"The Education of the Blind Poet" by Cameron Clark

Soundtrack to this episode

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Listen to my talk on Melville here

-Listen to my poetry reading with Dan Brown here

-Outsider poetry

-The Education of Henry Adams

-Metrical hijinks

-The inherent negations of blindness

-"Durer: Insbrook, 1495" by Ern Malley

-"Lycidas" by John Milton

-Forging a new sensibility in identitarian poetry 

Text of poem:

The Education of the Blind Poet; Or, Ars Poetica Ending with a Line from Milton

When I was 9 they taught me how to look

at someone as they spoke though I could see

nothing: it's polite they said & I was, look

I'm staring at the nothing of you, see?

My Nothing reader, pelted in your silence:

silent in History I drilled my lack

of stare into the history-shaped silence

of the confidential blackboard's black.

The teacher, standing slightly to its right

scrawled her timelines onto its cold chalk down.

See, teacher, have I not been studious: "Write 

what's on the board." & I noted nothing down.

My No-Thing reader, ear pressed to the board

of words, how has your face become hers? mute

light stained her hair as she addressed the board,

& I presided over absence, mute.

All blind things learn to cleave to absence:

stiff-uniformed moles shoulder their chalk-blank dome

of earth. O Teacher to you I was absence,

you who'd only bring yourself to speak óf me

asking always Does hé need help? in a voice

hushed & mailed by its pity, pitywords

cringing between your jaws. I knew that voice

as my inheritance: these blind mouths full of words.