American Sign Language as a medium for poetry: A comparative poetics of sign, speech and writing in twentieth-century American poetry

This study seeks to demonstrate that the emerging corpus of American Sign Language (ASL) poetry represents a vanguard rather than a marginal literary phenomenon. As the hallmarks of modernist and postmodernist poetry have been an increased interest in the visual, spatial and embodied dimensions of language, poets--especially those in the "Poundian tradition"--seem to have been searching for a poetic medium much like ASL without knowing it.;Chapter One opens up an exchange between ASL poetry and contemporary literary theory (grammatology, cultural studies, and reader-response theory), demonstrating how theory and Sign literature may each enrich understanding of the other. Chapter Two begins to create a specific context within which the relevance of ASL poetry may be recognized. Beginning with Ezra Pound's fascination with Ernest Fenollosa's essay, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, poets in the "Poundian tradition" have searched for alternative poetic media that attempt to synthesize the visual, spatial and kinetic aspects of experience. Chapter Two asserts that Fenollosa describes the nature of ASL more accurately than written Chinese characters.;Chapter Three then focuses on the increased attention that poets have paid to the visual aspects of their work, specifically discussing the relations of iconicity, painting and poetry in the works of William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings and ASL poets, Kenny Lerner and Peter Cook (Flying Words Project). Chapter Four explores the comparison between ASL poetry and the resurgence of oral, performance poetry through the essays of Charles Olson and the works of David Antin, Jerome Rothenberg, Amiri Baraka, Carolee Schneeman, Debbie Rennie, Clayton Valli and Flying Words Project. Chapter Five then demonstrates how ASL poetry calls for a rethinking of "spatial form in literature" through exploration of phenomenology and physics. The conclusion then offers a new model for language based on a new economy of shared perceptual fields.;This study argues for a reconsideration of the fundamental definitions of literature, textuality and poetry based on the emergence of creative works produced by Deaf artists in the visual, spatial, kinetic and embodied medium of ASL.