 Okay, what's your name, sir? My name is Todd Beers. All right. And what are you doing right now, Mr. Schuster? What's your job right now? I'm painting, paintings, and then writing, and doing a little teaching. Okay. And when did you, how long have you been, what you would call a poet, like what you used to say? I'm a poet, and I'm a poet, but that's what I am. I think people started referring to me as a poet in maybe 85, 84, something like that, the 80s. And were you from Rochester? Did you start out here? Yes. You're from Rochester, Virginia? I'm from Wayne County. Pardon? A lot of snow in Wayne County. There's a lot of snow in Wayne County. How did you meet in Cone? How did you guys start out together? I guess they met him at a poetry reading. And Jesus, Jim Cone. Well, he had Action Magazine. I was affiliated with Writers and Books. He was affiliated with it. And he, I guess he's my publisher. I could think of him as my publisher. He published some little poems of mine. And it gave me a lot of, he took me seriously, you know, as a poet. And that really didn't quite happen before that time. So I guess he really opened me up a lot and gave me hope, you know? Like he did a lot of people back then, I think. He took his poetry, poetry in general, very seriously. I think I remember Jim saying, I love this quote, poetry has been my most faithful bride. And ain't that the truth? That's cool. That was his quote? That was his quote. I remember that, yeah. How did you guys come to create the Painted Rope series? And why was it called that? A few of us did something at the Old Snake Sisters on South Avenue. The 12 and a half cent poetry series. And at that time, there wasn't all these open mics, you know? I think there was something at Writers and Books, but if you went outside of Writers and Books, there was, we were it, you know? There was like 10 or 12 of us. And I think maybe we asked him to read there. He found out about it. And then we decided just to do something together. And I was doing these constructions in the basement. And I was framing whatever I was doing with rope. And I was painting it like four o'clock in the morning. There's Todd on his knees in the basement painting these strings and ropes like purple with my hands, you know? And then we were talking, I just spilled my coffee. We were talking, he said, what could be a name for the poetry reading? And I said, how about Painted Rope? I like the alliteration, the P. And he said, OK, he was pretty easy to work with, you know? And he let things just kind of happen. The original intention of the series. Son of a bitch. Sorry about that. Pardon? What was the original intention of creating this series? Particular kinds of writers or...? Well, he was involved with NTID. And so he incorporated some death poetry, which I wasn't aware of at the time. And so we put the two together and created something that I've never, I never saw before. And it was a big influence on my work being exposed to the death poets. So I want to ask you a couple of things. I'm going to ask you one thing. First of all, you had never been exposed to sign language or death people before this time? Not at all. Not at all? Not at all. I don't even think I saw sign language at that time. Maybe with Jim talking to somebody and moving his hands. And it was like, what the hell is he doing? It was a totally different language for me. But I loved the dance of it all. There seemed to be a dance quality to it. When you saw death people doing the poetry, did you have an interpreter work with you? Was your first experience with the whole translation thing working with an interpreter? Or did you see some death poetry stuff? Yeah, I think I was exposed to maybe Peter and Kenny doing some stuff together. And you had mentioned a couple of minutes. And I thought it was cool that Kenny was there for me as a hearing person. So I kind of flipped the switch on the whole thing. So I could be, it was like I was the one that couldn't hear in a way. And in a way I wasn't. I was the one that couldn't hear. So that was nice of Kenny. I thought so. I thought he did that for me. And he did. The whole process of watching interpreters on stage and then working with interpreters yourself. Well, working with them made me really think about what I was doing and what I, maybe not my intent because I think a poem is smarter than the poet. So it made me realize what the poem was trying to say to me. And I never really took it to that level before. So it was an education for me, I think, working with an interpreter. And it was you I worked with. And you would ask me a question. And maybe an angle that I never even thought of before. Because my intent was to create an image. And I might leave it at that. But then the image would either obviously symbolize something maybe that I didn't understand or was what was the image saying or what was the friction between these two images, perhaps. So it made me go deeper with my own work, I think. Or with the magic of art. It made me see it, perhaps, better, I think. Oh, I know. I know that. And watching the work was the William Carlos Williams line in Things Not in Ideas, Show Don't Tell. And that's where hearing poets miss the boat. It's not about the thought. It's about the experience, I think, for me at least. So when a poem moves me, I have an experience with it. A thought doesn't really move me so much. But if I can see it or hear it, or it evokes some of my senses, then there's an experience there. And a deaf poet, in a way, has an advantage. Because you have to go to the image. It's kind of like when I worked with kids in the hospital, some of them were chronically ill, some of them were going to die. We didn't have to deal with all that bullshit in between. They were already there. So we were there. We got it already. I didn't have to teach them about things. And a deaf poet, they're already there as well. Because they have to go to the image. They have to know what they're saying. There's no, I mean, there can be ambiguity where there's two things being said, or you could take things on this level or on this level. But they have to go to the image. They have to know what they're doing in a way. It's a lot more than an idea. It's a heck of a lot more than an idea. And I wouldn't listen to a poet speaking. I would always look at the interpreter when I was in the audience. It allowed me to see the poem better. It was almost, I could hear the poem, but they interpreted it for me in a way and gave it more substance. And the poem began, the poem danced through the interpreter, which was an experience for me. They were very, very moving for me. For the point of view, one interesting thing that we went through was that when we worked with you guys, it wasn't just the cerebral kind of, all right, I'm translating, I have to put it out in this language. It was like putting on your poetry like it was clothes because we had to embody it. And so sometimes I would have experiences where I would interpret somebody's stuff. And I wouldn't feel that I really got it. I didn't really get, I'm not that person. I knew how to make an image to convey to the deaf people. But I wouldn't really get it, but I would feel it because I wore it. And I know that your stuff was like that for me and Jim was a lot like that for me, that his stuff was so multi-layered, images, images, images, and I wouldn't always understand. He worked like Sergei Eisenstein, you know, montage, montage, montage, and that the overall thing is what gets you after this huge bombardment of stuff. So I wouldn't understand sometimes why he would put these things all together, but I would convey it and do it pretty, I would work my ass off and get to do it as well as I could, put it out there for them to feel what they would feel from it. But I would have felt like I went through World War II. Whatever the feeling was he was trying to get, necessarily get the point of it, but the feeling of it was coursing through my body, like wearing a cloak and then... That's beautiful. So from our point of view, I wore your great old... You ate it. I mean, you, how brave, how brave an interpreter is. And to have my poetry worn by someone is what an honor that was for me, especially as a young poet, or even as just as a young man to have someone take my art that seriously and to experience it. And I must say that the deaf audience took to my work more than a hearing audience. A hearing audience can just be there without being there. The deaf audience is there. Every thing, if they're looking, they got it. So they have to go to the deeper meaning of the poem. They have to go to the heart. They can't just kind of let it go in one ear and out the other, as they say, you know? So the whole deaf culture, without me knowing, I know this is boring. It's about, maybe that's about all I know, but they really influenced me a lot. And probably influenced me as a painter as well, you know? A bit, I think, if I think about it. Yeah, and just how they reacted, I could read tell that they were into the work. They got it the way I got it. And they let me know that they reassured me that I got it. They reassured me that I was actually doing something. I was actually doing something, you know? And the attention, the attention to the art, it wasn't lip service, how poetry can be sometimes, you know? It was, they internally got it, you know? But I was always after the image myself. And I think a lot of hearing poets like ideas, you know, go back to that line. And I don't think that's art. I don't think that's poetry. And yeah, they would come up and talk to me a bit. You said it influenced your artwork as well as your poetry. Did you intentionally become much more of the images, stronger images in your poetry and leave maybe the verbiage that you think was simple? Or how did it have an effect on you? On the poetry? Oh, poetry. Oh, just, I think it's mostly the attention, the attention they gave to the image. And let me think about it for a minute. How did it, how did it really, how did it really, really do it? I think being understood, you know? I think being understood. I write, I think I write to connect you know, that internal world with my outer world. And I really think it allows, the art allows me to feel like I'm actually here. And as whole as I could be. And for that to be appreciated, for that to be understood is love, is life. So I mean, it goes beyond the art. I mean, what's the difference though? And for me to be there or here and to have them really paying attention and appreciating that I'm there as a person, you know, is a gift, is a gift. And we're not here that long. And I think deaf people might be forced to understand that better in an abstract way, in a roundabout way. And it's more direct. It's more direct. There's no manipulating. Oh, there's manipulation. I guess art is manipulation to some extent. But there is, it's manipulation, but it's truth, you know, I think. So it's not so much influenced me as what direction to go, but influenced me to keep being myself and follow it, you know, and to keep following it. And it's the attention. It's the intent. It's the attention, which is that gives life. The detail, right? Everything's in the detail. Even God, they say. And then that's what art is about, is the detail, the speck, the Leonard Cohen about that speck of dust that you get to see once in a while in the light. It's all there, you know? And they just reaffirmed it for me, I think, no doubt. No doubt. Come into that group, as well as the very active, hearing and cultured community that was here in Rochester for the time of the size. There was so much going on in your series. Was the painting rough one also the same one where there were like three or four at night and there were a whole bunch of folks? Right. It might there be three or four and there were tons of us interpreters who were working with several, you know, guys. It was some time, wasn't it? There was so much. It was wild. There's nothing like it now, you know? Everything's just gotten split and, you know? And I used to think, well, I'm just reminiscing about my own life and how great it was. But I mean, it was freaking happening. You know, it really was. And we took it seriously. And we meant it, you know? I mean, really, it's what we did. And it was an education. And there were, there were, you know, we brought people in from out of town and everything was interpreted. I'll never forget Jim Cohn interpreting. And we had music too. I remember Jim Cohn interpreting a rock song once. I've never been so frightened in my life. I've never seen anything like that. The music was, it was hard, some kind of hardcore stuff. And it goes back, it just goes back to feeling it, having to feel it in here. Because how Jim was interpreting it, he was interpreting it like, I've never seen anything like it. I just want to write in me watching him. You know? Frightening. If it's frightening, it's frightening. If it's love, it's love, it's bittersweet, there's no denying it when it's interpreted. Isn't it just the word interpreted is interesting to me, you know? Interpreted. Everything should be interpreted, shouldn't it? A little bit? Or not at all, maybe. Or not at all. But no, yes, interpret everything. Interpret nothing, I don't know. And you know, we would bring in like someone like it, is it Elaine Eileen Miles? Or a Bernadette Mayer, Meyer Mayer? Some, we would bring in pretty big poets who had a career already going on. And I don't think they were exposed to what we were doing. I mean, it was an education for people that came in from out of town as well that already were well on their way, you know, with careers probably more advanced than ours, you know, at the time. It opened up a lot of, it just opened up a lot of things for people. Remember the poet about the space shuttle 20 years ago, it stuck with me because it was experienced. I could see it in this, you mentioned it earlier before the interview where the space shuttle came up and then it exploded and made them think of Kennedy being shot and then the tears came down. And maybe hearing people are at a disadvantage because that's hard to, words are so limiting. You know, I'm up here struggling my ass off trying to get it right. You know, when we're talking before the cameras it's just like, you know, so easy. But now it's like, oh my God, they're so limiting. Trying to communicate with somebody what you really wanna say. And you know, this and then Kennedy and then coming down to say that is it's real hard to make it as beautiful as that with the right words, with the sound, you know, poetry is so complex. So I never thought of that until talking to you that maybe us hearing people are at a disadvantage. In many ways maybe, I think. I think maybe we're the deaf people. I really do. I really do. I really do. Although I would miss my music, hearing music, but maybe that's, I don't know. You get the music though. I knew good Wendy well. Good old Wendy. Wendy was great and she mentioned that each culture in each language has, their poetry has different wonderful merits that are endemic to that particular language that it can only do because of the way it is. And that sign language, one of the things that she would just give her teeth for is its ability to do transformations and morph images into each other. And that whole visual thing that you know, movie angles and all that stuff that you can do with words, it'll take eight million words to describe this image that somebody can do in four signs. And you just see maybe it doesn't have 150 synonyms for, you know, rug, gray rug on floor, dirty or something. You know, but what it does have is putting the image out with different little subtle things so that you'll just get it. You don't need all that. It's so direct and it goes right in you. Yeah, there's less decoration to get to the center of it all, I think. Pictures worth a thousand words, you know? And maybe that's why, maybe that's why it paints, you know? Turn to painting more almost because it is a little more direct even though it might be more complex of what's being said, but it's more layered, you know, that's interesting to me. Good old one, do you? You mentioned Patrick Gray with the space shuttle poem. Do you remember any other of the deaf poets that you saw in the show? You had a lot of exposure to Peter and Kenny and you remember Debbie a little bit, do you? I remember Debbie a bit, yeah. I'm sure it's hard to, without having seen their work in a long time, do you remember any sort of sense you had of what you saw different about each of them or that hate you was certainly about their styles or that was too gaze-y? Well, I remember this other cat, too. He's still around. I saw him the other day at the market. Eddie, I remember Eddie. Well, you know, I think it's hard to, as a deaf poet, it's probably hard to copy, cop a style, you know? You kind of have to be who you are. I mean, it's your body, you know? The body's the poem. I mean, how cool is that? And how do you copy someone else's body? And I guess people are doing it these days, but I'm not recommending it. Everybody was in, you know, the individual has to come out if you're even, if you're who you are. Your body is who, you know, it's not who you are, but it's representing who you are, I guess, and you can't fake that. And that's kind of neat, kind of neat. Words, you know, we can, us hearing poets can copy styles and whatnot, and I guess you can, I'm sure they're influenced by each other. I'm sure Kenny blew the lid up open for people to even do this, but you can't copy Peter, you know? How do you copy Peter? You can't, I don't think. So there was a, maybe there's more of a respect for the individual in a ways, because you're kind of forced into that, it seems, maybe. You know, you're making me think a lot, Miriam. No, that's good. It's good. You have to, I'll have answers for you in a week, you know? Do you remember going to Ramon, did you go to the Bethesda Festival and went home with Peter, was there, and you guys spent the whole time writing on a piece of wood, and you took the piece of wood home with your whole conversation from the whole weekend? Maybe. I wonder if you still had that piece of wood. Remember, you guys were back and forth for about, like, every time I came out to the campfire, you came. Dang, I remember that, yeah. You went hiking, didn't you? Isn't that full? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you took, I remember you taking this piece of wood like putting it in your car. Oh, man, I wish I had that now. I'd love to see that. Well, Peter is, you know, Peter is amazing. I remember Peter, he was like a block away from me. His back was to me, and I yelled at him, because I forget Peter's death, you know? I just forget that I can hear one of the two. He turned around, you know? It was the weirdest thing. He just turned around as soon as I yelled at him. He's in touch with something. And then, I mean, he could read lips so well, but I never, talking to him was like the most natural thing in the world and understanding him for me was the most amazing thing in the world, you know? Just so direct. And there's an emotional level with the deaf poetry too, which we kind of talked about abstractly, maybe, where it just, you gotta be there. You gotta be there, you know? You have to be there. Or don't show up, you know? What's the point? Not too much. I think she was a, not a lot. I know she was a major player in all, and I mean, I've always respected Debbie, but I don't really remember a lot about her. I think she was, I don't know. Yeah, and I think she was away when we started painted rope, maybe, or maybe she was, was she still around? Yeah, I'm sorry, I don't remember too much. And basically you touched on it. What is poetry? Pardon? What is poetry? What is it? It's the, I don't like to revert to quotes, but I think Olson, Charles Olson said it's the only, or maybe we'll say an art, but same thing. Charles Olson said art is the only twin life has. I kind of like that. It's a dance. It's another language. It truly is another language. It's not the, there might be a twin, but it's not, it's not the experience. It's not the experience that, I'm not just taking a picture of what happened. I think a good poem, perhaps, it makes visible what's invisible. I think poetry makes visible what's invisible. It unrepresses, it undenies, it says it's okay to laugh or cry or fuck or whatever, you know, it's real, it's, it's truth. It's truth, I think. It's a deeper truth than like, you know, my hat's brown, but there's a truth involved to it that we don't always get to, you know. Without it, I don't know if I would be here. I wouldn't be here, but I don't know if I'd be here, you know, it was harder than I thought. My hat, yeah, it is, it would've been better if it'd be just pretend, you know, I don't know. I'm always cold, but that was great. I thought you didn't feel the camera spoofed you. No, but it just, you know, talking beforehand, you know, things come out easier. Yeah, so I was trying to hold that. Yeah. I realized it's a mistake, we had this incredible, we had this rich one where we came in and he had asked me about it. They did a great job, but later he said, I don't feel good about this stuff. I think I led you back enough to what I remember he said. So that's why I was like, oh no. But it's just like talking, I could, you know, say so much and then. Eddie Swayze, ASL, well, but I'm using my voice at the same time because I'm being more good at it than people do. Their accessibility also, fair enough. Well, I've been writing poetry and English writing during high school here in the 80s. Maybe, well, high school was in Horsesad's high school near Elmira area in New York. During that time, the book was going on and I discovered Patty Smith and I saw her writing. That was the best thing with her way of playing with words that I start experimenting on my own. When you see some word that, you know, that I wrote poem for a while. Then when I got into NTID in 1983, I discovered Jim Cohen, Peter Cooke, Deborah, I know that. But I didn't think about performing myself. It's just like poetry to, you know, English to ASL and stuff like that. I only signed a song. I've been doing this since 12 years old. I signed a song when I met Jim Cohen and he acted to me. I'm interested in his approaches. Ooh, I've never thought of that. Let me try it. So I went to Jasperi the first time in 1983. I don't remember, but I thought I got into ASL poetry as from Jim Cohen. He was my teacher in the class back then. Homework, writing, homework assignment. He knew it was poetic. So he asked me if I'm a poet. Yeah, he recognized kind of writing. Even my writing English was not so good at that time, compared to now. But he noticed it's poetic kind of writing. So he asked me if that's the other one, but I didn't thought about performing ASL. I've seen Peter Cooke perform and all that, but I didn't know. Okay, I'll give it a try. So ever since I wrote, yeah. And I didn't really sign ASL poetry. It didn't cross in my mind really. I was just signing a song mostly at that time. Well, I signed a song with the music. English was not really a little bit of ASL. Many PSC depend on the lyrics. I don't remember, so I don't know. I don't remember. Well, I did write first, because I wrote it for a long time. And I took it on the poem that I wrote, and translate it in ASL. When I remember, I don't remember the name of the poem. I think it's because the night, I think that was Patty Smith poem. And it was my first one. I had it with me when I was in TID and Jim would act and say, oh, this is small, it's just dark, not a long poem, not complicated. So I would translate to ASL when I did that. I still do some time in this written translation in ASL, sometimes not at all. Back for, they really depend on how they create a process that goes. It was hard at the beginning, and I remember before Rookie Night or somewhere there or before or after, I don't know, taking Peter Cork workshops and stuff. I remember Peter Cork challenged me, he said, don't look up the words, think of the English words, try and say a little bit of pictures. I was challenged, though now I'm much better than him, apparently. But yeah, I remember that the challenge, there was a challenge. Well, I still write. I still enjoy writing. I love playing the word in English for now. I love doing this, I don't know, you know. But I do love ASL also. Sometimes I'm trying to translate ASL, sometimes it's just ASL, from scratch. And think of theater to script writing as for ASL, to, you know, English Shakespeare to ASL. Was it a challenge? And I did it for Tempest back in 1909. Wish at the first theatrical performance I even involved with, I was always a performing artist. The way I'd David Pauly be into Tempest and I'm like, okay, I don't know, I think it's beautiful. And then God have Peter Agarty, who's a brilliant English teacher. I know Shakespeare helped me a lot, so. So I still, I'm doing Signorella now. It's a small production. It's a twist of Cinderella and it's a script. And I have to look at it, translating ASL. So it's really good. And some of the script I see, that I saw in Signorella, English or anything, I don't need that. You know, the concept of the patents back and forth. It's bilingual and very bilingual. And I can talk about Lori Anderson, an multimedia performing artist. She infills me a lot because, of course, poetic should play with the words. But also, I was a symptom of the kid and we're always with that sci-fi thing, our high tech image series and, you know, cybernetic, punky look. And Lori Anderson has a lot of that in her multimedia thing of the video, behind her, the huge video animation for work, vocal recording, change to male voice, the vocoder, technology and violin with binary coded tape. She played it, spoke itself. Listed, listed, listed, things like that. I was like, wow, this is so cool. And she fills me with one example. Now, poetry, poetry I've done in electronic music. I've done a little bit, but mostly, one is using Bjork's one work, Pluto. The name is a very, very short and fast and a very mechanical techno work. And I thought, wow, it could be almost like Lori Anderson's concept, a little bit. And it's using the bike, red light, blinking red light, in the back of the bike, one night, protection, and the biker's right, blinking red light, two of them in my hand and move along the music. Well, I'm not signing a song. I put it down on the sign. I also had a classic battery run, battery run class of light, and I moved, very robotic looking. People loved that. And I did that recently, a couple of weeks ago, a month ago, for one small group student. But I also did it back in the 1990s for ASL Cafe, at Commerce Cafe. And it was mostly a Japanese student from a Japanese visitor. They all know JSL. They didn't know JSL well. When I did New York, they knew New York. It's very popular in Japan. And when I did that, they could take me like crazy. This was the moment I just danced like nuts. It was like, wow, this is really cool. So Lori Anderson's with me with the idea of music techno. She, though, mine works more simple and cheaper compared to her equipment. I mean, I know it's not rich, like her current portal, which I love to, but I used the idea of what I could afford. And make it more interesting. So I think you might need to contact someone in the lobby of the ASL Cafe back then. And it was David Drum. And he moved to California. I don't know if you can contact them, or Delo Gorellic might have somebody else to check. She had, I think I heard of this. She had the video of me doing paddy smith. People have the power. And a very phenomenal video. I was told I didn't see it, but that was back in the 90s at the ASL Cafe. I don't know, so I have to check the care, really, if they don't step in or not. But I'm sure that I'd have to not come to the idea of having a hard of hearing Brazilian hard of hearing back home. It's a hard of hearing, really. But I don't mind. People call me deaf. It doesn't bother me at all, because I am part of the deaf culture. Anyway, I'm really in deaf culture all the time. So I never, like, go with that. It's done myself really well. It's just that my hearing ability, what the uni are, seemed to enable me to be hard of hearing. It's just that the ability to protect me all the time. The future, who knows. But really, right now, I come to the hard of hearing. Without uni, I'm gone pretty much. Without hearing anything, really. So I really depend on a lot. So I come to the hard of hearing. Or according to, according to signing a song with, I mean, music. The reality is that music has been a part of my life since I was a little kid. I have not changed. And hearing a self, those two hearing aids, much more of this game than before that picked up high frequency is so much better than able to play guitar and electronic music. I love to guitar. But, yet, that doesn't mean that I'm able to sing when the guitar is well. I don't sing well enough to mash the keys. I know that. So I just play guitar and electronic music for fun. I don't expect to be famous and successful with that because I don't have that. I'm realistic to myself and I'm not there. But I still enjoy electronic music in a simple way as possible that I know I can understand how to do it. I use my poem along with electronic music using garage band software and iMac, which is the only thing I have. And I can afford it's already there. I can't afford buy full play and all that. Definitely lorry or mobile. But what I have is what I have. So I used and created electronic music soundscape. It may not be a perfect musical correctness or root or it may not be perfect. And that's fine. I just want the beats and then the side is background. Background, my poetry is good enough. So I enjoy that. So hearing people tend to enjoy that. Seeing electronic music and hearing the work and seeing movement over here and the body language they really enjoy that. I've seen that in a writer's book and just poet organization, which I'm posted to the workshop presenting that 203 of my work at St. John Fisher College of February of next year. And so if I tell people to like it, I can understand that they couldn't get the music and why would I do that? Well, I just love the sound. There's actually a high-priced sound, electronic sound, synthesizer things and spacey sound. I love soundscape, spacey, new age. And that's why I love New York and techno music and lorry anderson has just had a weird beep sound. I just love that Gary Newman, for example, British electronic music. So I'm sure they are. Well, I've seen some hard of hard of dead people that do like a special license. This is the cool and unusual thing and they were fascinated. They may not necessarily mean they like the music and they don't hear it, but they like the visual. The hearing person might like my work, but they don't know if reality is not a perfect music, it's not. And so I definitely may not make music if they don't hear high-priced at all. They may feel a beep as if I did that with a drama club, drama club here. And I get the beat and they enjoy it, but they don't know what music is. I mean, some may not, I'm not saying all of them. They're allowed to definitely have a hearing ability at a different level, they can pick up. I remember one deaf student from drama club who liked electronic music. They liked the sweet sound. He'd pick up high-priced, he'd say, he's hard of hearing. And he'd pick up high-priced and he'd hear sweet sound of synthesizers. They'd say, ooh, that's just thing. So it really depends on the visual and a level of hearing ability they like. Really, it's up to them, really. I'm not striving for to be a top 40 musician. Oh yeah, I've done a lot of those, yes. I have a lot of them I don't know what to do with electronic music. Sometimes both back and forth, sometimes separate. Like Sly Boyd and I Queen, the performance just got published in Eyes of Desire, deaf, hard of hearing, gay, lesbian, by six transgender writers. That thing was written in Transylvania cell. I had a lot of challenges with that, but I have not used it to perform in the audience. I was not satisfied with it. So I have performed that Sly Boyd, dragging home with no voice and just pure ASL storytelling, sci-fi, set up a futuristic new city of a drag queen or really an envoy and doing things with co-co-plan, controversy issues. Performing arts, I don't know. Good question, I have a lot of that. Is poetry performing arts? Well, you know, like Lori Emerson had done, she used poetry or writing that she did, put it in music, it's called performing arts. I could say it's my performing art. The only difference is that she doesn't sign, I don't know. She knows ASL, she knows she's daddy linguistic stuff, but Lori Emerson had done that for PhD in music and literature. She knows some of that, not through an ASL of course, not her first language, to really get into interpreting what you do. So I'm more of using hand. Well, then she's just a voice, I've performed that voice, I don't know. Yes, in a way, my sci-boy drag queen has a poetic form of writing in there, but it's more of a ballad as a story, I guess the story, it sets up the time. You're seeing the future of superconduct cars and all that stuff, but it also has poetic words in it, a change in the ASL, and it also has a political statement at the end of the punch. So poetry is just really meant to be poetry alone and be poetry, because it are poems. When it was written on a ballad or a long verse it has a little story set up. It could be different, yeah. Because poetry in ASL is just mostly playing with the waterers, it doesn't really often set up a time, day, and conflict resolution, like the story, and the story that has conflict resolution, like a position thing, and I learned literature, I taught literature, so I know what that is. So there's the difference. Poetry has metaphors all the time. Stories do, but you can only focus on the time when we are on the acquisition, phenomenal, in the middle of escalation and conflict resolution, and I'm right, I'm like that, yeah. I didn't even have a car that time, yeah. Yeah, that time I was very excited because it was phenomenal, because I didn't think that would happen at all in my lifetime, you know, in that time. And when that happened it was like it was like a movement of that time, you know, explosion, that's the new thing. So I got so excited as I keep going and going, and I ended up performing there some times, and I don't know, I was just a group of people who were a serious poet, performing various actors, you know, and they're just a network, and you have to know Peter, and Debbie, and all that, and it was just a wonderful thing, and all the parties we had after the earthquake, so. Well, I saw him around on campus and he was an instructor and lovely teacher in interpreting and all that stuff, and then when I registered in one class, or writing or English class, whatever, I don't remember, it says TPA, didn't know who it was, it turned out to be him, and I met him and got to know him, and he was a director that I got pulled into Jasper, because he acted me like, because no one in the writing is very poetic, and he saw me attending and seeing Peter and he performed at me, so, so I met him, did it take place in the Panera Theater? Yeah, so I just, yeah, I went and see that, the group panel had a discussion with Ellen West, Ellen May, and Peter Cook Valley, yeah, I remember that, that was great, it was wonderful. Yeah, I was the audience and watching it. I'm a hearing poet, Patty Smith, of course, and I really like Patty Smith, I also like Rimbaud, Arthur Rimbaud, they really influenced Patty, influenced me, because the style, the radicalism of Rimbaud was very radical in the time, and that's when he was very, very commitmentful. The style, the words, the plain words, it's a rock or debunked kind of, avant-gardeism is Rimbaud, it was very, maybe I've always went to the lab as of today, so, depo, I love Peter Cook work, I've seen him several times, even a few years ago, he showed up at U of R's, and I still enjoy his work a lot, and I like that everybody's work, hey, they don't know what some work is like now, but back in the 80s, there was a lot of funny things, mostly political ones, it's tough, some real humor's like I Rape Chocolate, which is, I never forget that poem, it's so funny. So all those two poems were really like, Clinton Valley, his style isn't my taste, really, but his movement, the location is the location, it's beautifully done, and I don't know, his idea, like the season, like the three season, I mean, four season, I just love that kind of, Platt Grable of the work, especially the cell explosion, we can't even be able to have a life location up there, down here, and it's just amazing. Ella, I like her work, it didn't hit me much, really, but one is very humorous by the classroom, and you have, oh, it's really funny, I'll be able to name that poem, I thought it was hilarious. And as you go, you have a lot of space, I like the sci-fi aspect, because that's very much what my slide board directly, I love sci-fi stuff, the sci-fi imagery, sci-fanatic punk thing, you know, that's what I like, and it's so funny, and it's also spacey stuff, I don't know, I enjoy that, but the first Peter Coggett, I mean, I'm like, hey, Grable, great, I'm like, chocolate, and a kale, and a boycott feel, oh, oh, Peter Coggett, so many of them, and I can't think of one of them, like, but they have a poem that really, I like the Ballad of a Bad Boy by Patty Svibb, her writing, tradition changes up to a boy, writing a car, and a wrecking a car, and it's just really interesting, and I gave that slide to student literature class, I was doing both of them, that's really funny, and it's a literary term about person changing, and what they really are, just so I can remember the word, but I'm a literary word with that, but that was a nice poem, and it's just a lot of the poem, I'm like, they can't pick one, really, don't, yeah. When I Patty Svibb poem, it's really, she's sung it, I spoke it, in one of her songs, in the beginning of the live concert in her Easter album, that I'm American artist and I have no guilt, I'd love that phrase, but true, should not be ashamed to be an artist, be an artist, I'm American artist and I have no guilt, I like that. The past and future, yeah. I don't know, I don't know, yeah. During, when I was taking art history, as an undergraduate student, I had to cover Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, futurist, surrealist, surrealist movement, they were focused on technology and advanced technology at that time, I mean advanced now, and I come here to technology, I'm sure those artists would be flipped out to see what they see now, and I'm sure they would love it because they would not even do that at that time, no social computer at that time, in the 1920s, 1900s, but they did a lot of cinematic, experimentation with cinematic things, you know, Marcel Duchamp focused on all the objects and put it all together, and they are right behind me, like that, it has plastic glass, painted on plastic glass, computer-generated images, printed on transparent paper, put it on the plastic glass, see if the light goes through it, dashed, bolted and drilled it into wood, and painted with all the, and computer-generated images of the most smoke stack, if you don't notice what I'm behind, but it has smoke stack and smoke coming out, and all dashed up, and Marcel Duchamp did that with the Bachelor of the Bright and the, okay, I remember, but it's the glass piece, my favorite piece of work, which I didn't see in real yet, I know it's the Philadelphia Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Art, I went over there, but I got this idea that the artwork behind me is just a part of this front close-up of plastic glass work, which you can't tell it's a plastic glass there behind me, but it has a huge piece of work coming to my chain and lit up with black light behind. It was Sleip and Anneke von Moriannis and Nanjun Bright, and also, I mean, back historically, the Futures, and Marcel Duchamp was listening to that kind of work, a poem by Sleip and his Focus on Death Coach, it has a cold-climbing issue, and I have one poem published seven years ago called Bone, it's about deafness and the bones, just the fragility of three bones and the cochlea problem and how it diminishes the sound of the ocean waves and how microsofted it and how beautiful it is, it's how I have one published, and if I'm like, it's any of that, but it's because I got to have it saved in my mind. So I have several poems called Get Deaf Issue, just not so many, because I'm so interested in this other thing, so interested in technology and science fiction, thinking about stuff like that, and political social issue, but I do have some of the deaf issues, like cyber drag, I mean, their mic, the technology, but Sleip and Anneke's deaf issue and the cochlea problem issue, but the other one, it's about deafness only, it's just bones and no music and no sci-fi, I think it's just pure Sleip and Anneke's English a little bit. I do want to stray the problem that people face, of course, I have some of my work to have statement about that, so if not, I don't have doubts about deafness only, I have other things, that's the thing with this poetry, that well poetry is playing with words in English, studying, you play with words and you come up with a metaphor, similar to the last stuff, put it together, try to make aesthetic quality of poetry itself, and how it can be presented as spoken words, or to make it ASL, and I just want to make it translate from English ASL to try to make it beautiful ASL, or from scratch ASL alone, so with a visual imagination in the head, which many deaf people do that or hard to think people do that, which is fine, and it can be approaching and performing our way, using the hand, and most of the hand is finished by the body language, it's not used by voice, it's mostly focused on hands shape, constant hands shape, and location, and classifier and ASL, linguistic concept that could be used, but poetry is different than just sign ASL when you're having conversation, poetry and ASL, ASL poetry, it's just, you just perform it, it's just similar to how you perform in English, phonetically, how you, like Daddy Smith played a role in the vocal elevation, and emphasis, and shout them down, and blame the words, one thing ASL, that can be emphasized when you punch one hand shape or, and just be operated, in a way that's more creative, and just spoken words, or conversation ASL in a hallway, it's a different approach, so poetry is a blame of the words, not necessarily, poetry is a blame of the words, and blame of the words, and blame of the hair, and blame of the imagery, poetry has an image of English, blame of the vocally, and it's a blame of the words, welcome. Welcome. Thank you. Welcome. Welcome.