What’s ASL poetry like–and how can any poetry exists in the absence of sound? a reader of this forum might ask.
Karen Christie, who studied ASL poetry for many years, responds:
“While people from Hearing culture would want to look for the lack of sound or sound images in the works of Deaf poets, I think they would be surprised to find how much rhythm is there. In ASL poems, we have rhythms of repeated signed handshapes, rhythms in our use of space, and powerful rhythms in the movements of signs.”
Then, there are poets, who are Deaf but write in English, living on a border between two languages. Then, there are DeafBlind poets, who might be familiar with ASL, but they create poetry in their own language, living in the trilingual space and creating something altogether new.
Then, of course, there are 466 million of hard-of-hearing (one of every ten humans on this planet) who drift in and out of what others call silence. This is a state I myself know from personal experience: the existence on the border between hearing and non-hearing. A world in which silence is both a metaphor and fact of life.
There is no end to the subtleties of this world. And, that is its beauty.
How to fit all of this into the mainstream world of the hearing? a reader might wonder.
“I am sorry, but so many of us are just not interested in fitting in. Indeed, we cannot. Instead, we are interested in collaboration,” responds John Lee Clark. “We are interested in changing the world.” More here.