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.

Earlier this year, we published a story about protactal, an emerging language based on touch that's increasingly used by deaf-blind people.

It was written by Andrew Leland, and one of Andrew's subjects was a man named John Lee Clark.

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

He became a poet and a scholar of literature, and a new collection of Clark's

work is out this week. It's called How to Communicate. Andrew Leland was eager to speak with him

again. 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 works with John

as an interpreter.

Clammer.

All things living and dead cry out to me when I touch them.

The dog, gasping for air, is drowning in ecstasy.

It's neck shouting, dig in, dig in, slam me, slam me, demands one door while another asks to remain open. My wife again asks me, how did I know, just where and how to caress her?

...