Lyric Anger and the Victrola in the Attic: An Interview with Stephen Kuusisto

Abstract

I sat down with celebrated author Stephen Kuusisto in fall of 2008 in Iowa City, Iowa where he lives. I had read his first book of poems, Only Bread, Only Light, and his two memoirs, hugely popular Planet of Blind and recently released Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening. I had also read his completed new manuscript of poems, Mornings with Borges, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2010. Having already met Steve when I invited him to give a reading and workshop at Grinnell College, I was familiar with his old guide dog, Vidal, who had just retired, but not his new dog, Nira, who seemed a paragon of affectionate placidity and navagational competence. Over several cups of coffee, we spoke about a great many things but kept circling back to questions of lyric mode and its usefulness to project of disability studies. Steve is a wildly energetic man, learned, unbelievably funny-a kind of walking surrealist. Think Johnny Carson meets Andre Breton meets entire library at University of Iowa, where he teaches in graduate nonfiction program and eye clinic at medical college. He is also a passionate activist working on behalf of those with disabilities. A truly public intellectual, he has appeared on countless national and regional TV and radio programs, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, Dateline NBC, and NPR's Talk of Nation. R. S. At one point in Planet of Blind, while birding with a friend, you pretend to see a goldfinch hopping up and down-jumping, you write, a penny on a railroad track. The scene underscores your proclivity as a young man to try to pass as sighted, but it also points to an aesthetic philosophy. Not wanting your outing together to become an exercise in description, where your friend reveals in exacting detail what his retinas take in, you decide to fake it with binoculars, gloating over imaginary blue jays. It seems to me that Planet of Blind inverts this outing while shouldering a similar worry. The reader is out birding with you, blind author, and is thankfully spared an exercise in description. Meticulous verisimilitude is thrown to wind, and analogy (what might be called practice of blurred distinctions) takes over, paradoxically allowing us to see world more clearly than mere sight allows. You say this explicitly when you remark about your early writing, Exploring what words can do when placed side by side, I'm starting to build instrument that will turn my blindness into a manner of And you come back to this very situation of blind and sighted in title poem of your forthcoming collection, Mornings with Borges. The mother of a friend used to walk with great poet and relate what was before them. Then, you write, the poet would tell her what he was seeing. Wingless angels with glass eyes; a book lying open from which a sequence of numbers arose and walked like those pocket-sized dogs favored by wealthy. Borges is said to provide solutions to incitement that is blindness. Is your own solution to this problem something like a counter-imaginative incitement? S. K. It's interesting to me that college English departments are talking these days about visual literacy as though optho-centrism, or photographic metaphor for seeing, offers in effect an unquestionable and dominant script for cognition and imagination. Poetry is often concerned with things we cannot see as Federico Garcia Lorca or Dylan Thomas will tell you. Association in surrealism means putting things side by side that don't belong together logically- the sewing machine on operating table or a horse galloping across face of a tomato-to borrow from Breton; poetry raises this quality of illogical to a higher level by insisting that there are states of mind, of perception really, that can't be represented by stable, figurative imagery. In one of his poems, Robert Bly describes people trapped in poverty by saying, They live in casket of sun. …