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Thank You Jeffrey Brown of PBS News Hour

Stephen Kuusisto to appear on PBS News Hour
Image: Logo of PBS News Hour

Tonight the PBS NewsHour will air a segment about my new book Have Dog, Will Travel. The piece features an interview with Jeffrey Brown whose reporting on literature and poetry is well known to book lovers across the nation. Jeffrey is also a poet whose first collection The News is available from Copper Canyon Press. In our time together we talked about poetry, civil rights, disability culture, dogs for the blind, the field of disability studies, and the power of literature to bring people together around social justice movements. And yes, there’s a lovely dog, Caitlyn, a sweetie pie yellow Labrador from Guiding Eyes for the Blind.

The program airs locally, in Syracuse at 7 PM. Check your local listings.

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Stephen Kuusisto and HarleyABOUT: Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the memoirs Have Dog, Will Travel; Planet of the Blind (a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”); and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening and of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light and Letters to Borges. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Fulbright Scholar, he has taught at the University of Iowa, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Ohio State University. He currently teaches at Syracuse University where he holds a University Professorship in Disability Studies. He is a frequent speaker in the US and abroad. His website is StephenKuusisto.com.

Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey is now available:
Amazon
Prairie Lights
Grammercy Books
Barnes and Noble
IndieBound.org

Have Dog, Will Travel by Stephen Kuusisto

(Photo picturing the cover of Stephen Kuusisto’s new memoir “Have Dog, Will Travel” along with his former guide dogs Nira (top) and Corky, bottom.) Bottom photo by Marion Ettlinger 

Aunt History and Stravinsky

Aunt History doesn’t care much
For Stravinsky
Its too much rum-ti-tum
Who needs it
Prince Ivan
And the firebird
Are piffle
She likes stories
Where no one’s saved—
At least
Not by magic
Nor by hope—
You just walk along
Maybe on a road
In summer
Somewhere in lapland
When you know
You’ve been spared
From something gruesome
There’s no analogy
For this feeling
No leitmotif
No hero

Of Gratitude, a Heart Attack, and Poetry

One year ago today I had myself a heart attack. To be honest I actually had the symptoms of heart failure over a period of about ten days. I honestly believed that I’d pulled a muscle in my sternum while lifting a carry on bag into an overhead compartment when boarding a plane. I made the classic mistake of googling my symptoms. A pulled sternum muscle can, said AI, cause shortness of breath and pain in the center of your chest. Put ice on it, or heat. Take Advil. Etc. I flew from upstate New York to Iowa City to visit a friend who’s been unwell. We walked around the town. We strolled beside the Iowa River. We’d walk a few feet and then I’d have to sit down. I explained my muscle pull. I had no idea I was having a full blown heart attack. When I returned home to Syracuse, New York I again had trouble walking across campus. I asked a friend if she could carry my brief case. It was that muscle thing. I went one more day believing I had simple strain. And then, on Good Friday it came over me, I was having a heart failure. The thing that put me over the top was that I had the compulsion to lie down. And a little voice in my head said, “you’re not going to get up, this is a serious moment.”

My wife Connie drove me to the emergency room. There are multiple hospitals in Syracuse. I chose the closest, “Upstate” a teaching hospital associated with the State University of New York. It didn’t take them long to confirm that I was having serious heart trouble.

My father died on Easter Sunday from a sudden heart attack. Here it was, Good Friday. Would I also die on Easter? I wanted to call Carl Jung on the phone. I wanted someone to tell me about magic numbers and fate.

I won’t go on about the triple bypass surgery, which is physically devastating. It’s taken me a year to feel like myself again. Today on my anniversary I’m almost me. Sometimes when I move my upper body I can feel the wires holding my chest together—there’s a little shift inside me like a transmission that catches when accelerating. This is normal. Its not painful, just weird. And of course while I say I feel like me again I’m not the same me. My rebuilt chest is misshapen. The long incision scar remains tender. I’m told that’s likely permanent. And I take a veritable armada of pills. Blood thinners, blood pressure pills, a daily statin bomb, vitamins, a baby aspirin. And there’s another pill which I don’t remember and can’t say what it does but its small and always drops to the floor and being blind I have to get down on my hands and knees and grope for it lest a dog come along and eat it.

My surgeon, the man who saved me, is a refugee from Iran. He came here as a young man. He’s arguably one of the finest heart surgeons in Syracuse. On the night before my operation we talked about Persian poetry. I felt lucky, even under tremendous stress. I felt cared for.

One of my resolutions is to never overlook the happiness of others. At its core this is pure democracy as Jefferson knew it. You have the right to pursue happiness and my job is to help you find it. I really mean this. I’m currently raising funds in order to publish first rate books of poems by disabled poets. I’ve published six books in this series https://www.ninemile.org/propeland will be releasing two more this summer. In these dark times we each have a job. And because I’ve received a second chance at life I like to imagine I know what to do.

Uncle History Knows All the Gods

Uncle History
Knows all the Gods
Mithra
His favorite
Divinity of contracts
Protector of truth
Guardian of cattle
Who watched the sun
Rise and set
The cypress trees
Wave
The heavens turn
Uncle likes
A god of good cheer
Striding
The riverbank
All observing
He remembers
Lesser ones too—
Athena
Pulling the petals
From daisies
“Zeus loves me
He loves me not…”
And Itzamná
The Mayan
Missing some teeth
Who adored science—
They were
Also pleasant

Uncle History and Artaud

Happy the man
Who hugs misfortune
(Uncle thinks
He should write a poem—
“The Merry Masochist”)
But he’s not ready
Poetry offers only
Illusory control
And synthesized pain
Ain’t true pain
“Artuad,” he thinks
“Was on to something”—
Never tire yourself
More than necessary,
Even if you
Have to found a culture
On the fatigue of your bones
No one truly rests
Not really
Artaud again:
In our present state
Of degeneration
It is through the skin
That metaphysics
Must be made
To re-enter our minds.
Trouble is
Uncle History
Has no skin
And he knows it

Sometimes Aunt History is blind…

Sometimes Aunt History is blind
And moves through the museum
Of atrocities like Helen Keller
In her childhood garden
She touches things
That can’t be explained
Like the world’s first
Lead lined hat
Or the Vatican’s
Catherine Wheel
Strappado poles
Falanga sticks
Imagine
Feeling objects
Without a teacher
With no words
So you yourself
Become an exhibit
You’d ask
“Who is watching me?”
You’d ask the air
To let you see
You’d pray
For the persistence
Of hope
Without expectations
Like a prisoner
Touching a wall

Uncle History and Disfigurements

Uncle History knows everything
About disfigurement
And he knows how insects
Crawl in and out
Of wounds
He really knows—
He can speak “blowfly”
Which at first
Seems like a hard language
But blood dialects
Are all the same
It’s the open sore
And larvae world
Without parades
“Parasites, parades”
He recites the motto
Of war wounds
Industrial accidents
Probably better
In the original Latin
“Parasiti, pompae”
Harder to translate
Than it looks
Pomp and suffering

The Old Radio Nostalgia Lonelies

I’ve lost many friends in this life, some from illness, others from painful misunderstandings. Of the latter I was often responsible. I was hot headed In my youth. Sometimes I wish I could repair past damage but not enough to chase people down. I certainly don’t want to find out that those with whom I fought never developed emotional intelligence. But then I have to ask “how much E.Q. do I have?” This is a bit like asking “how seasick are you when you’re seasick?” I feel better than that man puking over the rail but then again I’m not feeling entirely well.

Certainly I’m lonely. As a disabled child I was always lonely. When I was in my teens I tried to kill myself. I was lonesome in college.

Once in awhile you have to interview yourself. A preliminary question: when did you first realize you were a stray raindrop?

Note: the answer should include what you sensed on the day of your primal loneliness…like Eliot’s objective correlative…I recall as other children mocked me for my blindness there was a blue jay crying out the names of his flock…

Rain journeys road calls bird walks small blind child turns knob on radio…