Poetry, Signed: Themes of

While the poetics of signed languages is still very much in the formative stages, many of the early studies concerned the poetry of American Sign Language (ASL). These studies focused on signed poetry performance and on describing poetic form and linguistic features. The themes of signed poetry, however, provide us with a glimpse of the poets’ worldview, as their work addresse both universal human experiences and experiences unique to the lives of Deaf people. As with poetic works created in the oral and written forms of languages, the poems in signed languages studied to date have explored a variety of themes. Signed poets who create works not obviously about being Deaf or the Deaf experience—such as poems about death, love, or nature—still do so using a visual signed language, and many of these works represent a visual way of being in the world. Clayton Valli’s groundbreaking doctoral dissertation, which focused on the poetics of ASL, described primarily the rhyme and meter of ASL poetry. He noted that themes such as the oppression of sign language occur in these poems and that creating and performing these poems using the oppressed language becomes an act of empowerment.

British poet Dorothy Miles experimented with poetic forms while she was living in the United States and involved with the National Theatre of the Deaf. Her collection of poetry, Gestures, was published in 1976 and included an accompanying film. The poems, which blended written English and American signs, concerned the Deaf experience as well as themes related to nature and womanhood. One poem, “The Hang-glider,” was categorized as a poem of experience without any specific reference to the Deaf world. Even so, the poem describes an act of liberation, and the use of hands to connote flying is powerful Deaf-related symbol.

Original poetry created in ASL by Clayton Valli, Ella Mae Lentz, Patrick Graybill, and Debbie Rennie was disseminated to audiences via videotape in the early 1990s. In studying the themes of these poets and more than 50 video-published ASL poems, it was found that a significant number related to the Deaf experience. Borrowing from an analysis of De’VIA art, these Deaf-themed poems were further described as works that communicated political resistance to the majority culture and as works that communicated an affirmation or celebration of Deaf culture. Additionally, ASL poems that described a Deafhood journey—from ignorance to awareness—or those that described a transitioning experience—from resistance to affirmation—were classified in a third category, poems of liberation. Table 1 describes further subcategories of these themes found in ASL poetic works.

To illustrate, the ASL liberation poem “Children’s Garden,” from Ella Mae Lentz’s The Treasure collection, describes resistance to mainstreaming and affirmation of the value of Deaf cultural survival. In the poem, colorful flowers have been cut off at the roots and transplanted individually into less-fertile grounds, where they wither and die. Only when the flowers are carefully replanted together and carefully tended do they begin to bloom again. Thus, the poem clearly contains both educational and social subthemes, which communicate a desire to resist pressures to assimilate via mainstreaming as well as an affirmation of the Deaf cultural values taught in Deaf schools and Deaf cultural survival.

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