Stephen Kuusisto – författare

The Poet's Notebook brings together excerpts from the working notebooks of twenty-six American poets. Unsystematic, spontaneous, irreverent, intense, witty, unexpected, these notebooks shimmer with reflections, speculations, confessions, quotations, impressions, and ruminations. They create a portrait of the artist as a purposeful gatherer and sifter of every kind of experience.Included are the notebooks from such distinguished and eclectic voices as Rita Dove, Stephen Dunn, Carolyn Forché, Donald Hall, Garrett Hongo, Joy Harjo, Donald Justice, Yusef Komunyakaa, James Merrill, Mary Oliver, Charles Simic, and William Stafford.

Blind people are not casual listeners. Blind since birth, Stephen Kuusisto recounts with a poet's sense of detail the surprise that comes when we are actively listening to our surroundings. There is an art to eavesdropping. Like Annie Dillard's An American Childhood or Dorothy Allison's One or Two Things I Know for Sure, Kuusisto's memoir highlights periods of childhood when a writer first becomes aware of his curiosity and imagination. As a boy he listened to Caruso records in his grandmother's attic and spent hours in the New Hampshire woods learning the calls of birds. As a grown man the writer visits cities around the world in order to discover the art of sightseeing by ear. Whether the reader is interested in disability, American poetry, music, travel, or the art of eavesdropping, he or she will find much to hear and even "see" in this unique celebration of a hearing life.