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

I sat down with celebrated author Stephen Kuusisto in the 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, the hugely popular Planet of the Blind and the 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 the lyric mode and its usefulness to the project of disability studies. Steve is a wildly energetic man, learned, unbelievably funny—a kind of walking surrealist. Think Johnny Carson meets André Breton meets the entire library at the University of Iowa, where he teaches in the graduate nonfiction program and the eye clinic at the 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 the Nation.

R. S. At one point in Planet of the Blind, while birding with a friend, you pretend to see a goldfinch “hopping up and down”—“jumping,” you write, “like 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 the Blind inverts this outing while shouldering a similar worry. The reader is out birding with you, the blind author, and is thankfully spared an “exercise in description.” Meticulous verisimilitude is thrown to the wind, and analogy (what might be called the practice of blurred distinctions) takes over, paradoxically allowing us to see the 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 the instrument that will turn my blindness into a manner of seeing.” And you come back to this very situation of the blind and the sighted in the title poem of your forthcoming collection, Mornings with Borges. The mother of a friend used to walk with the 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 the wealthy.” Borges is said to “provide solutions to the 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 the 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 García 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 the operating table” or a horse galloping across the face of a tomato—to borrow from Breton; poetry raises this quality of the 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...