Language as an Art Form: Sign Language Poetry.

 

Poetry takes language far beyond its primary task of everyday communication. By artfully manipulating the forms and meanings of language, the poet conveys a particular or heightened understanding of human experience. Devices such as meter, rhyme, and alliteration may filter the meaningful content of a poem, in order to create an impression or focus an image in the mind of the audience. A conventional meaning may be intentionally distorted in such a way as to enhance the perspective the poet wishes to present. This union of language, culture, and art is found in some signing communities. We know of several accomplished deaf poets in the United States and Holland, and bring as an example of sign language poetry some work of Wim Emmerik from Amsterdam. Among the devices used by this poet are reiterative use of handshape, and a fluidity of style that results from the elimination of transitional movements. Entire poems may be characterized by one or two basic handshapes, such as the extended index finger handshape or the shape that extends all fingers. The esthetic effect is similar to that of rhyme or alliteration in spoken poetry. While the movements that are part of signs are retained or modulated in some way, lines of poetry are skillfully constructed so as to omit the movements that result from the transition between the end of one sign and the beginning of another, creating flowing verse. The explicitly poetic, somewhat paradoxical device of disrupting or distorting conventional meanings in order to enhance the intended meaning is also recruited by Emmerik. In his poem, “Member of Parliament,” Emmerik presents a picture of the governmental representative as jaded and cut off from the occurrences and sensations of the real world. The closest that the member of parliament gets to events in his country is through reading the newspaper as he eats lunch. To convey the idea that the politician crudely ingests the news through his body, rather than experiencing events spiritually or intellectually, the poet portrays him eating the news. As he eats and reads, he alters the usual sign for eat (figure 22.8a) by changing its location to the eyes rather than the mouth (figure 22.8b). Intermittently, the member of parliament eats food and ingests news of the world. The value of the work of Emmerik and other deaf poets is first and foremost artistic. But the fact that poetry arises in established deaf communities is instructive as well. It teaches us that the desire and ability to mold the formational elements of language into an artistic expression of its content is a hallmark of human culture. It also shows clearly that sound is unnecessary, not only for communicative use of language, but for artistic use of language as well.