School of the Blind. Daniel Simpson.
Poets Wear Prada, 2014. 31 pages, ISBN: 978-0692284575

Homer and Milton were blind poets but one doesn’t think of them as blind poets, only as poets. And that is what Daniel Simpson is: simply a good poet. He also happens to be blind. School for the Blind is his first collection, and, yes, it centers on his life growing up blind. The reality is that we are all blind in some way and that is what surfaces in these poems, not simply physical blindness but a failure to see, to notice the reality of others, even to notice what we reveal about ourselves.

. . . in conversation,
I try to act undivided
while, in fact, I’m on alert
for any glitch in composure,
any revelation of an actor playing a part.

It’s often a matter of tone of voice.
Most people don’t realize it goes even further —
that I’m listening to them breathe,
that I hear body language.
(“Vigilance and Dissembling”)

This is the larger blindness, in ourselves, that, toward others, is the one that leads to indifference, fear and sometimes cruelty which many of the other poems explore.

Opening and closing with poems related to his twin brother, also blind, the poems in between for the most part chart the course of life growing up in a school for the blind. There, he has his first French kiss, witnesses power struggles among faculty members and learns, eventually of the larger reality of people’s lives beyond what we assume of them. In what is one of the more poignant poems of the collection, “The Luxury of Being Children,” the assertion that “certainly, we could be forgiven/for not caring much beyond ourselves” is a kind of outrage in the context of the poem’s closing with one of the faculty members freezing to death, alone, in a cheap apartment for lack of money. What is innocent in a child is callous in the adult who is surely the one reading the book. And that is the point. . . of the poem and much of the collection.

In the poem “About Chester Kowalski I Don’t Know Much,” the admission to himself of what he didn’t know about his schoolmate becomes real to the speaker only after Chester drowns. These incidents shock the speaker and the reader into taking note of his blindness to the reality of those around him. Self-absorption is the primary blindness of the young and is forgiven as innocence. But we must surely learn from that as we grow. A collection like this, which distills that insight into fine poetry, is a helpful schooling for all of us. And, what is more, it is done, in these poems, with a wonderfully skillful hand.

The poems in School for the Blind are sensual and reflective, providing the telling detail to draw us in to their emotional reality. They are musical without being overstated, poignant without being lachrymose. Simpson is a very good poet, one whose work I look forward to reading more of. Until that next collection, savor this small one that carries a clear and moving voice.

Datura suaveolens

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For a poet who confesses to having more subscriptions to science magazines than literary ones, it’s not surprising to find something like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle couched in the closing of a poem such as “Your Way,”

you get just one thing or the other—
where the water came from, or the water.

What is surprising and gratifying is that James Richardson’s poetry is not merely clever. It is also tender. Not necessarily in the way that Bishop’s “The Shampoo” is tender. It is not so much intimacy but a glimpse into the grander scale of things that puts our smallness into perspective, that kind of perspective science usually gives through its comprehension of vast spaces and terribly long intervals of time. It’s a perspective that permits a compassion for the fragility of our place in the scheme of things. From it, we see into the isolation of our humanity, the pathos of our condition as if seeing from the perspective of God, whom Richardson evokes in this insightful capacity. For instance, in his long tribute poem to Lucretius, in section 10, about how what we perceive are not things themselves but our brain’s recreation of them, “the ripple/inward, of chemical potentials,” the last stanza declares:

It’s as if I were watching behind video goggles
a movie of exactly the path I’m taking,
hearing on tape exactly what I hear,
though to God, looking down in trans-sensual knowledge,
it’s darkness and silence we walk in,
the brightness and noise only in our heads,
which are the few lit windows in a darkened office tower.
(“How Things Are: A Suite for Lucretians”)

This kind of beautiful long-distance view of our humanity is at the core of Richardson’s poetry, in one form or another. Another example of its explicit use, and perhaps my favorite, is “Evening Prayer.” A poem that addresses God directly and, indirectly, our abuse of him to gratify our own ends. It is in this kind of distance that Richardson’s poetry, better able perhaps than poets attempting to be overtly religious, evokes God and gives him voice to plead with us to be humane:

To be a lake, on which the overhanging pine,
the late-arriving stars, and all the news of men,
weigh as they will, are peacefully received,
to hear within the silence not quite silence
your prayer to us, Live kindly, live.

In other poems, in subtler ways, it surfaces as the vast stretches of time that outdistance human life and in which our lives are embedded. In fact, the title of his New and Selected Poems & Aphorisms: Interglacial, is precisely that kind of vast interval. The brief title poem goes,

Anyone’s story,
dear, ours:
almost didn’t happen.
One
incredible day
between two colds.
The “O and. . . “
someone out the door
leaned back in to say. . . .

So life and beauty emerge from gaps, and patience is the essence of insight and even writing.

. . . here is another thing I cannot say slowly enough.”
(“Blue Heron, Winter Thunder”)

Or

it is a weed slipping fine blue rays
through walk and porch, where flags
or the hours do not quite meet.
(“Tastes of Time”)

The compassion and tenderness come in realizing that some of the things that touch our lives and make it meaningful exist in intervals that we will never live to see. That there are kinds of renewals in nature that we cannot witness come round. In a wonderful poem called “Nine Oaks,” he recounts how a storm brought down magnificent trees near his home and he’s “half-mad at my tears-on-cue.” The tenderness in these poems, the compassion, comes out in the last stanza of this poem,

Or maybe these trees, though not our property,
were something I had counted on to stay.
When I was younger, I wanted to hear sages
say everything grows again, to everything its season.
But less of life seems replaceable, now
when the less that’s left seems somehow more my own.
Some things I will see again. Things that take time—
great trees, a nations, peace, or a friend’s,
or on the white sill just that patient light—
may come back to this life, but not to mine.

This kind of insight reminds me of Loren Eiseley, the kind of thing he would say in something like The Immense Journey. I’m sure Richardson, a lover of science, has read Eiseley, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was influenced by him. He is, like him, certainly adept at articulating the vast inhuman contexts in which our humanity struggles to survive. It is a difficult project in the language of poetry, which prefers the local and particular to the infinite and abstract. But Richardson manages to find those details, those locally visible moments that telescope our existence and bring out its fragility.