 The presenter today is Patrick Gravel. Mike is not only in the earphones. The microphone is present, is in the speakers. Patrick graduated from Gallaudet University and got his bachelor's in English. He got his master's degree in deaf education, also from Gallaudet University. He taught graduate school at the Kendall School, and then joined NTD, the National Theater of the Deaf. He was one of the founding members in that theater company. He's been a professional actor for many years and has traveled throughout the United States and all over the world actually. Most recently he's been writing and working on ASL poetry. His topic today is creating poetry in ASL. Please give a warm welcome to Patrick Gravel, original poetry in ASL. Thank you, thank you very much. Are the lights all right? Is everyone able to see me? My top of my head too shiny, or are we all right here? All right, Susan Fisher, who just introduced me. I need to explain that my topic is original poetry in ASL, but I'm telling you I can't write poetry in ASL. She used the sign right, and that is not what I do. I sign poetry in American Sign Language. I wanted to start our presentation at 1.05, and it's 1.12 already. I'm afraid we're going to have to take away some of my topic today because we need to leave it to... I'll figure out how to handle that as we go along. First, I would like to explain what I'm doing today. I have an introduction to my presentation, and then I will go into the history. As I was growing up, what I saw in Deaf poetry, and what Deaf poets were doing, what they were doing with their own original poetry, I'll just have a brief summary of the history of that as I've seen it in my upbringing. Also, I'll discuss the features of ASL. We'll discuss... I won't go into depth on those, but I will discuss those briefly. There are six different features. After that, I will present one of my own original pieces, and we can analyze that together, that poem. And last, I will be discussing what I predict for the future in ASL poetry. I hope that we'll have five minutes left so we can have questions and answers. That's my expectation. Before World War II, I was born... I don't need to tell you my age here, but it was before World War II. I grew up in Kansas, and it's Kansas School for the Deaf, is where I was educated, and I saw many teachers and students reading poetry in English, in written English, and then tried to translate it to American Sign Language, or to sign it. Some were hearing in some deaf. They have... Poetry in English has written rules, and most of the people who were writing poetry in American Sign Language were born hearing and then became deaf. Gino Robert Panera, he's an example of someone who was writing poetry in English and then translating it to ASL. Another man is Rex Lohman. Also, Lloyd Galladay. These are examples of professors... professors emeritus. They've retired since, but there are many other poets as well. Deaf poets who wrote in English their poetry. There are many examples you can find, and I will not... I won't be presenting that in American Sign Language, but they have been written, and they have some derivatives from ASL in the poetry. This is a poem from Robert Panera. The title is On His Deafness. Maybe you've already seen that poem and learned it in English, and you see it follows the English poetry rules. It has rhythm, alliteration. There are these kind of rules that are being followed in this poem. You notice the S's are something that are used frequently in the first two stanzas here. And if people read that poetry, they think, oh, that's wonderful, and then it's printed. It was printed in Silent Network, Silent News. It was published in several different magazines. And other deaf people would read it and have much respect for Robert Panera for writing that. And growing up, I wanted to be a poet and write poetry thinking it would be in English. Even though English wasn't my native language or my first language, I still had the call of writing in English. And I realized when people would correct it that I didn't have the proper English in my poetry. It became very frustrated and decided I would get more into acting. I would read in English poem and then translate it into American Sign Language. When I...actually it wasn't American Sign Language, it was signed, it was more of a signed English with some derivatives of ASL presented in the poetry. And I would include those to hopefully make it a clearer message from the poem. This is another famous poem, Richard Corey. And while I was at Gallaudet University, I went into a... I entered a competition for poetry. That was in 1962 or 63, I think. And I was signing this poem, the first paragraph of this poem. The title is Richard Corey. Richard Corey went downtown. We people on the pavement looked at him. He was a gentleman from soul to crown. Clean, favored, and apparently slim. So I used some signs from ASL, but I still was following word for word quite accurately. I didn't care too much about the meaning. I wanted people to look and enjoy it. They accepted it. They didn't see the difference. Translating poetry. When you translate it for the stage, poetry for the stage, there's a poet that was a student at Gallaudet. And he made reference to how you translate poetry on stage. You need to set things up so that it's sort of like alliteration in English. And he made that comparison. We grew up together, and he was discussing this with me. Then in 1965, William Stokey, who was the chairperson of the English department at Gallaudet University, and there were two other people also. The three of them got together and did some research on sign language itself. And they analyzed the language. And then they shared the information with people about ASL being a real language that happened in 1965. And that was published in a book called The Dictionary of American Sign Language. Now, many other people at that time were really amazed at that because they thought, well, ASL isn't language, but I was an English major at the time, and the chairperson of my department actually announced that ASL was a language in its own right. And I thought about that, and I thought about ASL, and I had thought before that it was good for dormitory life or... but not really appropriate to use on stage. And it really took me years and years to understand what he was saying. But in 1965, onward, William Stokey, his work really influenced the deaf community. And many people after that, after 1965 became very proud of their own language. He was a professor of English himself, but he really encouraged all the students at Gallaudet University to become more creative in using ASL with their poetry. So around 1970, Ella May Lentz, who was another student, became very inspired and began to become very creative with ASL. And then in 1980, around 1980, there were more and more conferences held all over the United States where deaf people were invited to come and present their poetry in ASL. For example, Bernard in Berkeley, California, they had an annual event called a celebration... a celebration where they invited Ella May Lentz, and she went and presented, and I flew there at the time and also presented my poems, my beginning poems in ASL. And that happened on February 1st in 1984, which was a very big day for me because other people were involved too, but anti-ID, which was over at one side of the coast in California, well, anti-ID at the time was here. There was a famous American poet called Alan Gidsburg, who was a hearing man, and also Bob Panara. The two of them got together and they had invited a large group of people, a large group of people came to see their presentation and they talked about poetry and its meaning, and I was in the audience at the time watching their presentation. And Alan showed one poem from a book which was called The Owl, The Owl, and he had written it out on the blackboard with two words, jukebox. One of the words was jukebox, and I looked at the two words at the time and I really wasn't sure why he wrote that. And he asked people in the audience to translate the two words, and I at the time volunteered. Well, at the time other people were saying, go ahead, Pat, go on up there and try to do it. And I thought, all right, I'll try. And it made a lot of excuses why. And I said, I'll try. But there are many, many signs that can show the meaning of both these words. But the two signs that I think are, to come up with two signs equivalent to those, it's really impossible. And Alan at the time said, go ahead, just try anyway. So this is what I signed. You press the button, the record comes out and comes down, then the arm of the record comes down and the music starts to play. And then he gets louder and louder and louder until the record actually flies off and the jukebox breaks. And Alan said, that's wonderful. It's a very equivalent translation. You call it the meaning. And at the time I thought, wow, that's great. Well, after the class, I got together with a hearing person named Jim Cohn, who worked here before. He was also a poet himself. And we were encouraged to set up a class called A Bird Brain Society. And what we would do is we would sign our poems in the cellar of the Ritz, which was a bar at the time, or in the dorms, there was a bar with the dormitories. And there was also a coffee house, a restaurant called the Jazz Berries, which is located in downtown Rochester, where we held this also. And that went on from 85 and it's still continuing to gay. And it's become history now. It's still going on. If you have questions that pop up about the history of the Bird Brain Society and Jazz Berries and so forth, you can ask me later about that. Now, I'd like to move on to my next topic, ASL and the analyzation of it in the classifiers. Now, you know some of you are already familiar with it, but I think we should have a review first of all. Dr. Stokey himself, in the process of analyzing ASL in each sign, notice that signs themselves can be broken up into, they have three distinct categories within a sign. The first is the handshape. The second category is called the location, where the sign is made and location to the body. The third is movement. Then later on in 1975, Madison added a fourth category, which was palm orientation. Well, I'll give you one sign as an example. The sign for hello. First of all, this is the handshape. It has a B handshape. Now, the location where the sign is made, it starts from the head and moves outward. The movement itself, this is the movement that's used. And then the palm orientation, you notice where my palm is pointing, away from me. No, it's awkward. It's not pointing down. It's pointing diagonally. And that was how he analyzed each sign. Now, a poet. Well, first let me put that on hold. I have to discuss something about signing and poetry in the sign for poem itself. This is the sign for poetry. How that sign was developed, it was dealt over many years and it was developed from the English. ASL or poetry, we really wanted to have a distinction from hearing poetry. So they tried to come up with this sign or they thought maybe they could show this meaning poetry. And there were a variety of different suggestions on how to sign that. And finally it was agreed upon to pick one sign as the sign for ASL poetry. We haven't really done that yet, but we're still tending to use the sign, even though it's been derived from English. So this sign for poetry is used to describe both ASL and English poetry. Okay, so I was talking about the sign for a low. Okay, now I remember what I was leading into. Now, deaf poets tended to use the four categories, but they would play on those. And the deaf community really tended to play on these four categories, such as, for example, the ABC stories that you've seen, like A, for knocking at the door, the letter B for opening the door, C means you're listening, and they would use each letter of the alphabet in a sign and play on that during the ABC stories. Now, deaf poets looked at that element of the deaf community and how they played with the signs and the letters and the shapes, and they thought, well, that has rules that have to be followed. Now, who decides on the rules? We haven't really discovered that yet. Really, each poet himself will tend to develop and use his own rules, his or her own rules. Now, maybe someday we will hold a conference and we will be able to set up a definite list of rules for all poets to be able to use, but at this time of that isn't being done. Each poet tends to use their own rules. But really what poets do is they play with the handshapes. I have another example I'd like to show you at this time. For example, the five handshape creates something right now to show you what I mean by this. For example, this is a five handshape using the base or tree, and then continuing with that handshape into a river, and then the sun coming up and the rays from the sun, and the wind and the tree blowing in the wind. That's a poem. Ah, made with the same handshape, the five handshape. And deaf poets tend to play a lot of handshape when they're creating original poetry. Time is going so fast. I wanted to discuss the difference between the dominant hand or non-dominant, the strong or weak hands. The hand that you write with, or your right hand, if you're right-handed, is your strong hand, and then your left would be your weak hand if you were right-handed. Another word's dominant. Your dominant hand. And then your supportive hand is your non-dominant hand. People who are left-handed, the left hand would be their dominant or strong hand, and the right would be their weak hand. Is that clear? For example, the sign for help. The weak hand is just supporting the right hand, the strong hand with the sign. There are rules pertaining to strong and weak hands. If the right hand is moving and the strong hand is moving, the weak hand will follow. For example, the wind. You notice that the two hands are following the same movement. The sign for success. That's one sign. The same hand shape. And the movement is following the dominant hand, that both move moving in the same direction. Pointing to this, the weak hand is just supporting the motion. The right hand is doing the motion. Can you think of any other examples? Example is a sign. The weak hand is just supporting the movement of the right hand. And deaf poets break that rule. Sign language has a specific rule, but in poetry you can use right or left. It doesn't matter if it's a dominant or weak hand. You flip back and forth for poetic reasons, and explain those more in detail in a moment. Classifiers is another feature of ASL. And maybe most of you are aware of that. It's similar to an adjective in English. It serves as a similar function. Sometimes an adverb or a pronoun are different English grammatical features that classifiers take up in American sign language. For example, this hand shape is a person walking. You wouldn't say if there's a woman or a man, so you'd have to say woman, and then move this hand into a classifying movement. ASL poets love to use classifiers so much. ASL depends on facial expression to show feelings. However, within the rules of ASL, there are certain rules. For example, raising your eyebrows is showing that there's a question. There's a rhetorical question. It has specific rules in American sign language. In ASL poetry, however, facial expression is really used minimally. Minimally. And they're much more playful with the actual movement of the signs. And facial expression does not play as an important part as it does in American sign language. On a similar note, if you listen to English poetry, sometimes the meaning, the voice is not following the meaning. You're not using a conversational spoken in English. And that may be a comparison with how American sign language is used in poetry. Deaf poets are using American sign language, but might not be using facial expression, and the meaning would be more obscure. Space is very important for deaf poets especially. They use the feature of space very much in their use of ASL poetry. Deaf poets love to play with fingerspelling. Just love it. I'll give you one example. I have a poem that I'd like to present. I'll let you look at this for just a few minutes, and then I will present it. Reflection. Four. Three. Two. One. The lift off of the challenger inspired me. One minute and 45 seconds later, explosion. My heart halted. The maimed shuttle descended and depressed me. He dawned upon me in 1963. President Kennedy was shot. His body bent. A teardrop. Thank you. Did you see the ASL features used in that poem? I gluted fingerspelling, actually, numbers, and used that with my weak hand, my left hand. My dominant hand is my right hand, but I did not use that for the fingerspelling of the numbers, the countdown. And the reason for that is because I wanted to establish this area as the space shuttle area for the action in that. The next time you see numbers in the poem is representing the minutes going by as the shuttle is going up. I'm still not using my right hand. My numbers are placed in a higher location because that's where the shuttle is at the time. One minute 49 seconds. I wanted to include the motion and the placement of the shuttle in the poem. The third number is the date 1963. That's placed over here and to the back because it's mentioning something that's happened in the past. In everyday conversation, we wouldn't do that. We wouldn't put a date behind us because it happened in the past. You would just say, a long time ago in 1963 and put it in the past tense. So as you can see, we're playing with the rules of American Sign Language. I plan to use the left hand. And in everyday conversation, deaf people would not plan to use a left hand or a right hand. And this is just the tendency we tend to sign with our strong hands. As we're creating poetry, we do change the rules to create certain effects. Setting the date in the past, setting the shuttle action in the one area. As you notice, I'm using two hands. The rocket is going up and I'm being inspired. The two different signs, two different hand shapes at the same time and it's still successful. You notice with the sign wind, they're both the same hand shape moving. Here there are two different movements, two different hand shapes moving at the same time. Also as the explosion of the shuttle goes off, I'm shocked and that those two signs are happening at the same time. And that's for effect, the two different hand shapes and two different motions in both those signs. Breaking that rule of motion into the dominant and non-dominant hands. As the shuttle comes, as the body bends of the president, my teardrop falls at the same time. I have several poems, but I don't think time is not going to allow us to go through all of them. If you want to see some of the different poetry that I have, I have a videotape this for sale. It's called Poetry in Motion. I have three poems there. One is called, there are three poets included in this, Debbie Reddy, Clayton Valley and myself. And hopefully as this time goes on, we can collect more poems and make further videotapes. Now what I've been discussing so far has focused on ASL, features of ASL in comparing deaf poetry with the analysis of ASL as a language. If we had time, really, we had more than an hour, we could also talk about maybe psychological aspects of it. And one of my poems is a good example. It's called Paradox. And it's talking about myself watching a black singer singing music. Now I myself really didn't know what the song was about, but the title of his song was Where is the Man? That's how I watched him. And then later on, I talked about myself and my mother, my mother was a hearing person. She can sign somewhat. She's not fluent, but she can sign. And my father, who's a hearing, cannot sign. And I compared them. It was a psychological poem comparing the two of them. And the song that this man was singing was all done. It was in black and white. And I myself, when I presented my own poem, was dressed in black and white and used the colors to also talk about psychological aspects. Now, what I see happening in ASL poetry in the future, my own feelings on it, is first of all, I think deaf poets will influence deaf people in the deaf community more and more as time goes on. I think the deaf community will see the deaf poets out, playing with the rules and being more creative with poetry and adding. And I think at that time, probably more rules as far as the ASL language will be developed or will be discovered. I also feel, so I feel that will be one event that will happen in the future. Now, the authorship. At this time ASL does not have a written system. Deaf people will present it in a visual way, but oftentimes when it's being used with a voice interpreter, we wonder, well, what words are the interpreters using and there's a real struggle going on and a real conflict sometimes between the two languages. So it seems that hearing people have a hard time watching deaf poetry in ASL and then finding appropriate English words to use, what goes on in their minds and able to be able to do that because poets themselves often might not be clear so there's a real struggle with interpreting and what to do. So really what we need to have is a written system for ASL or a written system that can be used with English. So then if hearing people like such as linguists or interpreters watch a deaf poet present, they're able to do an analysis, write that down, show that to the deaf poet, and then the deaf poet can give their approval for their translation or they can try and make a translation themselves in a second language, which would be ASL for them. So really I think this requires deaf and hearing people both working together to come up with a written system. Thirdly, videotaping needs to become more widespread. I think as more and more videotapes are in use and become widespread, it will really help the proliferation of ASL poetry as we have a file or a library of ASL poems and ASL stories. I think videotaping is really a blessing for the development of ASL and I think as videotapes are developed more and more ASL poetry will be able to be kept in files. In 1985, I think it was in 1985, or actually 1885, or in 1985 there was the first ASL poetry conference was held here. It was an ASL lit conference that recently happened this past October. So I think as more and more conferences related to ASL poetry happens, information and ideas will be able to be shared and I think that will really spread and influence people and also I think it will influence more coursework to be established for people to study poetry and study ASL. I think it will help in interpreter training for those students to be able to learn the language and I think it will help linguists themselves to better analyze ASL as a language. Also, teachers of ASL will be able to use ASL poetry to show ASL its meaning, its purpose and so forth. Well, I think that's the end of my formal presentation. If anyone would like to ask me some questions at this point, I will try my best to answer them. Are there any questions that you have for me? Well, I really have about five or six, five or six minutes left. How long have you been studying poetry before you actually began translation into ASL? So you're asking me how long was it that I studied poetry, English poetry before I was, or how long it takes me to study an English poem before I can translate it? Well, I started as a small boy actually. Now, I came from a family of seven children, five of them were hearing, wait, wait a minute, five of them were deaf and two were hearing. The two middle children were hearing. My parents were both hearing. And when I was born, my two older sisters were teenagers at the time, so they really taught me a lot as far as translating things. So I feel that I've really developed my skill in translation over the years starting from a small boy. There was a question way in the back? Okay, he asked me a question about how I feel about having voice interpreters speaking while I'm presenting my poetry, how I feel about that. To be honest, I feel awkward with it. I feel a little uncomfortable. Have I had any really problems that haven't been able to be solved? No, but it's a really new feel that's been going on about ten years or so, I think. So I really think we need to have more conferences just to discuss that issue of incorporating the voice interpreting with the deaf poets and I really think that will solve the problems. I think probably that the interpreters themselves feel a little bit awkward in fitting in what they're doing with what the deaf poets are presenting. So I think again, the more conferences we have, the more exchange of ideas that problem will be solved. Question here. If a person is aware of ASL, of its rules, do you think that person, just because they're familiar with the language and the rules, can teach deaf poetry and ASL poetry? The question was, if a person knows ASL, has learned it, so is aware of the rules, but doesn't have any experience in the deaf world, should they be teaching ASL poetry? That's not an easy question to answer. First of all, the topic itself about teaching ASL is a course. First of all, I think the person needs to know ASL or needs to know the content very well and they also, to be a good teacher and they also have to experience it. I think the experience, I think a deaf person really is best to teach it because they know the language and they have the experience of being deaf. They have that gut feeling of knowing what it's like to be deaf, so I think those are the best people to teach courses in ASL. Now there are a number of, there aren't that many deaf poets. So as a second choice, I think maybe team teaching between a deaf and a hearing person would be best as a second choice. Maybe one person might be very knowledgeable and skilled in translating poems such as French to English or so forth, the hearing person. If the hearing person were to teach deaf people themselves on how to actually read and translate and I don't think a hearing person can do that 100% himself, he would need to have someone deaf to be able to team teach it to be the most effective way. Are there any more questions? I have experience with theatre myself and I've seen sometimes the comment was made that this person feels that a poet really uses a lot less facial expression and she disagrees with that. She's seen many poets that she thinks they tend to overdo their facial expression in the presentation of their poem as well. That's your opinion and I have to respect your opinion and I myself feel that the facial expression is really reduced greatly compared with everyday conversational ASL. Poets tend to be more formal in their presentations. Are you familiar with the term register, the registers of ASL? Now the one register intimate means you use it with a very casual friend and there's a lot of facial expression is not necessary and then in the more informal, casual you use a little more and then with the consultative register maybe you might go to see a lawyer or a teacher or a principal have a meeting with someone that type of dialogue it's a little more formal, it's more formal than casual then the formal register is used for maybe formal presentations in church and so forth and then the last register is called frozen such as established prayers or for example Robert's rules of order something that's very set the appletch to the flag a frozen style so you can see the difference from formal down to consultative as you move in the registers to the more formal there is less facial expression but as you move down to the more intimate levels there is a real change of how much or how little facial expression is used so I think itself the deaf poets present in a more formal style so they would use less facial expression question in the back how does poetic license apply to ASL poetry you were talking about playing on signs is that the same thing as poetic license she was talking about an English term which is called poetic license that means they might be able to change and bend the rules a little bit that's permitted now she's asking about deaf poets how they play with the language really it's the same thing you could call it poetic license and ASL poetry being able to bend and change the rules it's a very similar thing related to the English I have time for one more question where do you mean the American library there are two questions here that I just been asked from a man that doesn't know American sign language but we have interpreters here that I just saw the question he'd like to sit down and talk with me and please see me after this presentation and I will give you my phone number and you can call and make an appointment with me and we can get an interpreter for that time and the three of us can sit down and talk together second you had a question about the American poetic library and there's wonderful library with videotapes and recordings with English poetry and he was asking if there are deaf poets included in that library and I really doubt that at this time sign media incorporated in Washington DC is videotaping deaf poets and has been doing that and they can certainly send a copy of those videotapes to the American poetic library I think that would be a good idea I think I'd like to contact my friend that's involved in that company and suggest that thank you for your suggestion it's two o'clock now I'd like to wrap up and thank you for coming we can continue this discussion in another room I believe first of all this is a wonderful lecture thank you very much I just enjoy this very much thank you very much for coming if you have any more questions or want to discuss more with Patrick we can have this opportunity and now let me see I've forgotten the room number Susan Fisher where are you in the alumni room is where we're going to be meeting you can have more time to talk with Patrick for about an hour there's also some pop and cookies there for a reception so I'll see you there bye