Tag: poetry

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

 

Poetry as artful plagiarism

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

 

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

Poetry is to me…

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

 

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

 

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!

The Black River Chapbook Competition: Deadline May 31, 2012

About the Prize

Dear Friends,

This is just a friendly reminder that the deadline for the Spring 2012 Black River Chapbook Competition is approaching.

The Black River Chapbook Competition is a semi-annual prize from Black Lawrence Press for a chapbook of short stories or poems. Entries should be between 16 and 36 pages in length. The winner will receive $500 and publication. Previous winners of The Black River Chapbook Competition include Helen Marie Casey, Frank Montesonti, D. E. Fredd, Sandra Kolankiewicz, Tina Egnoski, T. J. Beitelman, David Rigsbee, Lisa Fay Coutley, Amelia Martens, Charlotte Pence, Russel Swensen, and Nick McRae.

How to Enter

Please follow this link for information on how to submit your manuscript for The Black River Chapbook Competition.

The deadline for submissions is May 31. That’s this Thursday!

We look forward to reading your work!

Black Lawrence Publishing • 326 Bigham Street • Pittsburgh • PA • 15211

www.blacklawrence.com

The Barefoot Review seeking submissions

Jamie Sue, from The Barefoot Review, made contact and asked us to share the following post. Happy to do so…

What is it?

The Barefoot Review is a new publication. We welcome submissions of poetry or short prose from people who have or have had physical difficulties in their lives, from cancer to seizures, Alzheimer’s to Lupus. It is also for caretakers, families, significant others and friends to write about their experiences and relationship to the person.

What’s the Purpose?

Writing can be a tremendous source of healing and allow difficult feelings and ideas to be expressed. Unfortunately, every piece submitted can’t be published, however every piece is important. The process of writing, verbalizing feelings that may be subconscious or unexpressed is more important than the acknowledgment of publication.

We hope sharing this work online will help people facing similar difficulties find inspiration in the words of others.

What’s in a Name?

The Barefoot Review is named to evoke several meanings: baring your soul and expressing naked feelings. Bare feet ground you, give you balance, and connect you to the Earth. The review is here from a desire to help others.

Where is it?

The review is here, there and everywhere —www.barefootreview.com

Please be sure to read the submissions guidelines before sending us your work.

submissions@barefootreview.org

Question, compliment or complaint?

info@barefootreview.org

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.

 

Disability and Poetry, Part 145

Thanks to Chris B whose blog, Through Alien Eyes, is a thoughtful and lovely place for disability reflections. He heard me speak recently on disability and poetry at The Ohio State University and has written a kindly analysis of my presentation.

When I am In New York City with my guide dog the happiness of the city is mine. Swiss tourists want to tell me about their Labradors at home. Doormen call out as we walk by. It’s a different city for us, communal, improbably humane even at moments ecstatic. This must go into the living poem of physical difference.

So too the damages and the ugliness. What I like to call the mercenary labeling of ableism. People with disabilities experience the crackling, unspoken diminishing glares of strangers. Until they are spoken. Then the day tilts like a bad amusement park ride. This must also go into the living poem of physical difference.guide dog, Nira

What the guide dog schools won’t tell you, or by turns, tell you imperfectly, is that guide dog teams will encounter public incomprehension and outright discrimination as they walk around. In my case this discovery came 18 years agoin New York City when I tried to get into a cab and the driver began screaming expletives. Despite this I got into the car. His language and mine became an instant study in art for all the ingredients of creativity were present: tension, incomprehension, passion, and spontaneity.

Sitting stern as a tree in the backseat, I told him that the law permits guide dogs for the blind in all taxis–in fact guide dogs are allowed everywhere. Hell, I even had an ID card from the school with my picture and the dog’s picture and all the appropriate legalese. But the driver, my driver, did not believe in the bravery or happiness of others. He began revving his engine and revving up his shouting.

What can you do? My driver hated me and my dog and was refusing to budge. I was reciting the law. Oh the godforsaken wilderness of human rage. When you have a disability every moment of discrimination evokes all the others: you’re again the boy who was told he couldn’t play with others, couldn’t go to school with them, sat alone in a room. This must also go into the living poem of physical difference.

Then again, the shy, unanticipated joy: in Central Park a man says to me, “You can’t tell, but I am the statue of liberty.” “Me too,” I say.

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.

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

April is National Poetry Month…

Someone wrote me asking why (I have) not been talking about poetry lately. I think the answer is complicated for its not correct to say that we don’t think about poetry like a caffeinated clock maker reciting Rilke as he works. We think about poetry with every little gear and pin. Daylight disappears and the windows grow dark and we’re still thinking about poetry. We even write poems though we’re less on display than we might be in other seasons. Why are we so introverted when it comes to the drums and snakes of the imagination?

Sometimes we are affected by a freshet of humility. We’re like the 100 year old monk who we met at a Finnish monastery. We were side by side in the sauna. I said to him: “Do you smell strawberries?” He told me that the smell was from his sweat, that he’d been eating only strawberries for about two weeks.

Have you ever sat with a 100 year old man who was entirely happy?

You see, sometimes poetry asks us to admit we know nothing at all. Try to write about that. Do it with happiness.

Are you happy enough?

Have you given away the proper things in this life?

I promise you that I’m looking always for the answers. I look with my skin. I walk around in the near meadow. I smile at light as it moves over the frozen earth like any blind man. I am lighter by the minute.

And you?

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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.

Post originally published on Planet of the Blind