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http://phoenix.swarthmore.edu/2006-03-30/living/16054
Donna Jo Napoli, chair of the Swarthmore linguistics department here at Swarthmore, sent out an e-mail last Thursday about a special poetry reading by The Flying Words, a poetry performance group that uses American Sign Language. She wrote that this was “poetry like you wouldn’t believe” and advised students to “do yourself a favor and come, and bring anyone you love.” Sitting alone in the audience the Friday night of the performance, I felt exactly what Donna Jo had described: absolute amazement at the performance, and a great desire to have my loved ones around me, witnessing what I was witnessing.
The Flying Words Project is compromised of Peter Cook, who is deaf, and Kenny Lerner, who is his hearing voice. The two performed last Friday night for a group of Swarthmore students, faculty and many members of the deaf community in Science Center 199. The two performed a set of about eight poems composed primarily by Cook, with some collaboration by Lerner. Cook signed the poems to the audience, working in a bit of pantomime and on one occasion, speech. Lerner, for most of the time, stood or sat to the side of Cook, speaking the poems, providing commentary and adding sound effects (at one point a deaf man sitting in the front row commented that he could hear/feel a sound effect, but could not tell whether it was Cook or Lerner who had uttered it). In several poems, Lerner stood up and moved with Cook. Sometimes he acted as Cook’s mirror image. In the first poem, Lerner stood in back of him and they each flashed their arms to the side, moving them up and down, back and forth. “I’m going to throw poetry around the world!” Lerner declared. He mimed holding poetry in his hand and threw it. It seemed to jump in the air, fall back down and come right up, encircling the world.
Napoli has gone to see The Flying Words “only twice,” and was enthralled each time by the group. “I want to tell with my body what Peter tells with his body. It will change your idea of what’s possible in language.”
“They looked like they were dancing,” said Eric Duchon ’08. “They inspired emotions by gestures and facial expressions instead of piling on words.” A number of the group’s poems dealt with the subject of violence, including the war in Iraq. “The horror and pain in his face as he described an explosion in Iraq with his hands was truly moving in a way written poetry is very hard-pressed to match. But he could be happy and joyous as well, and pass his happiness on to the audience.”
Cook, who learned to sign at the age of 19, has been a poet since childhood. He met Lerner as a young man and they hit it off immediately and began to write and perform poetry together. After some time creatively working together, a grant came their way, which supported their more and more extensive tours performing around the U.S., and eventually overseas. Today they are perhaps the most famous ASL poetry group around. Although we may not be familiar with this genre of performance poetry, it has become fairly wide reaching, and during tours The Flying Words Project has encountered many ASL poets of different nationalities such as Dutch and English.
During the question-and-answer session at the end of the show, members of the audience asked about differences between the world’s sign languages. “It [can be] a cultural thing,” said Peter Cook. “We have an ice skating dentistry poem.” Apparently this poem did not go over when they performed it in Europe. A member of their audience at the time finally told them, “You know why it’s not working — we don’t think about these things. You Americans are obsessed with you teeth.”
The Flying Words’ performance was the third and culminating event in the Cooper Foundation-funded series on ASL, organized by the Linguistics department. For Napoli, ASL is an important part of life, both personally and professionally. We often think of certain language communities, such as Latinos in the United States, as more marginalized. We rarely stop to think about deaf communities, however. According to Napoli, “deaf people are disproportionately impoverished.” Their literacy level is low, she said, and as a society we have not done well for their education. Therefore, she said, it is important for her personally to take social action.
Many members of Napoli’s first-year seminar, Language and Deafness, which deals with social issues relating to the deaf community, were at the performance. Anne-Marie Frassica ’09 thought that “it was an important performance in that it bridged the hearing community with the deaf community.” This was exemplified in the easy dialogue between the deaf Cook and the hearing Lerner. In many cases their roles, for the hearers in the audience, were inextricable from each other. Lerner’s spoken words needed Cook’s sign and pantomime, and for the hearers, vice versa. “The hearing community is often out of touch with the deaf community. It is hard to see what ASL literature is,” Frassica said. But in this case the hearers were able to appreciate the beauty of sign. Liz Brown ’09, another member of the seminar, not only thought it was “amazing,” but also very “moving.”
Many members of the audience that night, myself included, were exposed to a very new art form that was both surprising and emotionally touching. In ASL, as Napoli said, you can convey “information you thought was limited to one kind of communication.” That night, a new way of conveying that information was innovated before our very eyes.
Donna Jo Napoli, chair of the Swarthmore linguistics department here at Swarthmore, sent out an e-mail last Thursday about a special poetry reading by The Flying Words, a poetry performance group that uses American Sign Language. She wrote that this was “poetry like you wouldn’t believe” and advised students to “do yourself a favor and come, and bring anyone you love.” Sitting alone in the audience the Friday night of the performance, I felt exactly what Donna Jo had described: absolute amazement at the performance, and a great desire to have my loved ones around me, witnessing what I was witnessing.
The Flying Words Project is compromised of Peter Cook, who is deaf, and Kenny Lerner, who is his hearing voice. The two performed last Friday night for a group of Swarthmore students, faculty and many members of the deaf community in Science Center 199. The two performed a set of about eight poems composed primarily by Cook, with some collaboration by Lerner. Cook signed the poems to the audience, working in a bit of pantomime and on one occasion, speech. Lerner, for most of the time, stood or sat to the side of Cook, speaking the poems, providing commentary and adding sound effects (at one point a deaf man sitting in the front row commented that he could hear/feel a sound effect, but could not tell whether it was Cook or Lerner who had uttered it). In several poems, Lerner stood up and moved with Cook. Sometimes he acted as Cook’s mirror image. In the first poem, Lerner stood in back of him and they each flashed their arms to the side, moving them up and down, back and forth. “I’m going to throw poetry around the world!” Lerner declared. He mimed holding poetry in his hand and threw it. It seemed to jump in the air, fall back down and come right up, encircling the world.
Napoli has gone to see The Flying Words “only twice,” and was enthralled each time by the group. “I want to tell with my body what Peter tells with his body. It will change your idea of what’s possible in language.”
“They looked like they were dancing,” said Eric Duchon ’08. “They inspired emotions by gestures and facial expressions instead of piling on words.” A number of the group’s poems dealt with the subject of violence, including the war in Iraq. “The horror and pain in his face as he described an explosion in Iraq with his hands was truly moving in a way written poetry is very hard-pressed to match. But he could be happy and joyous as well, and pass his happiness on to the audience.”
Cook, who learned to sign at the age of 19, has been a poet since childhood. He met Lerner as a young man and they hit it off immediately and began to write and perform poetry together. After some time creatively working together, a grant came their way, which supported their more and more extensive tours performing around the U.S., and eventually overseas. Today they are perhaps the most famous ASL poetry group around. Although we may not be familiar with this genre of performance poetry, it has become fairly wide reaching, and during tours The Flying Words Project has encountered many ASL poets of different nationalities such as Dutch and English.
During the question-and-answer session at the end of the show, members of the audience asked about differences between the world’s sign languages. “It [can be] a cultural thing,” said Peter Cook. “We have an ice skating dentistry poem.” Apparently this poem did not go over when they performed it in Europe. A member of their audience at the time finally told them, “You know why it’s not working — we don’t think about these things. You Americans are obsessed with you teeth.”
The Flying Words’ performance was the third and culminating event in the Cooper Foundation-funded series on ASL, organized by the Linguistics department. For Napoli, ASL is an important part of life, both personally and professionally. We often think of certain language communities, such as Latinos in the United States, as more marginalized. We rarely stop to think about deaf communities, however. According to Napoli, “deaf people are disproportionately impoverished.” Their literacy level is low, she said, and as a society we have not done well for their education. Therefore, she said, it is important for her personally to take social action.
Many members of Napoli’s first-year seminar, Language and Deafness, which deals with social issues relating to the deaf community, were at the performance. Anne-Marie Frassica ’09 thought that “it was an important performance in that it bridged the hearing community with the deaf community.” This was exemplified in the easy dialogue between the deaf Cook and the hearing Lerner. In many cases their roles, for the hearers in the audience, were inextricable from each other. Lerner’s spoken words needed Cook’s sign and pantomime, and for the hearers, vice versa. “The hearing community is often out of touch with the deaf community. It is hard to see what ASL literature is,” Frassica said. But in this case the hearers were able to appreciate the beauty of sign. Liz Brown ’09, another member of the seminar, not only thought it was “amazing,” but also very “moving.”
Many members of the audience that night, myself included, were exposed to a very new art form that was both surprising and emotionally touching. In ASL, as Napoli said, you can convey “information you thought was limited to one kind of communication.” That night, a new way of conveying that information was innovated before our very eyes.