At Jacket 2, Jerome Rothenberg Relates ASL to Poetry

Poems in the air? For his latest post at Jacket 2, Jerome Rothenberg discusses American Sign Language and its relationship to poetry. Can American Sign Language be a medium for poetry? You bet! Rothenberg digs into the history of ASL and poetry. From Jacket 2:

[The great breakthrough resulting from a new signing poetry in Deaf Culture has been to call into question a poetics in which orality & sounding are assumed to be the foundational bases of all poetic expression. That revelation goes back three decades & more, recently & notably presented in Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign Language Literature, ed. by Dirksen L. Bauman, Jennifer L. Nelson, & Heidi M. Rose (University of California Press, 2006). Still closer to the present is an ASL-oriented web site, Deaf Jam, dedicated to a documentary film of that name, from which the first of the comments, below, is taken. The other two notes presented here represent my own early attempts to bring the poetry of sign into the ethnopoetics that I was promoting in the 1970s & 1980s. They also coincide in a startling way with the exploration of an outsider poetry that has been one of the themes of Poems & Poetics – a poetry distanced enough from the mainstream as to effect substantially our ideas about the nature of poetry itself. (J.R.)]

THE SILENT LANGUAGE
“Pain” for Joe Castronovo

two fingers,
pointing,
nearly touch

matching the pulse inside
the skull
a figure “8” explodes

over the temples,
gentle movements of the mind
of words in air

in silence:
do I learn to speak you?
can you hear

the way the lines weave,
barely
moving from the touch

to vanish
as sounds do
writing frees itself

from object-
hood
at last

(1) ASL POETRY is a performance art form utilizing body language, rhythm and movement to create a three dimensional pictorial equivalent to oral poetry. The similarity of hand-shapes can act as alliteration, and using the same hand-shape repetitively works as rhyme. Visual Vernacular (a term and technique originated by Bernard Bragg) involves cinematic concepts. The technique involves references to close-ups, wide shots, images dissolving into other images as well as "cutting" back and forth between characters to show different points of view on a scene.

HISTORY: From 1880 to 1960, American Sign Language Was Suppressed In The Schools And Went Underground, Until Statistics Showed That The Suppression Of Sign Language Was Detrimental To Learning For The Deaf.

Signed poetry grew out of a tradition of playing with the language in Deaf clubs throughout the country, where deaf individuals and their families and friends would congregate for entertainment and to socialize. [...]

Explore more at Jacket 2.