 I'm Carol Padden. I'm from the University of California, San Diego. I'm a professor of communication at UCSD. I work primarily in linguistics and culture and also history. Well, what really struck me was what was familiar about it. There were some pieces of poetry I hadn't seen and, of course, a few that I had. Malzcun, who we lost recently, which is very sad, Eric Malzcun, and Bob Panera. Now, of course, I grew up watching Bob Panera and seeing his poetry, seeing him perform stories and such many times. It was so nice to see that that particular poem that he'd written, I remembered it very well and how he expressed it in the particular way I saw on the tape. He was the same generation as my father at Gallaudet and what's interesting is he would write the poetry and when you would watch him perform it, you would see the rhyme actually represented on his mouth. He did these beautiful translations. He was very ordered and deliberate. It's really poignant to see his work. It's interesting because I believe he performed the one I saw in 1984 and I remember seeing it when I was a child. So seeing it again, I saw that he added the element of the small white bird on his shoulder, which I didn't remember from before. It's as if he was giving the signs a chance to shine in a different way by adding that element. The other part about the rain-pitter pattering on the eaves that he added, he was making it more visual in the performance than he had before and that was really interesting for me to see. Ella's poetry, Peter Cook, his older poetry, of course, when he was younger, but performing his older poetry. I'm more familiar with his work recently with Kenny. I really enjoyed seeing that a lot and I actually wrote about Peter and Kenny's work in my book about Deaf Culture and I think that's what people really enjoyed watching was the poetry presentations. Now, Clayton Valley, I met him at an SSLRT research conference and I'm trying to remember how somebody else might remember better than I do. I don't remember who it was, but somebody gave me the responsibility of putting together a night of poetry performance. Patrick Graba was there, Ella was there, Bob Hiner was there and somebody said, you've got to meet this guy named Clayton Valley from Las Vegas. I've seen his poetry. It's really interesting. Why not ask him to get involved in the performance? So I did ask him and he was full of trepidation. It's really interesting. He didn't seem like the kind of person who would have gotten into the poetry world but he'd fallen madly in love with it, it seemed. I guess it was the right time, the right place, the right time for this particular group of poets. He was really engaged with the idea of hand shapes and rhyme. It was really amazing how he would put it together. He was really deliberate about how he constructed it. He had a more linguistic view of poetry and I think that linguistics was informing the idea of poetry at the time. I think that Gil Eastman was also there. And let's see, we asked Patrick Grable, he performed something. I think he did a little bit of poetry and we did make a video of that event. I think, I'm not really sure, boy, I have to get hold of somebody to see if we did or not. It was a special moment when everybody came together, this group of performers. Patrick, he performed on the harmfulness of tobacco, that monologue. It was really beautiful, he did a great job. And Vali did also. Now we had a rehearsal before the performance and Vali would stand during his slot and he'd say, oh no, that wasn't right, I messed it up, let me do it again, again. He was extremely nervous about it. He had such an awareness of how precise he wanted it to be. He was really worried about what other people would think. And other people had this very flowy, actorly skill but he didn't have that kind of thing in his background. He was constructing his poems and really thinking hard about how he was making them in sign language. Dot Myles was there, of course. And this is a group of folks that was never on stage together again. Dot moved back to England afterwards. Everybody just got scattered to the winds and we never had a group like that together again. When I see some of the new poetry that's there from other countries, it's really fascinating, especially those from Italy. It seems like sign language poetry is kind of taking the world by storm now. In Italy, there's a brother and sister performance duo and they play off of each other in the same way that Peter and Kenny do. It's different than what you see here and there's just so many different ways to create sign language poetry across the world. I believe so. Gosh, I'll have to ask, I'll have to look it up. I don't remember which conference it was. It might have been TISOR, the second one that I think was held in Boston if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, I'll definitely have to look it up. It was either that one or SSLRT, I'm not sure which. Yes, well, we called it poetry with the old sign like a P on the arm instead of the new sign that people are using now. It seemed that people were understanding there was a new generation of poetry. People were very aware of it, what they were creating, how they were performing it. And these days, I think with the younger sort of hip-hop poets, you'll see some kinds of poetry. Well, if you look in the old days like Sam Sopala, he used a lot of film techniques, cinematic forms, and David Rivera does a lot of television kind of techniques. So it's different. He uses a lot of slow motion in his work and he'll slow things down. So he's copying the sorts of things you might see in television. There's a lot of visual genres that seem to be merging together now. But there's the street urban kind of hip-hop kind of performance now where the hands aren't kept in such precise orientations. Back in the day, it was very deliberate and signs were produced very crisply. But now there seems to be a more casualness to it, an improvisational quality. It's more modern, something that's of the moment kind of thing. Yeah, and slam, is that the sign for it? Yeah, slam poetry especially, what I see now, the performers that are out there. You know, from comparing the old days where it was so planned and state and formal. And now from what I see, the people that are just coming up on the scene, it seems like it spur the moment, which I think is great. It's nice to see that becoming more popular. I think that the science of linguistics has had a strong influence on the idea of handshape and form and what have you. There's a lot of artists and performers who look to science for some inspiration. So they're deriving some things from that that we are finding infusing the art forms. The idea of handshapes and different linguistic elements like that. I think the newer ones feel like, oh, we're past that, that was back then. We've already proved what ASL is, we don't have anything to prove anymore. It's like Peter, I love this one performance he does. He said, this isn't even ASL, don't even try to understand this poem. I really love that. This need to be clear and understand the message that used to be the status quo doesn't need to be so up in people's minds anymore. It's sort of like anything goes, right? And I think that, well, maybe it's like television and film used to be. In the beginning you had to give a lot of exposition about the background and wait until things got going. Because if you started in the middle of the story, people wouldn't understand the context or who was who. And if you arrived in the middle, then later you would come to realize what the message was. And I think that's what's happening more with poetry. They're not afraid to break that old rule of exposition. Yeah, not anymore. You don't have to do that anymore. Right? Yeah, right. There's a lot about modern life that finds its way into the poetry. Artists reflect what's going on and tell us what life is like before it even happens sometimes. And that's the role of the artist is to see and express things before we all completely understand it. They don't come after the changes. They come before the changes. Today, looking at what's going on, what people are doing, it's almost like a portent of things to come in a way, right? It's interesting about the beat generation of poets. Many of them were intellectuals. They were rebellious children of the 60s. They were very well educated for the most part. Many of them were affluent. And they were part of, I don't know, more of a higher echelon of people who were well educated. And they knew what classical poetry actually was, and they set out to challenge those classical norms. But nowadays with SLAM or any of the other more modern poetry, it's very different than the beat generation. Because with SLAM poetry, quite often the people who create this, they're working class, they're urban, they're street folks, they're coming with it on the spot. They have no knowledge or contact with the classical kind of poetry. And so they're writing about their lives. They're showing who they are. They're depicting themselves of the woman as a black person. And the beat generation, as I said, were more intellectual. They were middle class or upper middle class. So I think that's one interesting way to think about it when you compare them. As it except for Valley, the previous generation of deaf performers based on poetry like Patrick or Dot Myles were performers. Even Ella, they had some contact with National Theatre of the Deaf and the sort of exaggerated way of performing. Let's see, that was founded in 1967. And so NTD, National Theatre of the Deaf, drew people in who already had been performing for a while in the deaf clubs or out and about. But you get somebody like Valley who wasn't a performer at all. He was more of an analyst and a constructor. And nowadays you see all kinds of folks like David Rivera and others. Peter Cook, I think too. Now did Peter work with NTD in their summer school program? Okay, so he had some performing experience. But it seems like with slam poetry, it's more to do with the live performances of the moment. I have some students who are working on that kind of thing now and quite often they perform in coffee houses or just get up on any stage anywhere and you don't have to have any sort of credential to perform. Back in the days of Panera, whatever, you had to prove your credentials. You were from NTD, you were from that legacy. But now kind of anything goes. It's a popularization of poetry that makes it more open. It's as if they're more, well, they're less bound to the kind of constraints that existed before. Now they bring in sort of techniques from television would have you. From what I see on YouTube, poetry on YouTube, wow, it's much more democratized. You don't have to pay to get into a place and see people on stage with YouTube now. You can see anybody on there and you don't have to pay to play. But I think, well, quite often people will say, oh, a three-year-old could do that. But a three-year-old didn't and you didn't either and where were you? I mean, you were doing something else. So some people go ahead with poetry and I mean, I think there was a moment for poetry at that particular time when sign language was coming into its own and being recognized. And now I would say that not only is poetry becoming more democratized and you don't need to be credentialed, but there's a lot more different creativity than go into it. It's more accessible to everyone and there's so many wonderful creative things going on right now. I saw something recently that I hadn't seen before. There was a British sign poet and the kind of techniques that were being used were something I hadn't seen any place sell before and didn't exist in ASL. So you have to think of it globally now, the UK or Italy. It's just amazing. There are so many different ways you can do it now. And you realize that there's even more out there after looking at what ASL has. You realize that it's a global pursuit now. Yeah, I heard about him from Kenny. Vim, mm-hmm, Vim. Best name. Don't remember with a W or something like that. Yeah. Yes, it's beautiful. Well, right. I'm not so much concerned about what to call something. Is it this kind of poetry or that kind of poetry? How to classify it? Doesn't really concern me. But first, you realize it usually has to be about something. Now it's a political moment and of course, the expression itself became political as well. I find it interesting that often, not always, but politics just isn't involved at all. The poetry is just for the joy of experimentation or for entertainment and showing that there's different ways to do something. But for example, Peter and Kenny's work as well. And they come up with things and sometimes they say, like I said before, don't even try to understand this. Just watch it and enjoy what you're seeing in front of you. Why not? I mean, who makes the rules anyway? Yes. Yes. Well, I think that poetry is obviously cathartic. Yes, poetry is very cathartic for the person who's performing it, of course. But now what's interesting, I think, is the idea of live poetry or slam and the competitions that they have. People standing up there and performing their pieces and competing with each other. Different things like that. And people realize what is the role of the poet. They're supposed to be doing things that we don't necessarily do in everyday conversation in a prosaic way. They're doing it in a performative aspect. And it's a big challenge for a person to be able to get up there on stage and represent. Now, in ASL poetry, maybe from the very beginning, it was always that way. But now, with more live poetry and especially with teenagers doing it, it's more about the body. It's as if they're saying, look at me. I'm a woman. I'm black. I'm Hispanic. I'm working class. And look at me. I'm embodying this. So that's a part of the expression. And it was always that way with American Sign Language poetry. I mean, at first focusing specifically on the hands and arms and later becoming more of the full body experience. But it was always who I am as a deaf person. Classic poets always read. They read from a printed page. So it wasn't the body. It was the voice reading something that was already disconnected from an embodied experience and codified on paper. One thing I don't know if you've noticed or not, but does all poetry have to be memorized? Or is it read? It seems like it has to be memorized. And quite often that's one of the difficulties and challenges. You have to remember the order of things and not forget. Now an actor always has to memorize their lines before they can deliver them on stage. But a poet has to do that too. So they not only have to create it and order it correctly and so it makes sense, but also worry about if they're going to forget a line or two. Live poetry is almost anti-television, anti-film, and more about the connection and relationship with the audience. It's about this moment. It's not mediated through television or film or other technologies anymore. So it's looking for a way to build a rapport with the audience. I was wondering about what's on YouTube. What kind of ASL poetry is on YouTube? You're saying there's a lot? There's a lot of ASL poetry there? Yes. Yes. In search of an audience. In search of an audience. Yes. It's sort of like, please, audience, where are you? I know there's somebody out there, just one person out there for me. Yes. I find YouTube a wonderful tool for teaching. I find so many amazing things there that I can use and things I never would have found before. It's just fascinating what's happening with YouTube and what it does to poetry. I haven't done that really. I should search around, give a little hunt. So I just would type in ASL poetry and then there'll be a stream of things on the sidebar. Okay. You had mentioned previously the idea about the beginnings of poetry. Thinking about how rhythm was used. I talked about this before. One, two, one, two, three, a rhythmic rendering of poetry. So with performance poetry, maybe it works a different way. And what's the difference between hip hop and rap poetry and live poetry? Rap seems to be bound to the music world. And hip hop seems to be more rhythmic rendering. It doesn't have to rhyme. It does have to have a certain kind of rhythm. So I wonder about finding a distinction between those kinds of poetry and performances for you when you look at them. Because sometimes storytelling and poetry look the same to me. And where is that line of demarcation between them? Yes. One thing that's interesting about live poetry performances is that they're so spontaneous. They're only being performed by one person. And could anybody else ever do Peter Cook and Kenny's work, for instance? Yes. Fally's work. I do know that children have performed that as well as other people. I think Ella often performs Dot Miles's work. And has given it a try. I tried it even once for a university project. And I wasn't really sure. They wanted me to help out. So I saw that was fine. I'll try to do a rendition of it. And I don't know. This is my interpretation. I don't know if it's accurate or not. But these days it seems like stories or poems are specific to the person. Right. And poetry is, for the most part, meant to be passed down through the generations. Maybe. Maybe that. But also maybe the meaning of that particular poem is meant to be performed by that person at that time, at that moment for YouTube. Or maybe some other person just might co-opt it for themselves. But one thing you try to think about is the difference between classical kinds of poetry. Paneras. Or Dot Miles. They're translated poetry. I mean anybody can translate something, right? But it would be very difficult to duplicate a performance by Peter Cook. They could practice, they could rehearse and try to do that. Miles came up with Jabberwocky, but then it was made famous by Joe Volez who actually performed it out and about. I did see Miles do it and it was so interesting. He was creating a starting point. He was creating a beginning translation and then Joe took that further the Jabberwocky and made it more of a performative act. So that's right. Joe performed it, but the original translation was begun by Miles. So that kind of poetry or that sort of echelon of poetry is for other people to do, but maybe other kinds, more modern kind isn't because it's so specific to the person's body that it might not be able to be performed by other people or if another person really wants to. I mean that's a question to ask, right? Would Peter and Kenny complain if somebody else wanted to duplicate their work and re-perform it? Right, right. It was very, very ill near the end. Yeah, it was a frozen text kind of translation. Wonderful that you have that documented. That's great. Yes, I heard a very similar story to that and it's really interesting. Do you have the Velez version? It is available on film. Hmm, do I have it? Gallaudet for sure has it. I know they have it. I have seen it and maybe I saw it at Gallaudet. It's an NTD-created film, I think. I think it was part of the third eye performance and it is gorgeous. It's just brilliant. Beautiful piece of work, really. Are you going to talk with Michael Olsen? He's wonderful. Anything you need, just tell him. And you should... Yeah, get hold of him because I know they made a film and they translated... Was it Hamlet? Maybe it was King Lear. I think it was Hamlet. Anyway, you can ask him about it. They have a broader way of different performances but they incorporated poetry within the performances and I think that if you go back to the 60s you'll find some really interesting pieces within older plays and other performances that they have archived. It's worth it, really worth it and he's the best person to work with for that. They have wonderful videos from what I've heard. Yeah, someone told me they've got to hurry and they have to make sure that they're in an environmentally controlled environment because if it's not, they're going to degrade. Somebody needs to put them in Gallaudet or some repository, they've got to. People always think, oh, 1967. That was just last year. Fine, everything should be okay for a while longer and then a while longer passes and all of a sudden it's 2007 between 1967 and 2007. It's been 40 years already. Well, you should go. I have some other friends who are very worried about this too. Can we pause for just a second? Yes, well, it works both ways. We create things and after they're created sometimes later it comes back to affect us in different ways. People have always created tools or other inventions and then after the thing has been created for its purpose, it turns around and now hits us in ways that we never expected. And I think it's the same way. It's a reasonable way to think about the impact of poetry on us. How people think, how they see the world and how the performance of poetry has changed and how we think about it in different ways. There's some new ideas and things that we'd never thought of before. We're in a state of transition. There was a transition moment when the language ASL was named and accepted. And now we're in some sort of moment of transition and perhaps we could say it's about identity. This generation of deaf folks with cochlear implants and the way things are, I mean, we're new. It's a new way to be and it's a new environment and so people are giving expressions and a voice to that transition time we find ourselves in. Sometimes poetry even leads the way. Dot, once said about how she was performing at National Theatre of the Deaf one time that she was developing a translation of something and someone came up to her and said, why don't you try to think about this from your heart, from deep within you. And I can't remember exactly how she put this into the words what happened, but she said that that was an impetus for her to look at translating English into sign and doing it in a different way from writing into more of a signed performance expressive way than her. So poetry offers a vision of what will come when you look at who performs something, you look at who they are, what is it they're trying to say and maybe it helps you think about things in a new way. The moment of a poem being performed doesn't mean that that's the end of that poem. There is a time afterwards where it comes back to influence us and have impacts upon us even after the moment of the performance. Yes. Yes. Poetry has become more popularized now and everybody thinks they can do it. You don't necessarily follow anybody else's constraints. You can come up with your own. It's much more accessible and storytelling the same way. People making films, it's a very expressive moment in our culture and YouTube makes that possible. Blogs make it possible. Vlogs make it possible too. It's very democratic now. It's great time for expression, for good or for bad because there's some stuff out there that's got to wonder. People are just emoting and effusing all over the place but that's all part of the whole same thing and it's all okay. We're in the midst of an election year now and from the blogs and Facebook posts so many different ways to communicate with people that are going on now. Email. We're in such a new mediated world. Deaf and poetry trying to navigate their way through this whole system and society of what's going on. It's interesting to see the different ways of expression. I've been writing about that. At the same time we see more intervention with deaf people creating ways to mediate the deafness cochlear implants and such. We have a parallel track of creativity and explosion of ASL. Now with these two tracks someday converge or continue to diverge perhaps they'll stay parallel but watch each other across the great chasm regarding each other with trepidation. Who knows? Or maybe they'll influence each other. Poetry is a way to formulate language in a specific way to depict an idea and to draw attention to the language itself and somehow pop the message to the audience. That's my definition of poetry. Well growing up I'm trying to think did I see poetry? I know I did see Bob Pinera for sure. I did see him perform. Will Madsen had written that poem. I think it's to a deaf child. Yeah and I think sometimes he would perform that. I would see him perform things that he wrote. And that was my idea of poetry growing up. What I saw out and about in the community. Performance before NTD were primarily skits. You know Gallaudet would have these translations of Shakespeare or the classics or comedies. They did put on the man who came to dinner. I remember that one very well. And that was my idea of what performance was. So it's interesting to be there at that moment when people are saying let's do sign poetry. Let's do this a different way. Let's try to create rhyme and incorporate different linguistic elements. Ballet really. He was such an unlikely poet. Truly. If you were to look at him he had no connection to National Theater of the Deaf. He had no performance background. He didn't have linguistic background before he got into linguistics. And obviously he was thinking a lot about ideas. He's very engaged with in our life. He lived in Las Vegas or maybe it was Reno somewhere in Nevada. And nobody knew about him. So he's very memorable for that reason. His personality short life, beautiful poetry very deliberately constructed. Ella, Patrick and Dot I always loved Dot's poetry. And then when you see Peter and Kenny their work and you see how they collaborate together in their performance it's so interesting. I've seen poetry in other places. And every place does seem to have poetry wherever there's sign language. There seems to be a movement globally right now. And it's a beautiful thing. There's beautiful stuff out there. I always have a special fondness for that first I don't know if you call it generation that group of poets of my generation that I'm familiar with. It's as if they all spontaneously came to be at the same time in the 70s and 80s of that moment. So I really have a fondness for that time. I do love what I see now. There's some beautiful stuff wonderful creative things being produced now. But they're based on and scaffolded off of that previous work. It's fortunate that we have that. I decided I wanted to major in linguistics in high school. I was thinking about what I wanted to do. My mother was an English teacher so I thought fine maybe I'll go to school for English. And then somebody was mentioning linguistics and that captivated my interest. I wanted to do something related to language so I thought fine. I'll go to college and get a bachelor's in linguistics. I went to CSUN for one year and then I transferred to Georgetown where I graduated. And I started working with Bill Stokey's lab with a lot of the people whose names you're familiar with who started those first publications about sign language. Bill Robin Baddison Nancy Fishberg Harry Markowitz and Carol Erting just all these people who are all together working at the same time. James Woodward it's just a wonderful time to be working and everybody thought we were crazy. Why do you like that stuff? You know you're crazy. You're just rebelling against things. We thought we were doing something completely new and now I woke up one day and found that it's completely mainstream. Everybody's talking about it but I remember when people would mock me out and now people talk about ASL and I'll say well where were you back in the 70s? Ah you changed your mind, huh? What was depressing about her? What was so sad? But really my parents' generation was very threatened by a lot of what was going on. They say what are you doing? What is that? Why are you hanging around with linguists? What are you trying to do? Because really we were having this interchange of ideas from lots of different fields, different groups of people. My parents' generation were used to being with the traditional fields of deaf ed, audiologists, rehab those sorts of professions and we were working with sociologists and psychologists, linguists neuroscientists. This was a whole different ball of wax that we were bringing to our work and my parents weren't happy about that. They say what are you doing? Why are you calling it that ASL thing? Why are you coming up with this crazy stuff? We know what it is. Now they'll talk about ASL and I'll say wait a minute I remember we wouldn't even spell the letters ASL and now it's common parlance so the earth kind of changed on its axis and some people anyway it's very interesting history there. Yes part of it is a generational thing they think we're running things fine until you shake things up, stir the pot and now you've upset the whole natural order of things our nice clean orderly way to think about how things go and how everybody agreed about and now you challenge the status quo I think it's a generational schism I think it all worked out the idea of sign language and signed English. Here's this new word you're calling it ASL. Who are the people behind this? They didn't trust it, the linguists. I remember saying somebody came up to me one time and said oh are you still doing that linguistic with a Q instead of a G and I said no it's linguistic with a G oh right this person said I thought it was linguistic you know I saw the same person recently they didn't say the same thing but still sticks in my craw. It was an accident, yeah. In Britain they have what's called a coroner's inquest in cases such as this and they have different names for the decisions they come to and this decision was rendered to be a misadventure which means an accident what we call an accident here in the states they call a misadventure. She was also heavily medicated at the time and very difficult as a person people who knew her who were close to her said that she struggled a lot through a large part of her life with a lot of dysregulation she was on different diagnoses different medications she was very creative person but it's really hard to know it's always going to be a mystery I think what happened to her. Well first you have to figure out what it is you're trying to prove and you have to believe in yourself that's first and foremost and then you have to find somebody's opinion whom you trust and respect find a few different opinions and figure out if there's discrepancies between them how to resolve those and whose opinion do I value and trust the most. You have documented a lot of things including myself I've never seen there's a lot of things that were filmed that are put up on a shelf and forgotten about so it takes a lot of time and effort and skill to be able to consolidate them figure out which parts to leave which parts to keep edit it all together so it tells a cohesive story and that's really the most important thing I think you have to do is to tell a story. Every film has a point of view because without one nobody would bother watching it so with a particular point of view you'll develop some interest and some people may even disagree with the point of view that you put forth but you have films you have documentaries that are out there and if you find one you really like it could serve as a model for you it seems that there's a lot of resurgence and interest in watching documentaries these days and they're doing very well seems to have a lot of impact on people I enjoyed watching what you showed me that sampler that you sent it was very interesting am I forgetting anything I think well I'm really happy you're doing this um I read through the questions I think we covered almost everything maybe what you could do is look through some of the new poetry and add it to the end of the film yes right yes each of those people followed a different path Joseph Castranovo he ended up hanging himself and dot jumped so I don't know if it's true or not but people said just stop there's other people who are better than I do and then what I do so I can just go on and do other things I don't need to do poetry anymore so I think that person became more involved in communication but dropped performing and decided not to be a poet anymore yes yep I did see him maybe at the end as the credits roll you could say something about the people who are gone I liked what you had in the beginning of the sampler the explanation that paragraph it was really nice to read that you're taking advantage of where you are you're in Rochester so you're telling the Rochester story yes really sometimes that's enough sometimes it really is just enough alright onward yep just doing the universe a favor it's wonderful I'm really excited and I can't wait to see it