 Wonderful. So my first question was, did you know about any deaf community, deaf anything in this town before all this stuff started happening? Well I was aware of the deaf community here. Obviously, you know, with NTID and I mean one of the really nice things I think about Rochester is that you see deaf people around, you know, you see them signing whether you're at the public market or a restaurant or wherever you are, you're aware that there are a lot of deaf people in this community. But you have not been privy to any sort of deaf cultural events, entertainment, certainly not poetry. No, not at all. So how did it come about that you became aware of it? How did this all happen? Well what happened was when we moved to this building, which was in 1985, from a place on South Clinton. We had a one-room storefront and we moved here in 1985 and suddenly we had three floors of space and a lot of opportunity to do a lot of things and so we started having a lot more poetry readings and other events and people, a lot of people found us. We would have an open mic going on, you know, on a monthly basis so a lot of people would come to that and suddenly there was there was a real awareness in Rochester that there was a place to go where you could have, you know, give a reading or listen to other poets or fiction writers and so we had a lot of people coming and one of those people, you know, was Jim Cohn. So I mean Jim was a kind of a real bridge between the two communities, you know, being a poet himself and also being out at NTID and Wendy Lowe also was a person who was, you know, a writer and a poet and out there too. So there was, you know, kind of a communication going on that people who were, you know, who were writers, who were poets and also out there in the deaf community knew that there was a way to kind of, you know, kind of get across this gap here and somehow get the two audiences together. So I think it was probably Jim, I don't remember exactly, but it was probably Jim who first introduced me to Kenny and to Peter and at that time there was also another woman who was a part of it. Debbie Rennie. So it was, you know, so it was those two or three and I don't remember the exact, but we did have, and also there was Jazz Berries in which there was also kind of a cross thing because people, which was a restaurant and also, you know, organic restaurant and, you know, healthy food and it was over on Monroe Avenue and there was the stage there. So there was a lot of readings and performances and music, you know, jazz, Jazz Berries and also, you know, acoustic things. So there was things going on and I don't remember the exact thing, but there was, you know, performances, some deaf things started to happen here. And I remember at the time, you know, seeing this for the first time and thinking, wow, this is really, this is really unique. And, you know, in my position here, I mean, I, you know, I saw poetry all over the country. I mean, I would go to places and, and, you know, I would see what was happening. It was at the same time that the, there was the beginning of the poetry slam, which was growing out of Chicago. And there was a lot of kind of, you know, interest in that while suddenly, you know, poetry could be done as that kind of Olympic style, competitive event with judges, you know, like somebody would read a poem and they give them a, you know, 8.5, like, like you were watching, you know, gymnastics on TV. So there was some different kinds of things going on. There was, on the West Coast, there was kind of language poets that were kind of coming out of there. From New York City, there was a certain kind of, you know, outgrowth and follow-up to the, to the beat poets. So there was things happening in different parts of the country, which I was aware of. But seeing this, it really struck me that this is something very unique, not happening anywhere else and, you know, something that grew out of Rochester. And I, I remember kind of seeing that, but I remember the first opportunity I really had to kind of present that to other people was, we had a conference here in Rochester and we had people, it was a literary conference. We had people from all over the state, a lot of people from, from New York City and people from New York State Council on the arts. And we had a dinner down at City Hall and Kenny will remember this. And so I decided that the, this was to be a great opportunity to introduce all these people to something that was unique to Rochester. So when they came here, we said, okay, we're going to introduce them when they had lunch. For instance, we had lunch in this building. We said, well, we're going to teach you how to eat white hots because, you know, white hots are kind of a Rochester thing, you know, and we had Genesee beer. So we were kind of really kind of introducing them to Rochester. And so I said, you know, when we have this dinner, we'll have some local poets. And I remember people were coming, they said, oh, boy, we have to listen to local poets. You know, they were like, oh, boy, and they want to show us a local poet. And so I said, okay, you know, I introduced them. I said, you know, one of the great things about Rochester is that we have the highest per capita death population in the country here as a result of NTID. And people come here and they, you know, go to school and then a lot of them stay here. So throughout Rochester, there are people, death people who see them all the time. They're a really important integral part of the community. And out of this has really grown a, this really unique form of death poetry. And I said, what's really, I mean, it's unique in that American Sign Language is very beautiful to watch. And people may have seen that. But there's also, in this case, there's a spoken so that there's a voice which is being spoken. So you have two communities who can experience the same activity or event or poetry, but in a different way, obviously. Although the people who are hearing can see the beauty of the sign language and the body movements and the people, but they can also hear what's going on. And the death people experience poetry in their own language. And so they performed. And one of the people that was there was Gregory Calabacus. And Gregory Calabacus was head of the New York State Council on the Arts literature program. Just a wonderful, wonderful person who ended up dying of AIDS. One of the first people I knew in terms of, you know, who did die of AIDS. It was a great loss. But he immediately also saw that this was really a unique, wonderful thing. And afterwards, I know, came up to me and came up to Kenny and said, you know, we really want to do a lot more with this. We'd love to get you guys around the state. And out of that grew really, you know, flying words, project, being able to go out and reach an audience way beyond here. So I mean, my first, my first, you know, contact with it was immediately eye opening. And ear opening at the same time was that this is really, I mean, this is this is really wonderful. It's unique. There's nothing else like this going on anywhere in the country. And, you know, it's something to celebrate and something to get out to a much wider community. So that was that was kind of the without remembering the exact details of the first performance. But I think it was Jim that kind of introduced some things here. But I do remember very, very clearly being impressed and very clearly saying, Okay, here's an opportunity to really expose them to a much larger audience through this conference that we had. Did you have any first of all, is all this noise a problem with other doors? Should we do something about it before we go on? Yeah, if you want to do that, they're gonna Okay, that was so great. There were so many different things in what you just said. Did you have any awareness or did anybody explain to you the sort of adversarial relationship that deaf people had with the fact that even as accepting the fact that ASL could be poetic? Like, did you know about that whole cultural linguistic thing that was happening? That was the context for why that was so amazing? Like, actually, no idea at all. No, I mean, to me, it just seemed the first time I said that you know, this is, I mean, this is a beautiful expression of poetry. And it seemed to me a beautiful expression of the deaf language ASL. No idea that there'd be any thoughts that there's there's there's no way that this could be used as a poetic form. Did anybody explain it to you even later? Like, this is the first It's the first I've ever heard of it. In brief, the reason why this is being made or why I'm trying to make it is because before that time, deaf people would they would translate English poetry, they would try to write English poetry. But because ASL wasn't considered a real language, even the deaf people thought that it was less than English. And English is based on sound and rhyme and rhythm and all the stuff that we don't have that in our language. So poetry is English, and they'd read it and not get it because the convoluted way that English works is very linear. And so what the real reason why here in Rochester was even more amazing than you already knew. I mean, you knew it was. And the reason it was even more amazing is because what was happening here was people saying, I'm not going to translate English, and I'm not going to write English, I'm going to generate it in ASL first, because there are poetic forms, there are parallels, Wendy's going to talk about this, that the rhythm and the wit and the rhyme and all that can be done in sign language, it's just done in a different way. And so there was this realization and experimentation that happened here. There were a couple other people doing it in other parts of the country, but it was it was fairly endemic to the Rochester area that this explosion was really happening. And so what you were intuiting was even more right than you knew, you know, that it was incredible, even amongst the death people. Some people were resistant. They had trouble with it. They looked at it with, this isn't poetry, it's something else, but it's not poetry, because poetry is English. It's not ours. It is yours and you're doing it. What you're doing is well, you know, it's interesting because that parallels so many other kinds of voices coming forward. I mean, there was a time when it was the same with women poets, you know, like poetry is the language of men, I mean, as seen by the men, you know, and the, you know, the woman's voice, you know, it should be in the home, it should be about nurturing and raising children, but it should not be about the world. And so, I mean, in the, you know, fifties and sixties, there was a whole, you know, women claiming their voices and, you know, the establishment saying, you know, that's really not, you know, worthy of being seen as great poetry. And the same thing with, you know, with black people, black poets, and, you know, I'm just a number of other groups like that, that have just discovered their voices and the overwhelming, you know, the overriding academic structure saying, no, that's not, I mean, we know what is good poetry, and it's these white men, you know, who are the ones that can do it. So it's very parallel to a number of other situations. Right, and you take white hearing men. Yes, yes, right, yeah, yeah, that's a really great parallel to make, it's true. So you weren't aware of that, and when, had you used interpreters before, because even before the A.S.L. poets, sort of, there were deaf poets, there were some interpretive performance around not remembering if you used them before. Yes, yes, whenever we would have a large, well-known writer, we would get an interpreter to interpret for the deaf. And, you know, we may not have that large an audience that would, that would come, but, you know, if there were two or three or four people, then, you know, they were able to have the experience of, you know, that writer, and whatever they were saying or reading from. So we did, you know, we did have interpreters prior to the, you know, the deaf poetry movement here. And I mean, at that time, I remember, you know, looking at, you know, the interpreters as they were interpreting, and just sort of saying, well, you know, that's really interesting to watch, you know, and you kind of would hear, and especially if it was, you know, like, if there was a word like, fuck, you know, and so, like, everybody in the audience, you know, would, their eyes would go, how are they going to interpret that, you know? So it was, you know, there was that, I mean, nobody, I mean, I started to put a two and two together to say, well, you know, that would be wonderful as a separate kind of thing. It was just that, it was curious to see how, you know, the spoken language was interpreted through the deaf. And that was really my first experience was through interpreters who were interpreting something that I was, you know, hearing from a hearing, you know, writer of some kind. Did you ever, did you feel from your, from this whole experience that you understood more about the culture of the deaf in any sense? Like, you were getting a read on the language and that it was beautiful, and it was interesting to listen to, like, somebody voice it in all that kind of sense. Did you feel like it, did you got any more of the sensibility of what deafness was, or what the oppression was, or any of those sorts of issues? Well, yeah, I mean, as a result of, there were a couple of things. I remember through, you know, through Peter and, you know, through Kenny, I mean, getting a sense of how difficult it was for somebody who had been deaf since birth to kind of learn to kind of write the English language, the written language, and have a sense of the grammar and things like that. And it just sort of made me think, well, yeah, I mean, it's true. I mean, you learn the language first, you know, as you're growing up by hearing it. It's only when you get to be, what, five or six years old that you're suddenly starting to write, but you have this whole background of, you know, how things are said in the grammar of it. And so suddenly I had that, you know, experience of thinking, boy, that must be difficult. Can you imagine coming across a language that, you know, suddenly you have to write it out and you have nothing really that's prior to that. So I did have a sense of that. And then I also had, as a result of it, the sense of the feeling within the deaf community that, you know, this is our own community. And it's not as if it is, it's not as if we're, we're less than everybody else because we cannot hear and speak the language and that this language, this American Sign Language is our own language that we want to embrace as our language. And even if, and this was kind of, you know, the first time of hearing and thinking about it, even if cochlear implants were available, you know, to say, no, you know, this experience is its own true experience within this deaf community. And that, that is enough. It shouldn't be that you have to then, you know, try to make somebody like the hearing community. So I, you know, as a result of it, yes, I mean, I, you know, all these kinds of issues were ones that were spoken about that I was, you know, kind of thinking about and hearing about from, from deaf people or from hearing people who were, you know, at NTID, who were, you know, the person who were the interpreter. So yeah, suddenly it was like a whole culture that I was unaware of. And the issues of being part of that culture started to be come forward to me and get to get an understanding of it, yeah. The timing of it is really interesting because right around then is when the deaf president now stuff was going on at Gallaudet and all this sort of like deaf pride stuff was happening. And this thing of ASL, you know, like a banner. Yeah, the reason it all happened at the same time Jim Cohn kind of describes it as a perfect storm. It's like it's the right place, the right time, the right people, the right energy, the right political moment, the right coalescence of all those things and this understanding that, you know, our language is a language which had been linguistically verified by some researchers at Gallaudet, like 65, 66, but took about percolate outcomes, you know. And then all these students who are from schools for the deaf or mainstream schools from around the country are coming together in this place. And it was like a slam in itself being in this community with so many deaf people. It's like all this great energy in one place. Yeah. The other thing I remember which funny about that time which I thought was so interesting was the idea that the French used ASL where the English in England did not. And so that there was a better ability for you know, deaf Americans who understood ASL to communicate with the French who were doing as opposed to the English which were doing like the spelling out of letters, you know. And I think that's interesting. Like here's this communication that goes on better than, I mean for us to speak to French people hearing people, you have to learn French or they have to learn English. But you know the British, we can always speak with the British even with their funny accents. But the idea of American deaf being able to speak like immediately with the French deaf was kind of a fascinating kind of thing for me. Just a little tidbit that kind of. That's almost right. Almost but not. Almost right for quite what happened was that ASL, what happened was that there was a French educator. There was the first schools for the deaf in the entire world were in France. And Gallaudet, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet or had gone over to France to learn methods, brought a deaf man from there over here, started the first school for the deaf in America, Connecticut. And then all the kids who had their own sort of signs and home signs and their own regional things came there, took what they already had. And then this French guy taught them some stuff that got French language mixed in with it. So the reason that they can communicate, so it isn't because it's exactly the same, but there's a lot of French sign language in ASL. So it's not exactly the same. You're very, very close, but it's not like it's exactly the same, but there's so many signs that are similar. And the grammar is very similar, that it is a much more immediate ability to communicate them for sign language and a lot of other sign languages around the world because they're different in every country. Right. Yeah. And you brought up cochlear implants, which is a big, big hot topic. Which is something I've never would have even, you know, known about or thought about without having this experience with deaf poetry. I basically everything you said was exactly what I needed. I can't really think of anything else unless there's anything else you'd like to add about any of it at all. Anything that comes to mind that you'd like to. You said some wonderful things I'm going to pull out already, but anything else you'd like to add? No. I mean, it's just, you know, I remember just that loss actually when when Peter moved away and just kind of thinking, wow, this is, I mean, this is was something which was so wonderfully of this area and of this community. And then, you know, without having the continuation ongoing on a regular basis with flying words was just I remember just feeling that very personally as a big loss and a loss for the overall kind of poetry community in Rochester. So whenever they get together and do it again, I'm always, you know, excited about that. They'll be in town in February doing the show at NTIB. And there is a deaf guy in town named Jeremy Coroba just moved out a few years ago from Seattle who has an open, a deaf poetry series and open mic series first Saturday of every month over at Jitters in Southtown. So he's trying to get it going again. He's got a group called the Preservers and Sign Language Preservation and he's trying to get a deaf poetry scene going again. He's having a lot of trouble. Really? A lot of trouble getting it going. And I should put him in touch with you. You should. Yeah. You could help him out. Oh yeah. He had a gallery, a studio space over on University down at the end of the street, down way, down where it becomes channel, whatever it is down there. Right. And he was putting out a lot of money and not able to get a lot back. So now Jitters is running at their stage and is doing that once in a while. But I'll put you guys in touch. Please. Because, you know, we would love to, you know, wonderful to have it here. And, you know, there's already there's a big audience of people, you know, who remember that and you're looking for more of it. So, yes. Thank you so much. Wonderful. This is exactly what I need to appreciate it. Great. Thanks. Would it help to ask number one again? Because of the noise probably. That's a long thing we'd have to say again. But if you think we need it, was it at this time? Can you do it, Joe? That whole. That whole. I'm sorry. Okay. If you can, that'd be great. You have to go forward now. Yeah, right. It had a flow. You remember how you began? Jim and then how? And then the banquet and all that kind of stuff. I'm sorry. Okay. It'd be great. That's where a lot of the meat was too. It was just how it all began and who approached you first would have. Were you aware of the Deaf community in Rochester and how did it happen that you got sort of drawn into this whole? Yeah. Well, I mean, I was aware that there was a Deaf community and just aware of it because of Rochester being what Rochester is and there's always Deaf people around no matter where you go. You know, you can be at the public market. You can be at a restaurant. You can be, you know, at a bar with the game on or something. And there's going to be Deaf people around. And it's just, I mean, I think it was one of the really wonderful things about Rochester and kind of adds a certain kind of, you know, something that other communities don't have. So I was aware of that. I wasn't really aware that there was a Deaf, you know, poetry going on at all. But I think the connection was made. There were a number of people like Jim Cohn, Wendy Lowe, who were themselves, you know, hearing writers, poets who were at writers and books doing readings. But we're also out at NTID as interpreters. So they, and at that time we had just moved into this building in 1985 and it was suddenly we had a lot more space than we had had before. Before we had one room. So if we had a class or a workshop, you couldn't have a reading. And so you could do one thing at a time. But when we moved in here, we could have, you know, with three floors, we could have two or three or four classes going on and a poetry reading or some other kind of performance. So suddenly we were able to have a lot more things going on. And it was a time when there was, it was a really active time of people kind of discovering poetry and kind of writing it and wanting to perform it. I mean, it was going from much more of a, you know, you'd be the written poem to there was a real sense now of performance of poetry. And so there was that connection was made, you know, through Jim or through Wendy of, you know, there was this beginning of deaf poetry and to have it, you know, like take place here. And also there was Jazz Berries, which was another place. And so there were, you know, readings and things going on. But, you know, whoever it was, Jim or Wendy, you know, there was a, you know, some deaf poetry evening done here. And I remember at the time just being really amazed by it and saying, wow, this is really unique. And I was aware of poetry all around the country and various movements going on, you know, the beginning of poetry slams in Chicago, language poetry going on out in San Francisco and L.A. And even cowboy poetry, you know, out in Montana and places like that. So there was some very things that were very unique to specific places. There was a certain kind of New York City kind of performance poetry going on. So I knew what was going on. And seeing this, I said, you know, this is not happening anywhere else. This is completely unique to Rochester. And it's really wonderful. I mean, it could, it happens, it's happening here because there is a deaf community that exists of the size that it does. And not only was there the, what even beyond the uniqueness of seeing deaf poetry performed with American sign language and even more of a kind of a body movement, there was the other aspect of it which was having it interpreted for the hearing. And the two of them together made it even more unique for me. And I thought, this is wonderful. This is, this is great. It's, it's, it's something that's grown out of here. This is our own thing in Rochester. And it should get a larger audience outside of here. And I remember the opportunity came along. We had a conference here which was in, I don't know, 1985, 86, something like that. And we had people from around the state and it was done in collaboration with the New York State Council on the Arts. And so when we had the people there we wanted, you know, we had them here for two days, two or three days. And we wanted to introduce them to things that were unique to Rochester. So we had a lunch and we had white hots, you know, so they could kind of, you know, what's a white hot? Well, you know, here's a white hot. And we had Genese beer for them to drink. Here's you know. And then the other thing was we had a dinner that we held at City Hall. So we wanted them to see, you know, this architecture, this wonderful architecture City Hall and beautiful old building restored. And I thought that would be a great opportunity to have them see deaf poetry. But I didn't say to anybody it was deaf poetry. What I said was that you'll be hearing some local poets before dinner. And I remember people saying, oh, boy, we got to listen to the vocal poets. You know, can't we just eat, you know. So before the dinner, I went up and I said to people, you know, you're visiting Rochester many of you for the first time. One of the really unique things about Rochester is that we have the highest per capita deaf community in the entire country here. So as you go around Rochester, you will see people, deaf people signing. And it's a wonderful thing that makes it a unique community. And also, there is a kind of poetry that's grown up out of this that I would like you to experience. So I introduced, it was Kenny and Peter and Debbie Renny. And they performed, and the people there were, I mean, these were publishers from New York and poets and arts administrators. And they were just blown away by it. I was like, oh my God, this is unbelievable. And one of the people there was Gregory Colovakis. And Gregory was the head of the New York State Council of the Arts Literature Program. Wonderful person. The first person I actually knew personally who had died of AIDS, which was a great loss. But he was very forward thinking and really immediately saw what was wonderful and great about this deaf poetry. And afterwards came up and said, thank you for introducing. This is wonderful. People throughout the state of New York have to see about this. And he talked to Kenny and Peter. And as a result of that, he arranged for funding for them to tour throughout the United States and throughout New York State. They did also other places throughout the United States. But throughout New York State, to introduce deaf poetry to audiences around New York. And I mean, that first thing of, yes, this is good. People can recognize it here, how unique and wonderful it is. But also people from around the country and the state to recognize it and to get out and to reach audiences with that. So that's my first memory of how it happened and how to kind of how it went to a kind of a next stage. Great. That was almost everything. The only other thing I wanted to ask was, you did bring Ginsburg in, it seemed to me, twice. Twice, yes. Because one time I interpreted and one time Cindy Barrett interpreted and remember the dinner. Did he ever mention anything about his experience with when he had done that workshop with Bob Panera? There was this incredible workshop that he did where he met with a deaf poet before Peter and Kenny got going, before Debbie got going. It's kind of a seminal moment for deaf poetry when they had this sort of workshop. And he said it made a big impression on him and he told me about that. Did he mention anything like that? Yeah, he did. I remember him the same thing that was just kind of a realization that there is a whole other language out there for poetry that he was unaware of. And that, you know, the signing of American Sign Language. I mean, at that time it was, I mean, what he was seeing being signed was, you know, basically it was just a signing of kind of what would be a basic sort of poetry. I mean it wasn't poetry that was designed for American Sign Language that much. But I remember him being very impressed by it and thinking, you know, this is, yeah, I mean there's something really unique about this. Yeah, I do remember that. Great. Wonderful. Thank you. Thanks for going through that all again. One more thing. Can I get you to spelling your name? Yes. Oh, you want me to just do it for the camera? Yes, please. Joe Flaherty, F-L-A-H-E-R-T-Y. Executive Director of Writers of the Deaf Community. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Things started to happen to be changing in terms of what ASL was and whether there was even this thing called poetry and as you know there was tension about whether the deaf people would even call poetry. So, just anywhere you want to start talking about where you were at and what you saw and how you got involved with the whole scene? Well, I walked into an English teacher and a poet trying to understand the Deaf community. So, the moment was really right for me because I think there were a couple of moments that made me decide that even though I really struggled with sign language, sign language did not come easily to me that it would be possible for me to continue on this road I had set instead of just withdraw and become a teacher with hearing students. And one of those moments happened early on when I was a communications counselor and I was sitting in an office with a kid and that moment came at the end of the conference when we done everything we were supposed to do when the kid was still sitting there. And I started to tell about why I loved the snow, especially really cold snowy days and about how if you're out in Rochester by yourself you feel really alone and there's no one out and it's really cold and you feel really brave and alone and then you see somebody coming from a distance and you can't see them, it's kind of hazy because of all the snow and then there comes a moment when it all clears up and it's like there's a glass bowl over you and the two of you are alone together and it's like you you just kind of nodded each other and you're the two, you're the only people in the world you know and I was able to tell that and for the first time I felt like myself in the language as a person who is articulate and says things poetically and it was even better in sign language than I could have ever made it in English because of the spatial relations and the visual nature of what I was trying to communicate and so that said after that moment I remember this huge feeling of relief you can be yourself in this new language and then I got to know some people and I didn't know Jim very well and Jim had this idea that he was going to do something with Deaf poetry and he was talking to me about it and I was like oh I know somebody else who's interested in it it might even have been Ken and Jim was like well if they're interested in it why aren't they doing something with it and I thought this guy is interesting so when Jim started organizing to have the conference we were friends by that point through the poetry community because he was writing English language poetry and publishing action magazine I had started to have some Deaf friends because there was this sign language poetry thing happening I mean this happened gradually through all of this and because I had something in common with somebody who did poetry it was not an artificial attempt to have a friendship and Jim came to me one day and he was really frustrated and he said everybody's giving me a hard time everybody has a different idea of how to do this and then they don't show up to meetings and I said and I think he was meeting with Debbie and Peter and Patrick Graebel and there might have been one other person who said Jim you want this so badly but it isn't yours it's the Deaf peoples so you have to call their bluff you have to say I want to do this but I can't do this alone so if you're not supporting me because they were all like what are you going to do what are you going to do and when he finally said what are we going to do this is yours if you're not interested even though this has been the whole reason why I learned sign language it isn't happening then it started to go and I thought that was you know a big moment because he is a very visionary person and a hard working person and he was going to make it happen but he needed to make sure he had buy in and are you speaking of the times like Jazz Berries and getting the painted rope thing on the top I'm talking about the conference the conference itself in deciding to do the conference because that was a pretty major effort it took collaboration among a lot of people how about before that when he and Todd put together the painted rope series painted rope series where he was bringing interpreters in to show the deaf people the hearing poetry and then started incorporating them I was one of the hearing readers I was one of the hearing readers and I think that might have been the time Donna interpreted for me and there are a few people who were interpreters who really were wonderful poetry interpreters because they understood what they were interpreting and they got I think to be very very good interpreters by being able to be so flexible with the way language works in poetry and I felt really privileged to see their work so when there would be big really important poets like Alan Ginsberg in town to see them interpreted by really good interpreters really expanded my idea of how sign language could work and the same thing the other way around I was not good enough at that point in watching sign language to necessarily get it all without a voice interpreter nowadays I really wish there were no voice interpreters but I understand that not everybody you know what I mean but at that point I really needed the voice interpreters and the other thing that made it possible for me to learn sign language and I've since learned that this is how I learned Spanish if I learned French better this is how I learned French I had to look at the poetry because for me maybe a little ADD I get bored easily so watching people talk about what they're going to have for lunch on a videotape just doesn't do it for me it's not media enough language to watch again and again and try and get the language out of but watching watch Clayton Valley's stuff I would watch Patrick's stuff I would watch Teddy's stuff over and over and over again until I understood every little nuance and you know the 50th time through I'd see something I hadn't seen I had to watch it again and again and I could do that because of videotape and it really enriched my American sign language enormously because I memorized those poems it gave me a repertoire of moves in the language that I wouldn't have had otherwise so you felt like you even got better at it's a really interesting way to look at it you learn the language by looking at the poetry and the poetic constructs to how the language works because it breaks it down and it's so distilled right, it gives you more of an idea of the everyday in my games that's cool and just even the grammatical structure is there I mean I'm not saying I didn't have to do a lot of other things to learn the language but that's where the real joy in learning it other than in conversation with real people was were you aware of the tension at the time about whether what these people, what Debbie, what Peter whether it was really called poetry or not and you can talk a little bit about that well the poets never had any real question about it I think in certain ways I mean the deaf people didn't, there was this kind of thing well there was a kind of a resistance to poetry because poetry had always been the enemy in English class it's the stuff you don't understand because it's based on English and then and the desire to call what we do differently then there were the people the same people, I think there was some resistance from the people who were like is ASL a language is this poetry is this really poetry it was not major out there but it was kind of like this can't be the this can't be the equivalent of English poetry I mean it doesn't have a you know millennia of heritage in it well bullshit but you know I mean because most of the people doing it were bilingual and it had a millennia of heritage from that and it had a history within the deaf community too just because we didn't have records of most of that doesn't mean it didn't exist so I never had a lot of patience for that argument what was interesting to me was the tourist view versus what Peter and Kenny and Debbie are doing is not poetry but what Clayton Valley is doing is poetry and when I did my thing about duets I got in trouble because my example was Peter and Debbie and they said yeah well that's very interesting but that's not poetry and I said two things first of all I think it is poetry I think it's performance poetry it's just a different kind of poetry than the sonnet yours may be a sonnet and this is a performance pump secondly I may have the wrong example to prove it to you but I think my duet theory is still right with any example and the theory was basically that the same rules that apply the linguists had come up with this stuff about how you use your hands in sign language you have to use them doing the same thing simultaneously doing opposite things or one has to stay still while the other moves I think those were the three and I was trying to show that when you do a duet for the same visual reasons that the audience can't take it in any other way you either have to pass the movement on you stop and I start or you have to be doing the same parallel thing that I'm doing or the opposite thing that I'm doing or then it turns into a dialogue interaction but that stops, starts, stops, starts too so that was kind of my theory but it was being people were like being skeptical about it because it was Peter and Debbie doing something that looked like acting and is this resistance coming from that community or your community do you know I think it's coming from the legitimacy issue everything that is done around ASL in that time was a bid for legitimacy for the language exactly so if it was going to be a legitimate language it had to have a literature and then of course the argument is what's the canon, what's legitimate literature and if it doesn't look like Robert Frost are we going to get legitimacy for it now interestingly I don't think Clayton was the heavy hit around that one I mean Clayton I think was pretty accepting but he was questioning you know and I think Clayton Valley I think the world of Clayton Valley I think he's an amazing spirit you know so but he was questioning it and it was mainly was it the Sopalas or I can't remember there were a couple of people who were born deaf of deaf families who were really like trying to say this is my trademark this is this is what it is because this is what I do and I felt and there was questions about well Peter hadn't grown up with sign language that was an issue and neither had Debbie so how could what they'd be doing the question wasn't and I as a hearing person who knew a modicum of sign language my question I think their question wasn't so much was it poetry but was it ASL because to me it was poetry there's a book called strike a blow and die the story of the John Chilembwe Uprising and I think it's in Malawi or something it's in Pigeon English there are times when you can't even understand what he's saying but it's beautiful it's absolutely beautiful and I challenge anybody to say just because it's not a perfect example of native speaking of English that it isn't a great work of literature so that's where I'm coming from it's like Emily Dickinson says how do I know it's poetry at the top of my head comes off it's poetry and you know the rest I leave to the linguistics people and talk a lot of people that keep coming off the top a lot of hot debate about it did you so go a little bit more in your duets a little bit more about that well basically it was I think it was that I was fascinated that you could do a duet I was seeing this happening in performance poetry in English where people would be talking over each other I'd be talking and Todd Beers would be talking at the same time and sometimes that worked but mostly it didn't and so I was interested in what do you really have to do to have a good duet and I think I think I would argue that the stuff that was crossover where people were talking over each other where I'm reading one poem and he's reading another poem simultaneously it has musical interest but it's not accessible poetry it's language poetry language poetry where you're playing with how language works and not I'm not saying that's not poetry but I think that in most duets there are some rules about how you get something across so that the audience can actually take it in or take it in and so what you saw I'm assuming that the one you're talking about is psychotic memory I think so yeah hamburger slash hamburger slash yeah yes yes that one did you also look at there was the the poet from Quebec who came down Johanna and Sarah I did see them but that wasn't part of your work they did do a thing where they did a beautiful nature scene it was like a duet also I think I looked at that too but I didn't use it as my example it would be another one I was drawing conclusions from a very small set of examples what's going on yeah in duets there wasn't a lot I know that NTD did stuff where there were group homes where they created images stuff like that but it wasn't a sustained it wasn't a sustained thing that you're talking about that took it to the thing right and I don't I haven't seen a lot since the breakup of the Debbie Peter team was a big blow because they were doing really interesting stuff Peter and Kenny do a piece called E equals MC squared yes I've seen that I don't know if it would fit or not because they create so many things that are the image only comes by both of them being part of it not by playing off of each other and there you've got another factor what you've got is tableau that's another thing you can do in a duet you can stop the frame and give us a tableau picture and then some part of it can move ever so slightly but it's not like you're both saying different things does it extend so a tableau would also extend to well there's Serge and Johanna and Peter and Kenny doing the holocaust piece and there are several parts of that I haven't seen any of this stuff in so long it's hard for me to remember and I remember Kenny having this trouble too you know we would run it up the flagpole as an elective and not always get a class and I remember one time I had Debbie doing a class and I wanted to get a lot of people in to see her she was going to teach how to create poems and sign language and teach about transformations and all of this other stuff and I finally figured out because I had somebody else I might have had Peter doing a workshop and people showed up I started charging for it you know and the fact that you had to pay five dollars to be in it meant that people realized it might be worth something you know it's just funny how that is you had takers when they had to pay right and do you remember there was down in the basement there was a little pub like restaurant and there was a a monthly this was before I got the reseller you could talk about that because I wasn't there yet so I would love you to talk about that there was like an open mic no microphone but you know where people would perform and that's where Eddie Swayze really first started performing and doing anything and there were a couple of other people and Rita Straubhauer did a couple of really nice pieces Susan did some pieces just John Nathaniel whose name is escaping me everybody people who had an inkling towards that you know they were kind of interested tried things and there were many things I mean you see this in English language poetry you'll get people who in their early 20s write three or four really nice poems but it's not their life and they never write anything again but because there was this venue where you could try it and people were trying to compose stuff who had never tried before and it was really lots of fun and Patrick would I think they would have a feature person from time to time or maybe every time and Patrick would go down and do stuff one of the things that kind of disappointed me over the years was that people would get a repertoire and then they would freeze it and this happens I think a lot with performance poetry in the deaf world because you get a certain audience reaction and you're going in front of different audiences all the time so you don't really need a new repertoire unless you're writing this stuff for yourself and so a brilliant poet like Patrick has a very small I don't know how you say that French word that means your body of work and it's kind of interesting because what happened was people develop stuff really early on a lot of stuff and then they just kind of had it and they had their explanation for it and I think it suffered some from being studied for being an academic topic so early on rather than just an organic community art because it was an academic subject it was being looked at so closely people were maybe not as experimental as they would have been with some exception Interesting, I know Peter and Kenny were hard to keep doing stuff and Debbie considers herself although she's teaching and she's doing a lot of other stuff in the suite and she still considers herself primarily a poet now so she's still very active but Patrick told me I'm tired I don't really do stuff anymore and Ella does just sporadic stuff like I said in the service of her but I'm not even talking about in the long run I'm talking about people produced and maybe some of them had one in they'd written one poem they'd written one poem and maybe it had gotten some play along the way and they'd forgotten about it and then when this whole thing of deaf poetry came up they released that poem and people said oh hi you know that's wonderful and then they maybe made five more enough for a set they put together a set and that was their set and then that became one videotape and that was kind of and of course also who's next was a big issue I mean if there had been a real rush for a next generation right then and there it would have been great but not yeah it's not really do you have any corroda do you know me no I don't that young guy, nice guy very talented is trying to get himself in again in Rochester well and the other thing is I think that the videotapes also had an influence they became the frozen here it is here's the videotape you don't need a live poet you've got but no no the other way around some people had the videotapes and then the schools for the deaf they were so expensive at first so the kids weren't growing up with it so I don't know you know that's a very important point is that and what I'm hoping some of this will do is also like to correct him like he made kids study English poetry in school and recited and learned it and hated that you don't do the many things their language generated in the past poetic form so why would they think that they can create poetry in their own language when they have no role models well and for translating English poetry and not only you know not just to give an ASL equivalent but to say okay something is happening in this poem that the hearing person is noticing and that's all these thin sounds these ease and is that's like if you only use you know lines rather than whole hands are more like ohs and ahs when you're teaching English and you're teaching poetry you can say okay this poem has a relaxed feel like as if the hands were always open it's really it's you know poetry is hard to explain as it is but to have some kind of an equivalent and to be able to say it's like this how would you when you were teaching it that was great what you would just show me there are any other things like that that you were showing you had to do demonstrations of rhythm or rhyme or any of those grammatical features that can apply to ASL and it's on its way what were the sort of things that you would do to remember there is one thing I remember and it isn't really related exactly to ASL but there's a poem by Dickinson that has the great line it's about a snake and you don't know a narrow fellow in the grass that occasionally rides you may have seen him if you did his notice sudden is and then you go down down down down I never see this fellow attended or alone without a shorter breathing or something like that and zero at the bone and zero at the bone just saying it makes you go whoo whoo whoo and I had to say well the boldness wouldn't do it it's the sound that does it and you can see it in the lip reading so you have to have some visual equivalent if you're going to get this across in lip reading you can see that that tension of that E and that you can see it it's got to do with your visceral reaction to what you physically do when you say zero so just being aware of you get a visual equivalent and of course I'm sure you're going to talk about this ASL does something that any hearing person who knows it is really jealous of and that's those transformations I mean you're going to have something about that right? okay well in English you can have a pun and you can have a metaphor and metaphor is when you say something is something and you know but you have to say both things or maybe you don't you say what are your hair with our hair tonic you're saying hair is grass and it's kind of hidden but the best the best example of transformation I think is in Debbie's poem where throwing paint on the sky becomes fireworks becomes ASL and so it's at one point it's a pun where this means fireworks and ASL at the same time it's a pun but they're each transforming into each other and the implication of the pun is that all of these things are the same ASL is fireworks ASL is color on the sky ASL is expression and to have all those things happening at once well I just drool to be able to do that that every language has its own poetic virtues that another language doesn't have which is why it's kind of said that so many languages are dying off I'm not going to have a chance to ask many people this I'm really glad that I get you because you not only know sign very well but you were hearing poetry, you liked the service of those interpreters to entrust us with getting your poetry out oh and it was so much fun and it was a kick-ass experience and I wonder if you could be one of my talking heads about the whole process of working with an interpreter to get your poetry out we were so young and so I mean I don't think we slept much back then and we would get together and the interpreter would spend an hour with the poet just going over now what does this line mean when an interpreter and if it had more than one meaning do we have to do both meanings and people like you and Donna and Susan would ask such I mean such wonderful questions about the poems and make you think more about your own meanings in a way that maybe you hadn't and you had to explain the poem and you kind of like think and it was a poet's dream to have anybody pay that close attention to their poem in front of them I mean famous poets they write their poems, they send them out and they hope people read them and if they're really lucky they're in an anthology or they have a book of their own that somebody reads in a class where they actually pay attention to every word and really get into it and to have somebody very intelligent bilingual in front of you saying what does this mean and being enthusiastic about it and how am I going to interpret that and translate that it was just so much fun it was great ego stroke too and it was fun to have the interpreter there for one thing it allowed you a deaf audience it allowed me to give what I do in poetry to my deaf friends and at the same time I mean you guys were just I mean I don't know if anybody was listening to us at all, you know you were so beautiful up there doing your thing and they were just like that's amazing, you know it made it so much more it gave more dimension to the whole thing and you chose not to sign the stuff yourself oh god you can't sign the stuff yourself no I actually I never was good enough I mean that's not entirely true if I wrote a poem in sign language which I did write a few I did compose a few I would perform it in sign language but I was not necessarily good enough to develop my own translation nor am I a beautiful enough signer nor am I smooth enough to really feel confident that I was doing the poem justice the other thing I wanted to say is Stacy Lawrence and I have been teaching in the summer we teach for the last two years a class in American Sign Language for Kids through stories and poetry and I just really feel like this is the way to learn now I know there are different kinds of brains there are analytical brains who have to learn all the structure etc etc but if they're like me something needy like poetry to memorize to express starts to teach you the grammar starts to teach you all of that and of course you need a human being that you need to converse whether you'll never learn the language it's a very cool guy and that stuff probably came up more in the lit conference in 1991 because all kinds of fireworks went off in 1991 that was just a whole fortunately I'm not getting into any of that at all I'm sticking with poetry not lit and everything leading up to it and then if anybody wants to do all that other shit that can be my guess but my main thing I've already interviewed Ella, Bernard Bragg, Panera, Patrick Gravel I've got Kenny, I'm going to get Peter and Kenny and Valley's gone unfortunately but I have some old photos of him and some old Dorothy Miles now are you familiar with her stuff at all I remember seeing it why what were you going to oh I'm just actually getting the lit name it's all the stuff leading up to the stuff that happened here in Rochester in fact that Ella and Clayton were sort of independent spontaneously generated and somebody could have been some in 1950 somebody could have been something like that but there was no way to know because there was no way to know and there was no gathering and Jim was the catalyst and Jim was the catalyst and Jim is just an exceptional human being that way he's just always doing the next thing that takes poetry to another level Ella and Clayton actually had a meeting, a hurrying about each other and arranged a meeting so they could meet and say, I heard you do a poetry and I'm doing it too they found each other Clayton, Clayton I'm not sure I've seen everything like Clayton, I need to go and check it out it will lend fuel to your fire about the frozen aspect because one of the things that happened with him is that his stuff is absolutely beautiful and his hands and the way he does it but he performed it over and over and over so many times it became frozen in his delivery but he believed in that though he believed so that there was hardly any progress well you know it's interesting because there's this debate in the community about whether you do a poem, whether you do there are people who make a lot of money doing a story with exactly the same donations over and over and over again and then there are people who say that's not storytelling storytelling you respond with your audience etc etc and change it according to the occasion and certainly in freezing the way you deliver it you are making it like paper and Lois Lois Bragg was it? she argued that the American Sign Language communities storytelling and poetry was like in the old days in England Anglo-Saxon language there was no way to write it down and there were these traveling troubadours who would gather a circle of people around and then things that people asked for and things that people said influenced the performance and then there was the Latin literature that was high culture and was written down on paper and it was in a book and therefore it was valorized as better and I think some people like Clayton felt that by freezing it they had created something the equivalent of page poetry and I don't have a lot against that but I like oral culture I like interactive culture or in that sense face-to-face culture and the adaptivity of that but it's nice to be able to freeze it on videotape because if it does change then you'd like to see the next iteration and how it's changed because 9-11 happened for instance you take Patrick Graybill's thing with the space shuttle I can imagine him creating a new poem where he puts those two together 9-11 but it's not going to happen because the idea is you do it the same way over and over and over again and not to get too deep about it but one of the things I really like about Seneca religion is that it's not frozen at the midwinter ceremony people are allowed to bring up their dreams about how the ritual should change and there's something about being the people of the book as Jews and Christians that means that we're not very adaptive when things are frozen on paper it's not that flexible but that's going to a whole other that was awesome that was great there's so many parts of that that are really perfect you might see Lois Brad came and did her thing about how ASL was the same as the Trubidor it was the illegitimate illegitimate the illegitimate language of the people but that's so rich I interrupted you when you said that I don't want you to say that again without me interrupting you Lois Brad did a presentation where she talked about this and she talked about how ASL was the illegitimate language of the people and therefore it was not given the same value as Latin or French but that oral culture that's so rich that's where stuff bubbles up from and it's so responsive to the moment you know I'll ask you did you feel that your own poetry or your own creative growth was furthered by your involvement in this whole thing I just had the funniest feeling and that was of the deep sadness because I'd have to think about that it was a really wonderful time for me and I miss it when I get together with Stacy and Teach I get in contact with a part of myself that I don't because I don't have that other than when I see friends etc I don't have that much connection but with the Deaf community or with sign language anymore and there was a young idealistic poet back then and I probably created a lot more back then partly because I was part of this community Deaf and hearing together who felt they were what they were doing was important you know you can often feel as a poet or a writer putting something on paper who cares you know who's going to look at this who cares and that time was the growth and we now see this slam poetry and all this other stuff happening with performance but that was the first time the poet said let's take it out of the closet I'm sure they've done that in the 50's too but let's read it and let's see people's reactions face to face and on the one hand I sometimes felt like I was writing for a very narrow audience and therefore I was limiting my writing but on the other hand just the idea that somebody cared you felt like with the sign language poetry stuff you felt like you were part of something historical happening that had needed to happen up until then and would be needed by posterity and so you know you felt like you were really a part of something and the parties were good you know we had a good time we had a really good time yeah thank you you're welcome thank you wow alright I didn't know that was in there now I miss y'all you know yeah well we did it some great times certainly did and I think that you know I have this sign of pain in me that when I got here I just think I thought this must be happening everywhere else my body just did not exist and to have a language