Q. You say in your memoir that your parents didn’t have the emotional language to communicate with you about your vision problem – saying blind was like saying cancer – but did you wish you could have expressed yourself to them?
A. The Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai once wrote: “People who live in the hills surrounded by fog believe the world is covered by fog.” I was unable to conceive of a language for my blindness because my parents were so intent on treating it as a profound misfortune. In effect, I was living in their fog.”
Q. You persevered, no matter what came your way. Where do you think you got your strength?
A. Strength comes from thousands of sources—it’s as complex as the genome and as mysterious as the poems of St. John of the Cross. Sometimes I think that simple luck is involved—for instance I survived a profound adolescent depression that included a life-threatening bout with anorexia. I stopped eating for all the traditional reasons: my world was out of control, I didn’t fit in in my high school because of my disability, my parents were alcoholics…I found that not eating was something I could do really well. I had to sleep with the electric blanket on high—my weight dropped below 100 pounds. I was dying. Then one day I began to eat. Some switch was thrown inside me. Was it a neurological switch or a spiritual switch? And does it matter? Was it my dead twin brother who died at birth telling me to eat and keep living? Was it my understanding of the Eucharist? Maybe it was my emerging love of the New York Mets, “The Miracle Mets” of 1969? In the end I think the most important thing is humility—remembering that you had a close call and that you’re still here and trying to think hard about what that means.
Q. Where do you think your passion to read and learn came from?
A. Both my parents were passionate readers and my mother made certain that I was introduced to “Talking Books” by the time I was 7. The irony is that although she couldn’t find a way to support me at an emotional level she was very good at assuring that I had access to stories. Stories, of course, are the truest philosopher’s stone that human beings can have. Everything’s contained within them. So I guess you could say that my mother gave me a road map to the inner life.
Q. What drew you to poetry in the beginning of your quest to read?
A. I’m not sure that I was drawn to poetry at the beginning. The first book that I can remember reading with avid interest was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—I loved the romanticism of running away from the world with a canoe and a raft. Poetry came later, probably in my high school years. I was introduced to a terrific anthology of contemporary American poetry edited by Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey called Naked Poetry. Of course that’s a title a teenager is going to grab a hold of! And there I discovered tremendous poets—Kenneth Rexroth, James Wright, W.S. Merwin…poets who brought to the page spiritual truth and remarkable lyricism all at the same time. And like Emily Dickinson I felt reading poetry for the first time that the top of my head had been blown off.
Q. When did you decide you wanted to publish your poetry and why did you do so?
A. I was in college and writing poems at white heat. I would read and write all night. And I discovered the world of small journals devoted exclusively to poetry. I haunted the college library and read magazines like Poetry; The Hudson Review; Seneca Review; Kayak; --the list could go on and on. Seeing poems in print in magazines made me want to break into print—I suppose one could say that I thought of this world of small magazines as constituting a kind of discussion. I wanted to be a part of the conversation. I published my first poems in a small nationally distributed magazine published in Florida. I was 19 or 20. But I remember the elation of that even today.
Q. What do you hope others get from reading your work?
A. We like to think of poetry as conveying wisdom, but I think that we turn to it at first for its musicality and the sense of spirited buoyancy that all the fine arts give us. Poems put us back in the waters of our universe. Things there are again wondrous strange.
Q. Do you have an intention for each poem or does the poem come before you realize the intention?
A. William Stafford has a poem called “Reporting Back” – poetry is just that! We are telling the culture, the village if you will, what it is we’re seeing out on the sea or walking the woods. So it’s a discovery process. The poem is a journey, it begins with music or an image…and then we are reporting back everything we find on this journey. James Wright, who was a very fine poet once said something to the effect that you have to be a little bit of a “dummy” to write poetry. Explorers and children fit the bill. For them everything is brand new! So all poems come before I’ve understood the map.
Q. Why did you write your memoir “Planet of the Blind”? Was it difficult for you to look back at what you survived?
A. Yes it was difficult. Some days my wife Connie would come home and find me with tears running down my cheeks. And I would say to her, “Boy did I have a great day!” Memoir is not easy. In general terms one can say that both poetry and fiction are easier. Writing autobiographically requires a willingness to plumb the depths of emotional anguish and additionally it demands that you do this with a strong degree of comic irony. By this I mean that you need to look at yourself as you were, but with a revised understanding…almost as if you are now a member of the audience looking at your former life as a play. You as the audience member know more than the characters on the stage. Obviously this is a hard task. Then you factor in the difficulty of telling the truth about people who simply haven’t behaved well. How will you do this without hurting people? Can this be done? You have all these dilemmas when writing nonfiction. I wanted to write Planet of the Blind because I didn’t see any books on the shelves that talked about blindness, culture, depression—and I certainly didn’t find any books that did this in literary terms. A literary memoir is more than just a Hollywood “kiss and tell” book or a simplistic Disneyworld “feel good” story—a literary memoir talks about the possibilities and means of achieving a personal and social transformation. In this sense Planet of the Blind isn’t just the story of a legally blind kid who grew up in a vacuum—it’s the story of thousands and thousands of people. At least that was my intention.
Q. Did you feel vulnerable letting others see who you are?
A. Absolutely! I had to write about teenage sexuality, the ignobility of lying, bouts of depression and drug abuse. To borrow a line from Theodore Roethke, “Such waltzing is not easy.” But I don’t feel vulnerable having readers witness these things. It’s hard to explain, but when you write about your struggles you are simultaneously taking control of their place in your life. It makes you stronger.
Q. What do you want people to learn from your memoir?
A. Self-consciousness is a paradox. When we think we are without hope we are in reality richly beautiful and much stronger than we know.
Q. What do you think is your best advice for aspiring poets? Do you feel being a writing teacher is your personal calling?
A. I try very hard to live in the moment as much as possible. I think we have a disadvantage with our big brains—we can think about the past and the future. And we always think about the future with our imaginations. And our imaginations can be either terrifically productive or terribly destructive. Most people work themselves into states of depression by imagining the future will be even worse than the worst things they’ve experienced so far. All of this is unproductive. As a writing teacher I tell my students to write about the moment—what are you hearing, seeing, what’s happening right now? Thoughts and memories are also part of this mix. I suppose you could say that I’m a Zen-Episcopalian! Use your mind and imagination to its fullest effect right here, right now. And like Hippocrates, do no harm! I’m not certain that teaching writing is a calling since it’s the students who have the passion. I’m hoping to be their conductor, or singing teacher.
Q. If you were not a teacher or writer, what would you want to be doing?
A. I’ve always wanted to be a big-league shortstop—one of those baseball players who can dive for a line drive, catch it before hitting the ground, regain his footing, and throw the other runner out for an unassisted double play!
Q. If you could get your sight back today, would you want to see?
A. Yes.
Q. What is your relationship like with God today?
A. The poet Marvin Bell writes in his lovely poem “White Clover”
I could say
It was light from stars
Touched the tops of flowers and no doubt
Something heavenly reaches what grows outdoors
And the heads of men who go hatless,
But I like to think we have a world
Right here, and a life
That isn’t death.
In one of my own poems I say, “I’m going to live right here, and sing sometimes.”
I haven’t sufficient skill to say more than that. I’m going hatless and feeling something under the stars.
Stephen Kuusisto
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