Again I’m alone, a boy in my grandfather’s attic with a Victrola record player and Enrico Caruso records. I’d sit beside the contraption with bandages on my eyes and listen to a man who’d been dead for forty years, who’d come to America from Naples, the capitol of ghosts. Of course I didn’t know this. I knew a thrill instead—the start of poetry, a door swinging open on my inner life.
Soon I had a game going. I’d put on a record and while it played I’d finger the objects around me. The average aria lasted three minutes. I’d play “three-minute grope” while the tenor sang of heartbreak. I pushed my fingers into the fur of a raccoon coat. Touched an old spring-loaded mouse trap, the mouse corpse long gone. I fingered an infant’s dress, inexplicably hanging from a nail. How many things could I touch in three minutes?
Where writing and the arts are concerned I still play “three-minute grope”—a provincial way of honoring Jack Kerouac’s “first thought, best thought” philosophy. I like speed. Love Jackson Pollock. Adore bebop. And of course Caruso, who made those early recordings and had to sing them perfectly in one go because he was singing into a paper horn and there were no do-overs.
I still play old records and take stock of what’s around me.
—Stephen Kuusisto, author of Close Escapes (Copper Canyon Press, 2025)
Photo credit: Connie Kuusisto