When Peter Cook and Clayton Valli take the stage to perform their American Sign Language poetry, they’ll be carrying on a tradition that’s already more than 100 years old.
To be performed at Columbia College’s Getz Theater, Cook and Valli’s poetry show is Friday only. Any proceeds from a freewill donation will benefit the Michael Sryzlewicz Scholarship Fund.
“There’s no real documentation,” says Cook, best known around town for last year’s one-person show, “Your Hands, My Eyes,” at the Blue Rider Theatre. “But ASL poetry has long been used in institutions for the deaf around the country.”
In the 1940s, a group of young poets at Gallaudet University, Washington, D.C., which admits only deaf students, became known for their poetry interpretations. “It was the golden years of the Gallaudet poets,” says Cook. “But they were strictly transliterating the poems, word for word.”
What the Gallaudet poets were doing was taking existing written poetry and putting it into sign language. But they were not translating it into ASL, which has its own grammar and syntax, but continuing to sign in English order. Sometime later, a teacher and poet named Erik Malzkhun performed Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” in ASL — that is, by using signs as concepts rather than words.
“He broke all the rules,” Cook says. “ASL poetry became a new form of art. It became a part of the National Theater of the Deaf. Most people now recognize ASL as a legitimate language.”
Valli, Cook’s partner in Friday’s performance, has been creating and analyzing ASL poetry since the 1970s. He has a doctorate in ASL poetics from Union College, Cincinnati. “He is one of the few deaf linguists to really explore the literary forms of ASL,” says Cook. “I view him as a classical ASL poet, the opposite of what I do. He tends to focus on metaphors through his signs and he rarely moves around when he performs. He’s very . . . hmmm . . . unbeatlike; I’m beatlike.”
A performance artist, Cook, who is deaf, incorporates mime and movement into his ASL poetry work. He also uses a voice interpreter, not for every line in the poems, but for key moments and transitions at which a hearing audience might find itself lost. Valli does not use a voice interpreter.
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“I think it’s important for deaf and hearing to realize there is literary value in ASL poetry,” says Cook, who is a strong proponent of cross-cultural programming. And he dismisses any talk of ASL getting diluted by simplifying to reach a hearing audience. “The more people are aware of ASL, the stronger it becomes.”
Still, he understands the challenge of incorporating a voice interpreter at only strategic points in his work. “I remember a workshop with Allen Ginsberg where he mentioned that when translating to another language, you cannot keep the wit or the rhymes, but only the hard pictures,” he says. “I thought, `What does that mean?’ He asked a deaf person in the group to translate a line from `Howl’ into ASL. The line was two words: `hydrogen jukebox.’ The deaf person signed music box put coin in record play music boooooommmmmmm. `Atom bomb,’ Allen said, `that’s it! But notice I didn’t write the coin, the record, but still the hard picture is there.’ “
The experience in Ginsberg’s workshop gave Cook an idea about the limitations of translation. “So instead of saying everything, I just tell a few words that convey the concept. That’s how I work with voice,” he explains.
Although Cook works mostly in ASL, he also writes poems in English. Those, however, he won’t perform.
“The feeling will be different,” he says, just as translating ASL into English means losing a little something. “Besides, there are some techniques in ASL which are just impossible on paper. Let me give you an example. There’s something called `handshape rhymes,’ which means creating visual rhymes by using the same handshapes.”
Marc Smith, the guy who helped create the performance poetry phenomenon, is going legit. Sort of, anyway.
“Flea Market,” a three-act monologue, debuts off-nights at Live Bait Theater. It runs Mondays and Tuesdays through April 30.
(He’s even got a director!)
The After Hours date book
Friday, 7 p.m.: Peter Cook and Clayton Valli, Columbia College’s Getz Theater, 72 E. 11th St.; free. Call 312-663-5174. The theater is wheelchair accessible.
Mondays and Tuesdays through April 30, 8 p.m.: Marc Smith’s “Flea Market,” Live Bait Theater, 3914 N. Clark St. $7. Call 312-871-1212. Live Bait is wheelchair accessible.