This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

John Lee Clark is a poet, and his debut collection was nominated for a national book award this year.

The book is called How to Communicate,

and that's a central theme for Clark. He writes in English, but he speaks in protactile,

an emerging language based on touch that's increasingly used by deaf-blind people. Clark was

born deaf and lost his sight when he was young to a condition called Usher Syndrome.

He was profiled in the New Yorker by the writer Andrew Leland

just before Clark's book How to Communicate came out.

Here's Andrew Leland.

I first encountered John Lee Clark on an email list serve.

Poetry magazine was about to publish an essay he'd written,

and I wrote to him asking for a copy. It was a casual request which began what was, for me,

a life-changing correspondence. I have a related disease to Clark's. It's called RP, and it's

causing me to slowly lose my sight.

In Clark's writing and in our correspondence, I was struck again and again by the way he described his experience as a deaf-blind person. Despite the rest of the world's tendency to imagine

deaf-blind life in tragic terms, as a land of silence and darkness, Clark's writing is

full of humor and life.

A running theme in his work is the importance of touch, a sense that cited and hearing people tend to diminish or ignore.

Let me give you an example.

A poem of his called Clammer.

It's being read here by Halene or Hal Anderson, a woman who frequently

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