Setting the scene … It’s spring of 2020. The world has been shut down for a period of weeks or months (you stopped keeping track at some point). You are living with a disability—perhaps you’re blind or you have a highly complex autoimmune condition that makes it especially precarious to make your way through daily life during a global pandemic. You are feeling isolated, alienated, disconnected and at times downright terrified. What do you do?
For Stephen Kuusisto, poet, memoirist, University Professor and director of interdisciplinary programs and outreach with the Burton Blatt Institute, and Ralph James Savarese, poet, nonfiction writer, activist and professor of English at Grinnell College, in Grinnell, Iowa, this was their reality. Kuusisto is blind and has had pneumonia several times in his life, making him particularly susceptible to respiratory illnesses. Savarese is on high-powered immunosuppressants that make getting a COVID infection a potentially life-threatening event.
Their answer to “what do you do?” Poetry.
Together, Kuusisto and Savarese penned “Someone Falls Overboard,” a book of poems written over the course of two nine-day periods early in the COVID-19 pandemic. The book is a dialogue between the two acclaimed poets, following a model set forth by Marvin Bell and William Stafford with their 1983 collection titled “Segues.”
The duo wrote and exchanged poems at a rapid pace—16 lines apiece, three, sometimes four poems per day, riffing on one another’s themes and word choices—until 128 poems emerged. The collection is by turn tender, nostalgic, starkly funny, brutally honest, whimsical and misanthropic—a literary balm to soothe the soul during these uncertain and isolated times.
The quickness of the writing was deliberate; the project began when Kuusisto off-handedly suggested, “let’s write poems back and forth frantically to one another” as a way to pass the time and stay connected to one another. Savarese—who says he can typically barely write three sentences in 18 days, let alone 64 different poems—was a bit intimidated by the proposition. Kuusisto, who admits he is a fast writer by nature, likened the process to “playing speed chess with poetry,” which he considers to be great fun.
The frenetic pace of the writing helped circumvent any potential writer’s block, while also preventing either of them from taking the project too seriously—despite the seriousness all around them.
As “Someone Falls Overboard” was coming to life, 28 people died in the assisted living facility where Savarese’s mother lives. “During that first spring, the phone line was open between us, we talked constantly. Sometimes I could hear over the phone the screams, the sobbing,” he recalls. “There was something absolutely absurdist about the whole situation. Grim, terrifying. Part of this book is also comedic—there was this feeling like if we could just tell jokes fast enough, we might stay three steps ahead of what’s after us.”
Both men are long established in the history and traditions of both American poetry and global poetry, which is evident in the book’s many allusions to famous poets, ancient and modern philosophers, and thinkers of all kinds. “While these poems were written quickly, they are still quite layered in the back and forth,” Kuusisto says.
Savarese adds, sheepishly, “Then it’s like the Marx brothers got a hold of classic literature and shredded it, throwing lines around haphazardly … these go from high learning to anarchy very quickly. That’s part of the method of them, they became loonier and I think more fun as we proceeded.”
“Loonier and more fun” is part of the collection’s charm. As we’ve been collectively beaten down, discouraged, encouraged and discouraged all over again by the pandemic, the authors remind us that engagement with the arts can be a bright spot, if we so allow it.
“It was Bertolt Brecht who said that in the dark times, there will be singing,” says Kuusisto. “I think it’s important to remember that our creative capacities have always been the place we go to in the darkest times.”
As exemplified in “Someone Falls Overboard,” Kuusisto says that dysfunction will often take a backseat to the imagination. “The imagination can give us a bridge over troubled waters, as Simon and Garfunkel would say, and we found it in this book. I’m very proud of it.”
“Someone Falls Overboard” is available through Nine Mile Magazine and Books.
Commentary by Diane Weiner and Additional Resources
Someone Falls Overboard is such a fabulous, tragicomic, hopeful, and compelling collection of “speed chess” poems by two critically acclaimed Disabled poets who happen to be “besties.” I’m so happy to learn of this SU News feature highlighting the timely poetry collection published by Nine Mile Books in nearby LaFayette, NY.
I thought you all might enjoy some additional resources that complement the SU News feature celebrating and honoring Steve and Ralph, and this amazing book.
Steve and Ralph worked with Wordgathering Poetry Editor, Emily K. Michael and me to publish some of these poems before the book was released. Those of you who access content auditorily are in for a real treat, as Steve and Ralph read and audio recorded several selections, including the introduction, for Wordgathering. You can find the text and accompanying audio content here:
https://wordgathering.com/vol14/issue4/poetry/savarese-and-kuusisto/
Also, “check out” this early March 2021 video of a “round robin reading” with Steve, Ralph, and their colleague and dear friend, fellow critically acclaimed (and also Disabled) writer, Susanne Paola Antonetta, produced by the Office of Interdisciplinary Programs and Outreach in collaboration with SU College of Law ITS, with very special thanks to Rachael Zubal-Ruggieri and Kyle Jaymes Davis. Please note that the captions are unedited.
https://video.syr.edu/media/t/1_g1wzvtj9
During this public Zoom event, with friendship, energy, and literary magic at the center, Steve and Ralph indeed “speed chess” read from Someone Falls Overboard, and Susanne read from her book, The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here (published by Mad Creek Books, an imprint of The Ohio State University Press, 2021).
If you would like to learn more about Steve and Ralph’s amazing collaborator and friend, Susanne, I interviewed her for Wordgathering
(https://wordgathering.com/vol15/issue3/interviews/antonetta/)
and also reviewed
The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here (https://wordgathering.com/vol15/issue3/reviews/antonetta/). Please take note of the journal’s content warnings regarding Susanne’s work.
Praise for Someone Falls Overboard
Who hasn’t wanted to live that writer’s dream, eavesdropping on two great poets? For nine days, Steven Kuusisto and Ralph Savarese exchanged poems, multiple poems daily, and responded to each one: riffing, sampling, griping, cracking wise. The result is Someone Falls Overboard: Talking through Poems, a project suggested by the poetic dialogue between William Stafford and Marvin Bell, but unmistakably Kuusisto and Savarese. Water runs through this book: a paradise, a poem-drinker, a physical place where the poets boat together, “Two disabled men—this isn’t a joke,” on Lake Winnipesaukee. Ultimately water becomes the current that pulls between two powerful and poetic intelligences. The project is as kinetic and un-precious as it sounds. “I’ve banished irony,” writes Savarese, and Kuusisto responds, “Finnish underworld, a lake/where a swan glides.” Someone Falls Overboard is crackling smart, hilarious without losing its urgency, centered firm in this historical moment yet an instant classic in the long tradition of poetry in conversation. Reading is listening, ear pressed against an irresistible door.
—Susanne Paola Antonetta, author of The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here
Someone Falls Overboard is an effortless read and extremely funny! The poetic back-and-forth is brimming with wit, camaraderie and genuine emotion. It is an absolute treat, for us readers, to be in the audience as two good friends have a heartfelt conversation about themselves and everything in between. Savarese and Kuusisto have unlocked the secret to surviving a pandemic in style.
—Siddharth Dhananjay, star of the film Patti CAKE$