 Now? Okay, this is Jim Cohn. It's the 7th of July, 2007. My name is spelled C-O-H-N. Do I get an A? Okay. Hey, today's the day for the big concerts. Which concerts? The Al Gore, you know, concerts around the world. Oh, live world? I don't think there's anybody playing in there that I'd want to see. Anyway, so let's start out by, I need you to start way back. I need you to go talk about Europa, because that's where you met Vince Berkley. Was he one of your teachers there? Did he teach there? Right. Alan Ginsberg founded the Neurope Institute with Anne Waldman. What year was that? The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was founded in 1974 in Boulder, Colorado. Alan was a disciple or a student of Tronpo Rinpoche, and he and Anne Waldman founded the Neurope Institute Kerouac School of Poetics at that time. And I took my first class from Anne Waldman in 1976 as a senior while being a senior as an English major at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I took a class of hers that spring semester called Poetics. Did you already consider yourself a poet at this time, or were you writing poetry or were you just sort of starting to get interested? Kind of not, really, much. And I was at Neurope off and on between 76 and 1980, and I was working for Burlington Northern in 1979 and living in Missoula, Montana. And I had written Alan Ginsberg a letter to apply to be a teaching assistant for that season. And I heard back, and I was in his TA then in the summer of 1980, and I was completed a certificate of Poetics program there that year as well. So I worked closely with Alan in the summer of 1980. And the project I worked on with him at the time was a younger poet's collection for City Lights Books for Lawrence Farrell and Getty in San Francisco. There were three younger poets at Alan Ginsberg championed. They were Antler, who lives in Milwaukee, who had published a great long work called Factory. There was the poet Andy Clawson, who was an ex-Marine immigrant to the United States, who's poetry was thought to carry on the lineage of Neil Cassidy, who was a friend of Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg, and the beat poets. And there was a third poet named David Cope from Michigan, who had sent Alan poems, and Alan was enamored with his poetry. He founded in the tradition of the Objectivist poets going back to William Carlos Williams and Charles Reznikov, the Chicago lawyer poet. So I was working with David Cope and corresponding between him and Alan in 1980. And during that summer, I went to a doctor's visit with Alan, who had had a partial stroke due to some bad medication he had taken. And he was, at that point, in his 60s, early 60s, I think. And we were sitting in a doctor's office, and in the waiting room, he started talking to me about golden ages of poetry. And he had mentioned that Ezra Pound, who he had known and championed during the time that Ezra Pound was charged with treason and placed in St. Elizabeth's Hospital in D.C. From the time of his internment around 1946 to his release in the 50s after 11 years, Pound had been thought to be treasonous to the United States government for making anti-American, anti-presidential attacks from Italy. And these radio gigs he was doing, like iPod kind of radio shows he was doing out of Italy during the war. And Alan said he had learned from Pound that golden ages of poetry were always happening when traditional, academic, formal, official language, dominant language states were hit with vernacular street language of the people. And that when that language busted through sort of the official English, this is how we're going to think about life. This is heavy iron conceptualized reality, accountability language, integrity language, sort of credo language of like we're all going to be good citizens and good patriot. When that language is busted out by sort of what people are really thinking about their government or what they're really thinking about their life or what they're thinking about sex or what they're thinking about politics. That led to poetry that was really a more timeless and kind of eternal and for the generations to come kinds of work. And so this happened in a doctor's office like five minutes and this was very powerful for me. Can you just read ahead of the reader's digest? Oh, no. No, we're talking about, we're talking Dante and Alan had just an absolutely audio and visual graphic memory for poetry. Probably the last great living poet in America who had that kind of prodigious knowledge of poetry and poetic culture and poetic history. Did he think that that happened, that his golden ages happened because of linguistic shifts or a critical mass of people using the more colloquial thing so that it butted up against it because of demographics or because it was a political thing? Why would it happen that something would challenge, was it a political thing that was the exception of the challenge to hegemony or was it the linguistic conflagration? Yeah, I think he generally looked at it as a combination of cultural, political, spiritual, evolutions. I don't think he would isolate it into just, it was the language or it was just the politics or it was just a certain, but it was a coming together sort of a perfect storm of art. So the art expression through poetry in particular, which was the genre in question was, through language itself, was in fact, through the subjective, through people claiming as they would like right now, because we live in this world of really self-production, a loss of sort of omniscient, omnipresent objective news. When those kinds of controls are loosened or else pried off by people, by particularly artists, then it's a combination of social, political, the academic, the governmental, that gets pried off people's backs. They just see things different way. They just see sort of wars as completely, the war that they're in that's being fought for a certain kind of reason, they just don't agree with the government. So yeah, I think it's a combination. So he said this all to you, and you just talked about it? Well, he basically just talked about Pound in the Golden Ages of poetry. And so I took him home to his apartment where he lived with the poet Peter Olowski and while he was teaching that summer at Naropa. And I was walking down the street in Boulder and I just had one of those light bulb moments where for some reason I thought about sign language. And that in terms of, I think I have to learn about sign language. I think sign language might be a confluence point where what deaf people might be thinking and creating might have a similar kind of experience, at least for American letters, if not for American culture in general. If what, the language of that unofficial in the sense of disability or in the sense of stereotypes, if that is known to a greater number of people that that might flood out something that is so misconceived, that is sort of so heavily conceptual and not based in any kind of truth of what's happening. So that's when I sort of meandered back and forth to try to begin to learn sign language to try to begin to meet this world and enter into it. Have you ever met a deaf person before? Have you signed before or anything like that? No, really, no, really. Did you right away start? Except maybe a deaf piano tuner I knew one time, yeah. The lower range was always off right here. Never got so familiar. So you had this idea and did you immediately try to find a sign class? You know, my learning sign language essentially evolved like AA meetings or something. I would be in towns and I would like see there would be a sign language class. And actually at that time there were sign language classes everywhere. As soon as you just looked, I was traveling a lot. And so I was living in my truck in Arcata, California at that point. And I took a class out there after that. That was my first foray at a community college, I think, up near Eureka. And then I was at SUNY Newport. So I was really traveling across the country a lot at that point. I was hitchhiking around and I was working in odd jobs. And so yeah, I slowly ended up here at NTID where we are now at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in 82 after hitchhiking back to New York State from Upstate New York when my sign language class completed my first one, which was maybe a month or two. And at that time I got picked up by a guy who was a student here at RIT who had told me, wow, there's a lot of deaf people hanging out around this place where I study. Do you want to come see the campus? And so yeah, I was here for maybe a half hour. And I checked into an interpreter training program here and was interested in that as a way to kind of do both the things I wanted to do, which was learn sign language for my own sort of personal growth and interest and admiration and actually meet potentially the poets of my generation who were deaf. When you started taking sign, I know when I started taking sign, the tactile kinesthetic thing was like just this immediate hit like this is what my hands were supposed to be doing. I really felt this immediate thing that I wanted to do this more. Did anything resonate for you when you started learning sign that was helping you along the path to find the answer you were looking for in terms of the poetics and just were learning that did you already see possibilities in the visual aspects of it or anything about it hitting you that was leading you more towards that kernel that had come to you in the beginning of your thought process? I don't know if I had like great thought processes or much of thought processes about that, but we had read, I had read as a student, Chinese is a medium, the Chinese written word is a medium for poetry. Something like this is a title of a book by Ernest Fennelosa and Ezra Pound, a little book that really interested me about the representational aspect of the Chinese written word as a medium for poetic expression, sort of the representational aspect where a word visualizes somehow or represents somehow what it is about. So I don't think it was necessarily a mind-hand connection or sort of the painting on, painting pictures on heaven, kind of quality of sign language that draws a lot of people to it. But I guess I was interested in the sheer visual quality of the sign as to be representational of things as they are or time as it is being described in the moment or recreating past. So that sign language was like this machine for making poems was really fascinating for me. It was very representational and it began to make me see our own spoken or written English language so abstract, so inner heads and so potentially filled with neurosis or hallucinatory experience that was not tied to things themselves, things as they are, that was actually a grounding and saying both contemplative and sort of meditative practice. So actually signing was really a practice of meditating on the world as it is as it appears. Doesn't that incredibly concrete in a sense of that sophistication of being abstract? You and viewing it with qualities that were comforting to you but aren't necessarily true, I'm wondering. Right. Not really. I mean those are, that's sort of, when people study deaf culture or ASL culture they tend to put these, you know, set up this oppositional camps of the, you know, I think William Stoke did a great job of, particularly as a hearing person and that was an influence for me as well, like from the linguistic community to sort of up the ante on ASL for people to admit that this language, that this was a language. I just, and obviously for me ASL is much a language on par with any other language and one of the definitions of a language particularly in arguments around ASL is does it or didn't it have an abstract quality? Were deaf people really capable, were they really thinking in the same way? Was their cognition of the same set as the rest of the peoples and their languages of the world? So I'm not sort of saying that it's, I think it was that representational argument that sort of connotes that this was a people that was incapable of abstract thinking and their language wasn't capable of any kind of angelic or philosophical or mathematical capabilities equal to, you know, the Egyptians or, you know, the great civilizations of the world. But what's interesting is there's a huge, there is the history of this dragging oppositional nature of these arguments and that was no problem for me at all. I just thought as a poet that the visual quality is premier because the lineage I come from was language actually has three sort of functions. The premier being as Pam would say the phantopoic function being the visual that that is the most translatable, that people can understand that regardless of what culture they're from, what language they speak and as a poet I wanted to ultimately be part of a tradition that would speak sort of cross-generationally or intra-generationally on a global level. So sign language for me with the emphasis on the language being a given the secondary aspect was the sign was the visual was the phantopoic so it would be the most cross-cultural like regardless of time and space. The other aspects of Pound's sense of language was wit and melody and I think people tend to sort of not see the rhythmic elements of ASL they kind of get fascinated particularly novices particularly myself as a novice I was fascinated with the visual and not necessarily understanding the melopoic the musicality or the rhythmic elements of sign but I think that that came later and I was probably unconsciously as a beginner maybe even more influenced by that as a hearing person than I was the visual and so I think but as a question of like was it one or the other or did I think ASL wasn't a language at first or was I involved in a struggle to uplift it with other people that was already done to me that wasn't even an issue worth discussing I was just interested as a poet in the vision sort of the wit and the music and I'm over time began to see all those elements as a part of it the more I could look in and understand what was being communicated and produced So that's when you're having conversations with people but what was happening like when you were here and you decided to get into the training program and I'm assuming that was just as a fast track to learn it as fast as you could did you ever have any aspirations to become an interpreter? Yeah, yeah I needed a job I mean I had a degree in English so you know the question they ask English you know graduates always ask is do you want that with fries you know so yeah so I had become a piano tuner after I graduated from the University of Colorado in Boulder with it as an English major because I was trying to find a way to make it in the world as an artist and then I went from being my own personal kind of back and forth vision was somehow on the one hand I'd become a piano tuner and technician on the other hand I was diving into becoming a sign language interpreter both vocationally and that was kind of confusing at the time but I don't think it was not a fast track for me it was just but it turned out to be a major sort of like anthropological kind of journey which I think anybody could frame their experience around I think our studies here at NTID were sensitive enough to sort of permit the ethnographic or just sort of the informant process to emerge as a real way to actually learn language you had to meet people you had to be a social agent to deal with learning this language because there were customs and attitudes and ways of life that you couldn't just learn devoid of the people and incorporating the language so that wasn't particularly that was sort of fast track being here at this mecca of deafness so we would go to those deaf parties and you know we would smoke a lot of dope and everybody was high and people were listening to music you know full blast so that your bones felt like they were going to just kind of turn to dust because the music was so loud and perhaps that was a sort of avagrave way of like heavy metalizing hearing people to torture them into some kind of form of auditory shutdown so that they could and maybe it was conscious but I think to understand that my contemporaries who were deaf and partying were as much sort of in this underground kind of scene they were hipsters they had their own networks they sort of had their own artistic sensibilities and they were deeply engaged in like what this language that they were particularly engaged more than Americans are who have a sort of functional literacy but no real competency in their language they speak they use this language English but they don't really have much as a whole a sensibility of what it's about what it's doing and so the whole kind of deaf party scene of that time in the early 80s around here particularly on this campus and around the campus was I think very heady you know very investigatory of what was going on and there was sort of like this this sort of sense of huge possibilities and change see many people were asking here's what I do and what can this language do and you just told that story Dennis Webster and that was so cool how you did that shift with the cinema you know I mean people were talking about the language and how they were using it yeah yeah they were they you know and there's this sort of social you know how they sort of like you cop how a person's body language is or you cop their moves and I think like it's like dress it's like costume too I mean people would pick up on how people are doing things in language and that would kind of float off and around is sort of this way of being potentially for somebody else and someone might inhabit that speech costume or that speech code and I think that that was kind of that was more plastic than for hearing people but not particularly because there's just sort of styles of vernacular and spun off new ways new words in a language new ways of saying things that were just kind of typical of probably college age students well there's also the whole the first mainstream kids after money it was really being done you know by the late 70s these kids were mainstream and a lot of them who heard for a bit for the schools from the deaf are coming in for mainstream programs and finally getting into this infusion of sign language to some wonder of part of it the fact that a lot of the excitement still is kids coming in here and finding a peer group and finding a sign that they're not the only one and you sign that way and you sign that way and that's why I've never done it so I'm a cue or a well or I had a cochlear implant screw this right like at age staff schools kind of like its own slam center it was like every school was a poetry slam and so this was like the big American slam sort of staging of it all at that point at that moment so that and people were you know sort of not particularly judgmental and maybe aesthetically but not particularly I mean more wanting to get along and meet and sort of surprise by like oh you know like you sign Chicago different than I sign Chicago or you know I and or you know just that variance of regionals regional derivations of language I think people were sort of mesmerized fascinated by that and you're right so there was a certain internal confluence of things going on at that particular moment for that particular generation of students that had arrived here sort of in this bulge of early to mid-80s Rochester and that probably brought and then when people like Peter Cook he was one of those people kind of coming into all of that and you might have had a sense that someone in that group might have been destined or able to sort of see it all and take it all in and somehow put it back out there in a way that was big enough new enough that it was going to blow people's minds Conversations happen what were the performance things that were happening like when you got here and you were seeking poetry you're sniffing it out like blue you know and so where was the inkling that this is the cell at his birth brain and I don't quite have them so I got here in 1982 and I was in a two-year program here and I think the early part of my time during that program was trying to connect with the poetry scene of Rochester itself was its own sort of regional offshoot of New York school poets to some degree regional New York state poets and offshoots of beat generation and beginnings of post-beat era poetry and that was all sort of around Joe Flaherty's Writers and Books Literary Center in Rochester and at that point I was meeting people and going to readings there because I had met a lot of poets and studied with a number of them at Naropa at the Kerouac School and so I was hungry as a young poet at that point to just kind of connect with the poetry scene here and there were people like Phillip Whalen would come through town Sam Abrams who taught at RIT English was here and Anne Waldman would come through some of the major poets from downstate New York would come up because Rochester was a part of both the New York circuit and sort of a national scene so poets were running through town and I was meeting my own contemporaries here too and then as that kind of evolved and I got to meet the poets who were hearing and steeped in various lineages here in and around the RIT campus one day the poet Sam Abrams asked me if I had any activities planned for a visit by Allen Ginsberg to Rochester to do reading in the community and also at the college here, at the institute here so I thought well, yeah, I might like to try to see if I could set up a meeting with Allen Ginsberg and Robert Panera, the poet Robert Panera and they could sort of workshop together and that might be interesting to the poets and language artists here on campus up until that point on this end of things I had really sort of made myself a disciple or a student of Panera's and I had kind of gone to him as if he was a certain kind of teacher but like a spiritual teacher and I was interested in the lineages of deaf poetry and poetics here that he had great knowledge of and I was in awe of the information that he was given me I'd say Patrick Grable as well was he kind of came later for me but it was a different kind of sort of spiritual and aesthetic energy I got from him but those two were playing a big part in sort of my sort of internal development of seeing of learning more about deaf lineages and deaf poetics traditions and I think by the time that Allen and Bob met for this sort of deaf beat summit in February of 84 I felt pretty well versed in both of those lineages the beat lineage came out of a long tradition through Whitman and... Do we have to... Up! The beat tradition that I think was so influential to me really comes down to that line from Ginsburg to Whitman through Blake and so forth but I think the deaf tradition that I was seeing through studying with Panera just it turned me on to a tradition of struggle and of variety that was so new to me and of interest the problem that I was seeing was a lot of issues of trying to emulate as opposed to kind of trying to subjectively do your own thing and the level of experimentation and spontaneity I'm not sure I'm a person who can judge that in deaf poetic lineages but the great golden age school that Panera had both scholarly championed and participated in at Gallaudet University was... seemed to me when I sort of had a chance to look at the Silent Muse anthology which was the probably the most important written text of deaf poetry to that time and on some level and not particularly fortunately may continue to be like the primary text of deaf transmission of poetry in written forms in the sense that that's not particularly the most vital aspect of what has happened and what potentially is most relevant about deaf poetry that school seemed to be engaging mostly in a closed form kind of poetics of Brian Cuplitz and things so that Panera's poem on his deafness is probably one of the more exquisite kind of sonnets formations but didn't really convey a sense of ASL I mean he translates it or he performs it as a signed poem as well as a poem in spoken English he does both together but that was not too interesting to me that's not what was really interesting to me occasionally I would see poems in written form by let's say the poet Ed Sollenberger who was like a bomb sort of like a classic sort of Buddhist deaf bomb in Lower East Side of New York writing sorts of objectivist poems that were in an open form that were sort of describing events as they were and that was of interest to me that was part of what my lineage was about they wouldn't see him for good no, no but I was interested in also in these people like Ed or Dorothy Miles because they were people who were also I could see somehow they were struggling with their own personhood and coming to terms with that through poetry which I think was something I could relate to and I thought that that was something that people would really want could relate to the emotionality of it as Pound says only emotion endures so the fact that Dorothy Miles was like manic depressive and suicidal and both she and Sollenberger did commit suicide and wondering sort of what their communities had contributed to their isolation or their unhappiness was really relevant to me too because I could see this sort of common ground of the heart or I could see this common suffering not in the way hearing people as a dominant sort of force like subjugate deaf people to the realm of suffering as a way to sort of create the normate of ability but just every day common suffering that a person who would meet another person on the street would relate to so I was interested in things like how communities respond to the poet and ownership that communities take I was interested in how Robert Frost would appear at JFK's inauguration and somehow poetry had at that point in the early 60s still this level of dynamism that the country could relate to it emerged this spring, the spring of 2007 when, oh, I'm blanking on her name so I apologize but we had a poet at Virginia Tech, Nicky Giovanni who was called upon and gave the great eulogy for the students that were massacred by a Korean student who had massive depression and went postal like on the students on that campus and there you had a sort of relevant poetic figure sort of rising as the spokesperson of the people and their suffering and despair and solidarity so I'm saying that because I think the poets in the deaf world that I was learning about really had perhaps greater struggles to just sort of work in the context of language without having to sort of represent the people and I think the deaf community had and continues to try to lay claim to their poets and the productions of those poets as sort of some kind of proof or some kind of like the poet's work is immediately sort of absconded by the community as some kind of proof of the you know again the capability of this group of people something that I don't think like in the beat generation when in that general context of going against this massive witch hunt and blackballing of people as communist or as deviance or against the state or in today's time you know under the Patriot Act in a surveillance society that like just those basic issues of going against what people are thinking or saying something that the government finds offensive or is sensible I didn't see a lot of initiative by the deaf community to take a look at their own sort of need to sort of surveillance or censor or claim the poetry that was happening and so people had a desire to sort of appease I think that was as strong as the sense of fun and just experimentation that was starting to come out with people just doing poetry and they're becoming like a growing body of work and I think that the work essentially then in my time it was kind of clear that ASL was the place where the poetry really was and it was great that there was a body of work for hearing people demonstration to like them that there was real citizenship of deaf people as well but I thought that that again was some kind of proof of humanity that didn't really need to go on any longer I didn't think that anyone had to struggle to overcome like a sense of pariahhood any longer I just thought that that was a done deal and why don't we just get on to like let's see the poetry man So we're talking about students who were basically producing the things and Bernard Bragg looked at Bragg's stuff and did things like nobody else did and you get here and now this meeting takes place which I also want you to talk about in a second also but all of the theoretical and academic overlays we're putting on right now didn't exist for these students who were just getting stoned and messing around so what were you stumbling on to what were you like did you just go to a party and there were these people who stood up and started doing stuff and did it look different in storytelling how did you know that you'd happened upon these kids who were experimenting with some kind of thing that you might think was the poetry you've been sniffing for Well the funny part of that time for me was really I was seeing things one way and other people were seeing things a different way so I was seeing what was happening as poetry a lot of times even now someone will write a poem and want to show it to me and I'll go this is terrible this is like not how you talk at all this is nothing that has to do with your reality really at all this is like you talking like you think a poem should be and in that regard what I was seeing was really poetry and the circumstance was deaf people did not think of poetry as a deaf thing so that's the interesting conceptualization that was happening and what I was involved with was this sense of I'd say man that was a poem and people would say Debbie Renning would say no a poem equals English so I can't possibly be doing that because I have this at best adversarial relationship with that language and so I can't possibly be doing poetry I can't possibly be a poet I can't possibly have this identity so I think what I might have been involved with was on some small level a transmission of poetry hood or poet identity and really trying to like sort of clear a ground to the potential to just see that if people just sat there by themselves or stood there on a stage by themselves and essentially did their own language performance or as William Carlos Williams said a poem is like a complex machine if what they had created as a piece was in and of itself not just a theatrical or a dramatic thing which deaf people did feel very comfortable with and deaf culture did embrace from the silent movie era onward but if in fact that solitary person sort of speaking candid, naked, vivid rememberable mind could do then in fact there was the identity that they might be participating in the poetic tradition that goes back to the beginnings of dance and music as well and so that's what those conversations would essentially be about was yeah I think you're wrong I think what you're doing is poetry yeah I think you're right and for some reason the storytelling tradition for me was separate from poetry and in and of itself it is more it has a greater grandiosity it's not rock and roll but it's definitely a higher status than poetry and I guess I just thought that there was an absence of self of the sort of it wasn't really allowing people to sort of lay claim to their own mind and their own holiness and their own sanity it wasn't about them yearning for that it was in a story and in sort of carrying a story forward it's in like the Native American tradition which it was more similar to I think it was about moving cultural values like forward through time and cultural memory and with the essentialness of in a non-written language people that element cannot ever die if it does that people would die but poetry was something else than that as well and there was something potentially about that mode that artistic mode that would even be of greater value to the people I mean in a sort of Shakespearean kind of sense that there was a person that created that stuff and went through the world experiencing something that became something else or Dante in a sense of creating a personal cosmic vision and the validity of that among many realities so the ultimate sense of that for me was in a conversations with Peter Cook and when we first met and before Alan came to campus and asking Peter if he'd like to go see this thing and him saying well I've been to a poetry reading or two and that in and of itself was really exciting for me but he would say you know he'd look at that scene he'd see people sitting like we're here sitting now and you know he's I'm not signing right now and I'm talking about deafness and so he's sitting there at a poetry reading watching some cat on a bar stool with you know a piece of paper in front of his face and he's talking and doing his poems and people are sitting in the audience and it's sort of like you know deaf people are sort of like Italians in a certain way I mean they're just very justicular and Americans are sort of like you sit with your hands folding your lap like I'm doing here and you're not really there's no expressiveness there's nothing sort of there's nothing coming off the body there's no stardust there's just no action coming off it's just boring so I think as a deaf person what was fascinating to me was that my initial take from Peter Cook was that this was an exceedingly boring activity exceedingly pedantic and so what was kind of exciting was I mean I lived, breathed, poetry myself so and I had just studied with these beatmasters people that appeared in carowax on the road I had been studying with Gary Snyder the ecological poet and Zen master poet I had studied with Phillip Whalen who was also a Zen master and I had studied with and Walden in the poetry I was reading was not, was about a way out of this prison mind of the closed poetic forms where people would say things like instead of teaching students about prosody as if the form dictated the content of poetry I would study people like Frank O'Hara who in his manifesto would say all you need to know about form is you want to wear your pants tight enough so everybody wants to go to bed with you and so that was an element that I was walking around thinking about and in fact it was sexy what was happening poetically in ASL it was sexual, it was sensual it was active, it was it was breaking down conventions and the argument that then hearing poetry in fact the reverse of what hearing people were trying to impose was that deaf people thought that hearing poetry was just a drag was great it was great because we were involved then in some kind of contest of will and contest of like well yeah I'm going to show you buddy watch out and for some reason Alan Ginsberg had even I think the sort of mystique or the mythos of Howell the creation of Howell was strong enough that even someone who was disinterested in hearing poetry like a young Peter Cook who was more interested in sort of avenues of theater for the deaf and storytelling and being on the road and experiencing a carousel kind of existence in a totally deaf framework it was something that was of interest to him enough to come it was something of interest to Patrick Grable enough to come with all his theatric background these people knew of the hearing world of poetry via Alan Ginsberg who had somehow sort of come through so many airwaves that it just nothing could keep him out it seemed of pretty much any culture so those people showed up among students and administrators and interpreting students actually it was a class for my interpreting studies that somehow I had arranged that the curriculum for that day would be this one workshop and they came and hung out Kip Webster interpreted that session as the main interpreter I think I introduced the two of them and they sat there and they dialogued and did some poems Panera performed his poem on his deafness and Alan began talking about how his poem, how it had been translated into many languages but the key element of it that he was interested in in that moment was how the phrase hydrogen jute box could be that that was something that had difficulties being translated into other languages and he was curious how it might be translated into ASL and Panera got up and he sort of did an interpretation of how he thought it might go and I believe Alan said you know someone explained to Alan that he made the sign of an A bomb with his hands in the A shape so it was like an A bomb exploding and the idea of a hydrogen jute box was that the world was insane enough such that like it had created this canned music that even the music was canned inside of some kind of mechanical apparatus like a jute box and that essentially the same way that sort of the lyric formulations of deaf poetry up to that point in the closed forms was like canned hearing music presented to deaf people and in the more larger context that sort of expression was being canned mass produced, mass distributed and mass consumed and then sort of this mass sort of capitalist hallucination was just kind of we're all lost in this matrix of just the same just of a homogenous mind and so we could all just partake of the same hallucination but in terms of exploring realities or dharmas or gods we weren't going to have that discussion in this lifetime so the beats essentially I think in Allen's formulation of the juxtaposed words hydrogen jute box was such that the role of poetry was in certain times and their time was to basically shatter that and that nuclear the creation of a whole nuclear world was in fact people had produced that themselves and so in the midst of all this canned life we were creating our own destruction and so he felt that Panera had gotten it wrong and asked for other volunteers other people to sort of interpret that and Patrick Grable got up there and did his you know famous where he sort of outlined the shape of the jute box and then sort of like put down the wreck or the wreck he kind of put his arm out to grab a record and then that turned into coming down and then here came the turntable and then it created the bomb the sort of the potential of sort of something kind of happening and faster and faster the sense of like this bomb exploding and it was that ah moment for everybody in the room one in particular was struck by the accuracy of language and the energy of that presentation of thought and was delighted and threw back his head and laughed and everybody in the room laughed too and Patrick Grable humbly just kind of then took his seat and I think that whatever happened for and after that moment was important but I think that visual presentation was a huge transmission for everything that would have transpired after that workshop what was going on like what was Peter for instance and his other friends what were they doing prior to that that was experimental and then right after it how did it carry forward and what did he do well I can't really speak for Peter per se or any of his pals they were on the road they were doing this theater and they were really digging it they thought that was very cool and I'm sure it was he was doing some kind of theater troupe I know I have photographs of some notebook of tour that he was involved with at the time and of all the folks I met I was really hanging began hanging out with Peter at that point we were watching I'd go to his house his dorm room or maybe it was and they had like three televisions they watched three TV's at once and you could see like and we were watching the presidential debates and it was funny you know like the pictures the feeds were all like a little bit off on every channel and so like it was the same thing but the feeds were off so everything was sort of delayed we were watching these three televisions coming out and you know I don't know what they thought about that but I just thought that this is how they're doing business over there this is just how they work and I just thought it was okay you know I like these people a lot and you know I think we essentially we would just sort of go back and forth about hey man I want you to do this poetry and I'd like you to try this and you're interested and I think you could do it and actually he was somehow had got something from this workshop and you know I don't know what he got per se but he essentially I guess got something to say I want to try to do this because I think he realized maybe his own real poetic nature and wasn't hung up on the identity of being a deaf person he probably had his own issues with being a hearing child and having some hearing and then becoming deaf so in sort of the worlds of status I mean he probably wasn't from a deaf family of 90 generations of deaf people so he wasn't pure deaf either so he was an outsider too and an oral yeah so he had his own outsider issues and maybe he just felt like I don't know he just didn't care enough about what you shouldn't be doing in the same way that I really didn't care too much about what I shouldn't be doing as a hearing person and we didn't talk about that per se but I think we just kind of hit it off as two people so somehow I thought it would be really good to take the energy from that and start an ASL poetry series and we used the campus there was some kind of club like atmosphere thing and Alan Ginsberg had a poem called Bird Brain which was a funny poem and essentially calling the government and sort of this sense that we've had all this money and all this potential to do the right thing and form domestic policies as a nation but squandered at every single chance that occurred like we were incapable as a nation of making a wise sort of seven generations kind of decision and bent on just mass destruction planetary destruction so Peter had lined the first Bird Brain Society poetry, reading and series and then there were several after that and they were well attended and people like that the former clown, Mimus, Debbie Rennie she got involved with that too and so I think that there was a good balance of gender energy too that was taking this in that I think I can be deaf and be a poet and I can use my own language to do that and I can sort of make it up as I go seeped with the lineages that I've already come to embody and see where that goes without really knowing what lies ahead with that and so those two really stood out I think maybe Patrick Grable might have read and I don't know if Panera came down at that point and never showed up and did something I think he came to them but he was working as a professor here and teaching a huge load and educating students to literature so that was his thing at that point doing scholarship and literature and at the same time that was happening there was a club in Rochester called Jazzbury's in an old fire station down on Monroe Avenue that had given us permission to sort of start a series there as well, Poetry Series and so the Rochester poets the circle I had become involved with initially here in town really started then being a experimental stage for introducing interpreters sign language interpreters to a hearing audience and then by doing that allowing deaf audience members to come and start sort of seeing what the hearing poets were doing and not just sitting there reading pieces of paper but understanding what those words were saying and so those two things started happening almost simultaneously and there were great sign language interpreters the most dedicated, self-dedicated sign language interpreters that were also part of that mix too and as a sign language student so I was involved with those sort of third world folks third mind folks even probably the closest and those were people like yourself, Miriam and Donica Cheetahs and Susan Chappell in particular the three of you were so deeply involved in translations of hearing text written text to ASL for presentation purposes and serious committed aesthetic minded people like trying to get this right as if you would die if you had gotten the wrong word or you had created the wrong sign students of the performance of that and intense feedback sessions about a performance like did I translate this right and did this make sense so audience, players, interpreters all this started coming together in this really unusual way that really had never happened anywhere and I was quite sure that this hadn't happened anywhere and I don't think it mattered that it had never happened anywhere with this velocity but it was happening and I saw myself at least a part of something that I knew was a golden age moment that Pound had talked to Alan about and so essentially I was seeing a dream of a golden age unfold right before my eyes and essentially I was just walking through it and we began bringing in great poets Andy Clausen came to Rochester and was interpreted the New York City poet Bernadette Mayer came up and did a reading that was interpreted and deaf people were being exposed to like New York school and sort of beat, post-beat poetics and poetries and just this kind of different personal style that each person would bring to things and it wasn't done by it wasn't then carried over into ASL by novices who were putting out a second and third rate gloss of what was happening but in fact I think we're putting out these meaningful translations and interpretations of actual form and content and expression in the whole body way that ASL is about and the deaf end of things was really starting to coalesce into this almost like breakthrough sense of like wow yeah I think it's politically important to me I think the poets might have been thinking something like this is a political act for me to do ASL poetry and it's both something for my people and it's both something for myself and in fact it was a breakthrough moment that ASL equal poetry and poetry might equal ASL and so it allowed people to kind of be free of the academic linguistic discussions of like is it you know can ASL have poetry or can't ASL can't have poetry I mean these kind of ongoing discussions and certain classes of people love to engage in I think the most exciting moment in that whole era that happened was sometime then around 84 when I said to Kenny Lerner who was a hearing history major who was out here to teach that he should meet this guy named Peter Cook because I somehow think that they would be great friends and not particularly like and in fact Peter needed someone to sort of work with him to on the end of getting him into the ears of hearing people so that they could get a full understanding what was happening so I said you should maybe meet this guy and I said the same thing to Peter Cook and the two of them met and that was that's sort of a whole other chapter of things Well I was befriended by a young brilliant Long Island interpreter Donna Cachitas who we later married and that became a scene in and of itself for a lot of parties and a lot of poetry parties that would after hours kinds of parties that would happen after readings and so there would be sort of pseudo-deaf pseudo-hearing, pseudo-interpreter kinds of bashes after the readings I think that we she had found herself interested in Debbie Rennie and her work and we were all friends so that like Kenny, Peter, Debbie, Donna yourself we would start hanging out and goofing around and I think when Debbie sort of took up the challenge during the Bird Brain Society to get out her poetry when that translated to Downtown Rochester intercultural poetry readings at Jazz Berries at that series I ran with Todd Beers poet in town she needed somebody to be her voice as well and she chose Donna Cachitas who was exceedingly gifted poetic interpreter and they sort of bonded in the same way that Kenny Lerner and Peter Cook bonded so you had sort of this cross-gender so you had it happening the feminine and the masculine you just had this this wasn't just a male thing happening and it wasn't just a femme thing happening it was happening regardless of gender so it was happening there was a full-blown diversity kind of thing going on that poetry couldn't encapsulate I don't know much about that How long did Bird Brain go? Not too long maybe like I think until the end of the school year probably to the end of spring 85 or maybe to the spring of 84 after Ginsburg had come we did a few sessions and they ran out at 84 that's definitely the spring of 84 because I graduated from the interpreter training program here in 84 and then went on to become a deaf educator quote-unquote my studies at the University of Rochester and I don't think I continued that that's when I began thinking about what had happened I mean so by 85 I was already thinking about what had happened which means what had essentially happened which would be this cross-cultural exchange and this sort of transmission of beat energy and beat traditions which in and of themselves are not about the poet per se but what traditions the poet is carrying forward in a new way that transmission had happened and so you had the early sort of poetic careers of Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner Donica Cheetahs and Debbie Renne and myself is sort of the odd man out in all ways you could imagine like forming a little troupe called Bridge Of and I think that was a very short lived performance troupe we performed at the Hudson Clearwater Revival and we did another show in Vermont I think at the University of Vermont in Burlington and I think after that it was kind of clear that Kenny and Peter were doing a thing that would soon morph into the Flying Words project and that was their vehicle and Debbie and Donna's thing would be somewhat occasional but not as lasting and not really as... it didn't produce as much work for the parties involved so I don't know what that was about in terms of longevity but the work that they created was the work that they created it was... it's in a body of work 87 is when the first winter time my mom had died and was living in New Mexico we interpret for it and we help me coordinate whatever it is sure so that started really rolling in the late spring and all summer we were planning so what made you want to do that and how did you pick the local players we know about but Clayton and Ella were involved in that too so what was your knowledge of them how did you get all that together? well I think when I was in in grad school I was... I continued my interest in deaf poetics so deaf history so I had come across Clayton Valley's work and Ella Mae Lentz's work and I was interested in what they were doing I was interested in Valley's commitment to ASL from a totally different history than we were what had happened here at Rochester which was pretty much like a beat kind of thing and Ella Lentz was just someone you'd actually see her pictures in your ASL books like it would be like her face in there when you're learning a sign it would be like Ella's presenting the sign for like whatever cooking or something and it's like this woman is a radical poet on the west coast and so Valley's hardcore committed sensitive gay, you know, poet on the east coast so it was sort of this sense of like okay I wonder if there's a potential to pull together a national kind of sensibility of a poetry conference for the deaf but a little before that while I was in doing my studies I had written a paper for that explored what had happened in Rochester from this deaf beat summit in 84 and you know in the past I've had a poet friend Randy Rourke who I'm very close to all these years from my student days with him at Naropa Randy had sort of was left to type up all this conversation that Alan Ginsberg had had in all his classes at Naropa and that amounted to over 28,000 pages of discourse that would have gone into that I don't think has really been published yet but when I look at pieces of posthumous pieces of Alan's like deliberate mind that have come out and that's the kind of thing where he had a student actually then type up these talks on the tongue tapes but so I had written Alan to be his apprentice and it took a certain kind of audacity to do that and saying like I think you should have me as an apprentice and Randy always hounds me to this day that that took a lot of balls you know like to sort of think that you were like somebody should you know that somebody should think that there's somebody about and so I had written this paper of which I think I received a B from my teachers and I worked on it more maybe six months and it was I think it was called the new visible poetics or something and I had sent that to William Stokey who was still alive and doing sign language studies out of Gallaudet and I heard back from him in a little over a week that he would be glad to accept this paper and he thought it was terrific and he wanted people to know about this and that little paper would have influenced you know people like Dirksen Bauman and the more heavy hitter academic of poetics professors in the academies you know teaching poetry so before we get to a national poetry conference there seemed to be a need to kind of rise things up through as many channels as possible in terms of credibility and that little seminal piece was a part of that that probably gave me the ego to proclaim again as a hearing person something I was seeing in a culture that was really has a difficult time with hearing people trying to lay claim to any kind of sense of what is and isn't going to happen for them on a basis but it was what I saw and it was sort of my own thing and it sort of caused something to happen I'm not sure what but I do think it caused something to happen later in terms of deaf studies and so somehow we got the bread we had a really wonderful wonderful administrative person at NTID around that time Adele Friedman and she somehow was very she was sort of like a Victorian mind woman she might have been like a friend of Mary Shelley's or something she might have like seen Frankenstein when it was being you know hatched or something like that or when you know when Shelley was out of town as a robot like row into Italy or somewhere with Byron and she was at home you know like you know taking speed and volume and like writing Frankenstein or something someone like Adele Friedman might have been like her friend or something I don't know and she understood just intuitively that this was really important and she understood the deal that would allow us to try and sort of pull off a national poetry conference here which was a place essentially that had very little interest as a technical institute in poetry at all which on the other hand and it's very corporate looking environment and on the other hand it's kind of filled with art students who are very creative young people so the lineup was Pantic Grable, LMA Lance and Clayton Valley so they sort of represented an established ASL first school of the modern era and this era is like late 20th century and then there was the introduction of what had happened here which was essentially the beginning of an experimental um I would say spontaneous kind of care whack Ginsberg, Waldman kind of sense of death poetics embodied by Debbie Ranny and Peter Cook with their own traditions vast traditions of theater, dance clown, mime sort of lineages that they embodied as well in conjunction with hearing interpreters that were bringing an additional quality to them in Debbie's case it was I think she was producing the work herself and she was using Donna Cachidis more as an interpreter but in the radical formation of Peter Cook with Kenny Lerner and the sort of tension that that created on the community itself and the sort of the potentials for misunderstanding that was really a collaboration of work being created by a hearing and deaf person with a deaf face and a hearing kind of mind so Peter Cook essentially was the headliner in my mind and I arranged the conference so that he was the headliner, he was the last and and we had panels and we had readings and there was just a lot of get-together stuff going on and it was just, and we documented it and I think that was an essential element I had gained from Naropa which now has its own audio archives which is so vast and then coming to NTID that was something they could do and so that was very good because we had really high quality documentation tools that are disposable and they were interpreted fully interpreted and so they were strongly attended and the people that met each other I think were bonded and there was sort of this sense of high level best minds poets coming together at both ends of a generation or several generations but there was that sense of best minds of a generation kind of coming together and presenting their work with great dignity and difference and I feel that you mentioned very briefly about being a person involved in this and the sensitivity that you had to have to feel often feel that things are co-opted and whatever did any of that spill over during the conference and was it dealt with I know that Kenny and Peter had to deal with having Kenny as his partner shouldn't have a person involved in this doing their kind of thing and it was a lot through that Yeah I think Kenny Lerner took on the bulk of disparagement and discrediting there wasn't meant I think in any kind of truly malicious way it was just meant it just happened in the same sense to the role of like 65 Newport Dylan plugging in and he just sort of had to face that and essentially I think he didn't care and it wasn't his deal essentially that was other people's problems about and the thing was people would keep coming back they actually liked what was happening so much and at the same time it's one of those great moments where in true art lasting art where you're disagreeing with it every step of the way that you're falling in love with it and so as their work started then really being exposed to the deaf community in a national way and it is very I don't know how difficult it is now but if you want to start banging the drums of the deaf grapevine that message gets out there pretty fast and I think that people were confused in essence by what Peter was putting out in terms of a poem and how he was using ASL as poetry and because in a way he was putting it out such that he understood what it was about but he wasn't but he but they didn't so there was a question of like well this poem isn't like absolutely making sense to me but that didn't mean that every line wasn't brilliant or every phrase of picture making wasn't just taken from most memorable scenes of life so that their impact was in fact great but he was doing poetry in the contemporary sense that like he was making the sense of his own mind and he was making that he was laying that out as his gift for people and he was also laying out a gift that wasn't his own mind or even necessarily his own he didn't necessarily agree with it because he hadn't particularly written the entire thing that he was doing so to speak off he was the conveyor of the bomb that sort of the bomber had made on some level and but Peter's sense of as the bomb carrier wasn't like was really the sense that we'd wish for poetry communities around the world in so far as poetry bombs instead of suicide bombs I mean they were like they were anti-suicide bombers and essentially they were spreading them this sort of radical message of mind that just would fill people with imagination and the potential to tell a story that wasn't so literal or be stuck to a story that wasn't so narrative and in fact was a story more like cut and pasted or in a borough's tradition of or in a sampled kind of manner or in a cinematic manner where you're like looking at technique of views and angles and exits and entrances and taking that whole history and totally just turning it upside down and inside out and they were doing all that people thought it was incredible and it was nothing that they had ever seen before in regardless of other deaf media figures at the time whether because even someone like Bernard Bragg who was probably the most well-known deaf media figure actor they weren't really doing their own thing and their own thing was probably not a thing that was sort of bent by introduction of sort of shall we say alternate consciousness and there was an alternate consciousness universe being created here and I think that that was the thing that people wanted to go into and in a fearless manner so I think a community of people were at once totally angered by the introduction of an alternate universe parallel universes, parallel cosmos into their own heads by this one guy with a hidden hearing person and I think that Kenny took a lot of that on but essentially the work is all that matters the work that was being done was visionary in a new sense and also coupled to great visionary work of the past even without necessarily being literate in a very conscious or studious manner towards it so I think Kenny took the heat I recall him shaking his head like why me? he was the person that was crucified and my crucifixion came later and that was at another conference that's good I mean it's not really a crucifixion either for the purposes of this good I hope you don't I don't think we need to for this story I'm really worried about time let me just see if there's anything that I'd like you to address is there a way that you can describe why the stuff that Danny and Peter just drew why is it beat? it's hard to put a definition on what why is it beat? why are these death poets considered beat? why do you see it as a transverse of this with death beat poetry? so maybe I don't need to be simplistic but is there a way that you could say you know why was beat poetry at all different from the things that came before it and why would you if you could say why this would be called beat poetry? well I just think that the beat generation was a marketing it was marketing lingo and it was a way to define a group of people for marketing purposes so you know there's no real beat generation per se there's no generations per se I do think that and in retrospect I don't think I was wrong in sort of like characterizing this as a death beat summit I do think that the Alan Ginsberg in particular was focused on compassion and he was focused on mainlining the poet's job was to mainline into mass suffering so you had to have a sort of access your own secret mind to get there and so you had to disclose and I mean you know on some level people are well hung up on disclosure particularly in the kind of society where you know they have cameras stuck to our eyeballs looking at us and they know where we've been or they know what we've bought they know you know in the realm of disability or in the realm of you know that unfilled field of deafness that's not disability and not necessarily ability but in fact it's really its own aspect of life it sort of plays it sort of plays the fence it plays it both ways and I mean when the time comes to not be have that sort of coalition you know it can be ill go either way as a people but at that point and now I I can't say for sure but I've kind of like lost my train of thought Well I was asking about like why why Peter and Debbie would be considered why you would think they would definitely be like why is their poetry different from Ella Clayton and Panera it obviously is when you look at it just as Alan Ginsburg is different than Emily Dickinson and Emily Dickinson had just as much compassion and self-disclosure and the whole thing was all about so I'm not really sure that the self-disclosure part I mean poets all through the ages it's the the impetus for their art it's all about self-disclosure and all about that sort of constant belch merits and all that kind of thing so where so is it form it seems that there's a great deal of it that has to do with form Panera talked about that in our interview or during the workshop about reverse and how creating it was to be able to not worry about so the lack of form in a sense or the playing of form I don't think that form ruled for Peter Cook or Debbie Branny and that's not to say that their works aren't exceedingly formal the formal elements are probably what we see and those elements are the things that probably are the things that are affecting us most on some level but I think it's the vision that they bring to the poem I think it is a level of disclosure and that they bring to the poem I do think that they brought a secret mind to the poem and let it out there and I everything from you know everything from Peter Cook's doing his oral presentation of I was ordered not to talk to which is an ultimate kind of secret mind disclosure which carries a lot of emotion and a lot of integrity with it to his sort of more surreal and I guess it was the surrealism that they brought to their poetry so that they really were not hung up on the representational they weren't presenting poems in the classic sort of storytelling or in an American letters way, objectivist way sort of like obituary kind of like writing like you know Aunt Rose had four children and she died and she's buried here but they or the snow came down but there was a surreal sense of almost in the sense of like someone like Robert Desnos the French poet or the sense of there's something really international about what was what their vocabulary was and their vocabulary exhibited a certain kind of surreal sense of time and space and life that I think is part of this alternate consciousness that the beat generation turns out being sort of about in a sense of an on the road culture it's part of that street language that is you know sees like Time Magazine as official US sort of doctrine on what is happening in the world this week but I think later as time went on and for myself and my connection with these poets is that you know we're not beat generation poets so we were something else and our time is not been defined and we don't have scholars and critics studying us with necessarily as much certainty because the media isn't telling the world that with any kind of certainty that this is even happening let alone that this is good so I consider the surrealistic qualities the adventures in form the what is being brought to the marketplace of ideas is in their poems such as Deja Vu Salesman which was always a I remember being so knocked out when I saw that like I can't believe this is happening I can't believe that this is being formulated so I was never in a sense that this isn't happening to me through form but I was taking in something personally that was like beyond language it was sort of in the meta language levels that you could go to like swimming to Cambodia or you kind of go into when you're reading a poem where you're just your world and the world that you're reading about or watching is sort of creating this whole other movie in your mind while it's going on that is even it's a collective consciousness that you've entered into so this person opened doors to sort of a higher consciousness and it was happening after the beats so my affinity with the deaf poets of my lifetime now is that we're part of a post-beat era which is defined by different parameters different complexities and more instant communication and encyclopedic styles from which to choose from almost an overplay of potential styles I mean you can have Italian you can rip off passages of anything from the internet and put it into your poem you can do you can sort of rip off any visual that you see and put it into your poem I mean just the explosion of the visual or textual worlds that we're living in defines this differently than that era that we came from but I think that there's a great affinity for what I saw in the disregard for official versions of the way the world is from those two poets that the others did not receive or they walked with a more militant or a more they were in a more ambiguous time of being alone trying to work out for themselves of what was right for them and by the time it sort of was the difference between Pericomo and the Beatles it just was like that much of a cultural explosion as a difference and where there was a certain tranquility that I think Clayton Valley was after a need for serenity and I think Ella Lentz was engaged in a certain kind of militancy and Patrick Grable was invested with a certain kind of pathos or ethos a certain kind of soulfulness and skilled with as we've talked about a whole other Patrick Grable sense of being able to actually sort of rip off his clothes and then there was this whole other being in fact there but sort of restrained fighting against restraint his own restraint I think there was an element of restraint that people were still shackled by that somehow this collection of hearing and deaf and men and women and gay and straight and deaf and hard of hearing and post-lingual and pre-lingual and the various beat traditions that had been brought forward that the poets who were hearing were embodying in their own separate kind of channels and carrying forward I just think that that bring with it this whole other sense of the sky's the limit we're just going to tear this hotel room up and then we're going to go down and do the show and then we're going to come back and we're going to like look at what we did and talk about it all night long and then we're going to keep talking about it and we're not going to stop talking about it and why it was so interesting to talk about I just think it was and why it was Rochester I just think it was it just happened for its own reasons which isn't an answer but I just think the mix of things was right the same way the mix of things was right in the Paris Hotel for the beats when they were in exile so we were all sort of in exile from something I would think and looking for a way to just be ourselves as poets in a society that wasn't and actually grows sort of less interested in truly what the power of the personal in poetic expression it's awesome one thing I wanted to do I just didn't want to take the time with it one of the things Patrick said was that when he watched the Sampler DVD I gave him he was very struck by the fact that how Evinera and Clayton were just standing still camera on him face forward and that Debbie and Peter moved and he said so he realized that he could move and so he decided to try a couple of things later where he moved and he was so free he didn't know he could move I mean there were just things that were so embedded in performance which we talked about so it was just like being in a hearing poetry reading in a sense, well I wouldn't say that it was it's still visually very interesting what Patrick said but there was this rooted to the spot like Anglican, like you weren't church and I have him saying that and the other thing I was thinking of was that Kenny is not going to say I left out probably the best parts of all this I'm really disappointed that it wasn't last night I will tell me, we can revisit that but I don't know what it is the other thing I was thinking was you were talking about the images all the things that poetry could do now and all the media and all the things we could do it's like wiki poetry grab grab grab grab grab grab yeah, I probably should have used that example but anyway, this is just great and the other thing was when you were talking about deaf people and their own sort of... it works both ways they work both sides of the fence and it's like its own separate thing it's like Texas if I should have said that it seems to me that the deaf is like it's like Texas