Planet of the Blind by Stephen Kuusisto

Author:Stephen Kuusisto [Kuusisto, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-83005-0
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-08-07T04:00:00+00:00

A week later during a terrible heat wave, classes begin. The Writers’ Workshop is in a modern building on the shore of the Iowa River. It’s humid down here, steam rises from the water, and you can almost hear the willow trees breathing. Poets and fiction writers have gathered here for decades; the teachers reminisce, and the graduate students take long walks, fill their notebooks, discover imported black tea.

The classes are wildly various; some are like group therapy, while others become gatherings of cooperative scientists. In every session the poet apprentice reads aloud from his or her work while nine others read from copies. A noted poet-elder presides over the discussions that follow.

During the two years I spent there, the faculty used a mimeograph machine to reproduce student work. Every Wednesday stapled packets of purple typing were distributed for our editorial scrutiny. The object was to mark those pages thoroughly. In classes we would refer to those notes as we spoke.

The pages were impossible for me to read, and asking classmates to read them aloud and inscribe my critical responses proved awkward. Young poets bristle, spit, feel lofty defeats, sparkle like mica. Each poem hangs over them like a dirigible that must be shot at, run from, dispelled by incantation, or saluted.

Poetry writing is a monastic activity. And monks will tell you that devotion to God is both anger and love. That’s why so many take vows of silence. But at Iowa we took vows that we would speak.

One week into the semester, I’m visited by Terence, a poet-classmate who has offered to read “the worksheets” to me. He’s thin, sallow, his hands are always branching in the abstract air as he recites lines from the French poets: Mallarmé, Nerval. He’s a smart young poet, though he doesn’t like his classmates. This I find out as he reads. I remember it sounding something like this:

“Okay. Here’s a poem by Miriam. Cough.” (He says the word cough.) “Oh, it’s another sea-goddess effusion. She has a trunk’s worth of these!”

“Please, just read it, I need to formulate my own responses, okay?”

“All right, here we go. (Cough.) No title. ‘The brave one sleeps for a time / Of course the past is with her, / Beauty dissolved into thingness, narrow streets / Where she goes disguised.’ ”

He pauses.

“Oh, please! The fucking sea is dying of love! I can’t stand it!”

He lights a cigarette.

“Hey, do you have any Coca-Cola? I can’t read this without Coca-Cola.”

“Sorry, I don’t have any Coke. Want some orange juice?”

“No. Orange juice is revolting.”

“Instant coffee?”

“Never mind.”

I hear him flicking ashes into something.

“Hey, you want an ashtray?”

“No, thanks.”

Where is he putting his ashes?

“Keep reading, okay?”

“Right. ‘Even Odysseus / In cold solitude / Can’t see her now.’ ”

He stops again.

“It’s just Antony and Cleopatra redux!”

“Terence, everything is Antony and Cleopatra redux. Let’s keep going.”

“Let’s skip her. Here’s one by Roger. I call him Harpo because he’s a musical surrealist.”

He starts in on Roger’s poem.

“This is titled ‘Night Dogs.’ ‘Here they are, their sponge brains full of blood / Sniffing behind the peasant auberge.

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