce on our behalf. No one.
Earlier today when the blues caught the ball, when I was turning the corner for home, fresh from a bad dream, I wrote on Facebook that its hard to imagine who might take Senator Harkin’s place, and pointed out that liberals and neo-liberals are no better when it comes to disability than many conservatives. You can’t count on democrats. I am, for all intents and purposes, rather terrified. People with disabilities are about to lose the best friend in politics they’ve ever had.
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.
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.
The paper wasps fly all afternoon through the ruined woodpile. Some are fast, driven by errands both urgent and mysterious. Others circle a nearby log as if their ancestors had once been there.
It’s risky to get so close when you can’t see. It’s also a thrill.
I sit beside a stump and right off one lands in my hair. He moves across my scalp like a wind blown seed. I shut my eyes, let him go about his business and then he flies.
May 16, 2008
EDUCATION Opening others’ eyes Blind professor helping UI students, doctors see
disabilities in a new light
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.
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.
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“ has just been released. Listen to Steve read “Letter to Borges in His Parlor” in this fireside reading via YouTube. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled What a Dog Can Do. Steve speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy. www.stephenkuusisto.com, www.planet-of-the-blind.com
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Planet of the Blind 
