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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 

The blood of never mind…

By now you and I have read everything there is about Donald Trump. On the one hand reading about him is a guilty pleasure. But the other hand is a pirate’s hook. No matter how much you understand the nature of his Christo-fascism, his fealty to Peter Thiel, his deep animus toward what, for lack of a better phrase we’ll call the adult world, his seizing of American political corruption for his own ends, finally one has to admit that he’s just a detestable fool and while we’re paying attention to him we’re not seeing the man behind the curtain as in the Wizard of Oz. That man is a thousand men, each possessing untold wealth, and owning beside yachts and private airplanes, all three branches of the United States government. “Why won’t Congress do its job?” Because its owned by the oligarchs who owe everything to John Robert’s and the Supreme Court. Can anyone say “Citizens United?”

Here in upstate New York where I live I notice each morning how few song birds there are. It’s a shiver, a Rachel Carson shiver. The oligarchs are burning down the planet and Dumpty Trumpty is rage posting about whatever hot red herring hits him over the head at 2 AM. Meanwhile, the butter sculpture Prez goes on and on fucking everything up—scientific research, disease protection, environmental protections, international relations, the list is too long for my challenged typing skills. I don’t know about you but I get up in the morning and the immense moldy circus tent of contemporary politics falls on me. This is before I’ve checked the news.

I’ve spent my life fighting against congenital blindness and depression. In some regards this gives me a scoured advantage—one can think of me as pre-stressed furniture. There are tens of millions of us and perhaps, just maybe we can vote the bums out. But the oligarchs have a serious plan to stop this. ICE agents at polling stations, draconian voter registration requirements, jerrymandered districts. Dear John Robert’s: I don’t want to hear you whining about how the public says your Supreme Court is political. We all know who’s stuffing your coffers.

What precisely do the oligarchs think they’ll do when the country has been destroyed at last? I suspect they think their minds will be uploaded to eomputers which will run on the blood of the…oh never mind…never mind…

And the years come close around me…

And the years come close around me
Like a crowd—spruce limbs
Wave beyond my window
I’m not myself—
I say “let it go”
Child, young man
All his mistakes
Crying alone
Tree wind helps
A cup of mushroom tea
A song my mother loved
Steep rain
Three gold apples
Hanging
From a dying tree
My friends
Who are disabled
Are struggling—
One can’t find an accessible home
Another can’t get a steady job
Though he has a doctorate
Still another can’t keep his car running
So he can teach part time.
The day is substantially dark
Who am I?
Who are we?

Uncle History Smells Something in the Weeds

“I smell something in the weeds”
Sez Uncle History
“It ain’t death
But death adjacent”
Stink
Of rotting books
Or an old man’s
Hairpiece
He thinks
And patting
His pocket
He finds
He’s lost his ticket
To the underworld
He’s carried it for
A thousand years
He’s even
Touched it to his lips—
(Revenant smooch
Charon’s gift)
“Oh well” he thinks
“Whoever finds it
Will discover
The first day of death
Is the hardest”

Uncle History in the Nursery

Ah those early days beside the fire

Uncle History being read to

By his father (who wears 

A toga-like affair

And scratches himself

Since with clothing

Came bed bugs)

“Gilgamesh” 

“Enkidu and the netherworld”

Lost objects

Tears in the afterlife

Trials in this one

Heroism unrewarded

All adventures

Meaningless 

“Isn’t it lovely,”

Says his father

(Who looks like Karl Marx

In a serape)

“To think 

How you’ll

Keep track 

Of this tale

As it unfolds

Forever?”

Uncle barely remembers

As he was playing

With his Sumerian legos—

Puzzle pieces

That cast no shadows 

“Come on along,” Uncle History says…

“Come on along,” Uncle History says
Channeling Robert Frost—
You come too…
But then he forgets his way
(Looking backwards
Will do this to you)
Crustacean travel
You might call it
And its easy to fall down
As the ancestors
Left stumbling blocks
And its easy
To forget
Where you started
Lost among the mud colored houses
At dusk
“Where did I begin?”
“Whose path is this?”
“Yes I’m talking to myself”
The self-behind me
This last minute affair
Of nostalgia
And fear
On the barren tracts
Where a forest once stood
Just outside the city

Aunt History Like any mystic…

Like any mystic
Aunt History
Can be anywhere
The Levant
Mesopotamia
Peru, Pittsburgh
She knows
All the dances
The local lingos…
Of what’s unknown
Like Newton
She sees
How the brief life
Waves as darkness comes
And tiny transparent
Flying specks of faith
Fall into our hair
Its the same
Town to town
Epoch to epoch
Mazda to Mary
Worldwide
All the sad night long

“It’s a hard road”

“It’s a hard road”
says Uncle History
But hardest
For the road builders
As there’s no name for them
You can look it up—
No name
Just euphemisms
“Pavement pros”
“Asphalt guys”
Even the Roman’s
Had no term for them
Though “slave” works
What does it say
That such
An important job
Has no word
Uncle
Thinks he knows
But he reckons
You can only
Get to it
Through silence
And walking in circles

Aunt History Carves a Crutch

Aunt History Carves a Crutch

When you’re disabled “those” others
Think they can see right through you
Your watery eyes, thin bones…
They don’t think this
Of mushrooms
Or coconuts
Or kitschy carved
Pinocchios
And of course
To a large extent
They’re not thinking at all
They’re just seeing
The aleatoric dumbbell clots
Of fussy prejudice
And you, you trembling one,
You got in their way
As they were seeing themselves
But don’t call “them”
Narcissists
For like nothing else in nature
They’re afraid of death
And again, you
You simply got in their way…
Thoughts while home alone
Knife on wood…

Aunt History on the Shoulder of a Highway

You can go anywhere you like
But you can’t outrun your head
Aunt History walks through a grim place
Some New Jersey marsh reclamation
Where even dinosaur bones
Can’t be found—
Just mob land corpses
And the teeth
Of railroad workers
She loves to walk
American highways
Though they have
Narrow shoulders
Death is not unlikely
But the truck
That hits her
Will roll straight through
And she’ll keep going
Like Mozart’s Papageno
Oddly cheerful
But also broken hearted
Her job is to pick things up
Carry them in her robe
Lost keys
Crumpled pages
A wind blown lock of hair
The hair of a child
A discarded flute
A single dancing shoe