24PearlStreet Workshops and Events
LIVE via ZOOM: 2pm-4pm (Eastern)
Join blind poet and memoirist Stephen Kuusisto as he talks about what it means to be a “literary listener.” Kuusisto writes: “Starting in the 1920’s creative writers turned to the image as the means for conveying immediacy in literature. The idea was to be as clear as news photos. These talks will instead focus on sound as a tool of the imagination. Igor Stravinsky said: ‘Hearing has no merit. A duck hears also.’ Our goal is to explore the art of active listening.”
We’ll explore opera arias, steamboat whistles, the chance music of what happens around us, conversations overheard, the sound of a baseball cracking off a bat, water coursing, Chet Baker’s trumpet, Beethoven’s old piano—in short talk about stretching our ears. The aim is to promote great listening, literary invention, and yes, fun.
Who Are the Great Literary Listeners? Kuusisto will talk about literary listening: why is it different from just hearing things? From John Keats to Tillie Olson, from Hemingway to Toni Morrison the best writers have had a true felicity for deep listening and have conveyed it in their work. One outcome is that you’ll appreciate the auditory imagination when reading.
We will discover the “Practice of Active Listening.” This is a generative workshop. Students will be given unusual prompts to inspire their listening imaginations (many drawn from his own life of blind travel) and to sharpen the skills of anyone who wants to listen with attention.
Biography
Stephen Kuusisto
is an American poet, essayist, fiction writer, memoirist, and disability rights scholar with a broad interest in the history of medicine and illness. He attended the University of Iowa’s “Writer’s Workshop" studying with poets Marvin Bell and Donald Justice. In 2021 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. As a Fulbright scholar in Helsinki he researched Finnish poetry after World War II—a new period of international engagement in Scandinavian writing, much like the burgeoning interest in translation in American poetry during the sixties and seventies. Since he was born legally blind his reading (both in Finnish and English) was slow, careful, occasionally difficult. In those years he remarks that he “grew to appreciate necessity in poetry and prose—bad eyes meant a text should be worth reading. In turn I tried to understand what makes first rate poetry and prose succeed.”
His first two books appeared almost simultaneously: a memoir from Dial Press entitled Planet of the Blind (a New York Times “notable book”) and a collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press, Only Bread, Only Light. He has since published three books of nonfiction and three more volumes of poems: Letters to Borges; Old Horse, What is To Be Done?; and Someone Falls Overboard. His latest memoir, Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet's Journey is available from Simon & Schuster. His forthcoming collection of poems, Close Escapes will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2025. He has held senior faculty positions at The Ohio State University, The University of Iowa, and Syracuse University where he currently directs the Burton Blatt Institute’s Program in Inter-Disciplinary Research. He travels and lectures widely on disability rights and literature and has served as a US State Department “cultural ambassador” in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan.
