One of my most vivid memories as a child is of stretching my small body across the rear bench seat on an endless family road trip and staring up and back through the tinted glass at the upside-down telephone poles punctuating that long line of bare Western highway. I remember the sensation of tracking the wires with my eyes—the thin lines strung between inverted crosses loped like rope bridges, like double Dutch—and tracing that same half-moon metronome, back and forth, into the late-1980s vinyl and velour upholstery with my fingertips at my sides. It’s cinematic in my mind’s eye, and visceral, too, but the memory merges almost immediately—details sticky with similarity—into a recollection of Ella Mae Lentz’s “Eye Music,” a poem in American Sign Language (ASL) that describes the way telephone wires create a kind of visual score, the music staff built of dancing lines and repeated bars, measures notated by telephone poles in a highway time signature.
Lentz’s literature—mine as well, and perhaps yours?—is not limited to the kind of text you’re reading right now. It exists, too, in space: visual and embodied, ephemeral and performative. The imaginative space of the mind fuses experientially with the visual engagement of the hands, face, and torso to yield a new genre of expression and transference. Deaf literature is at once drama and visual art—and yet it is neither. A secret third thing, perhaps, if secrets are visuospatial, multimodal, semiotically diverse, and culturally foundational, though primarily regarded in the nondisabled mainstream via a lens of ignorance and inaccessibility, ableism, and therefore an unusual and shared experience of perceived lack.
This is one site of tension I had in mind when designing Ekphrasis in Air for the Guggenheim Museum in New York City as its 2024 Poet-in-Residence. It is no surprise that I have long found it difficult to draw the boundaries of my poetics along the arbitrary margins of the printed page; as a Deaf poet writing in English, my relationship to sound and the politics of voice have changed drastically over time. I cut my teeth on spoken word and slam poetry in the decades following the emergence of what we’ve come to understand as a kind of early-Internet golden era of ASL poetry and visual vernacular, ushered in and sustained through the nineties and into the aughts by personal heroes Patrick Graybill, Bernard Bragg, Clayton Valli, Ella Mae Lentz, Rosa Lee Gallimore, Terrylene Sacchetti, and others. In them I found evidence of life in poetics—movement, attitude, embodied rhyme—but also corporeal proof of bodies like mine: queer, and in more than one way.
Getting comfortable on the page, then, felt both like a betrayal—a quieting, a closeting—and also a requirement: formal education in creative writing still doesn’t accommodate widely for the presence of the body as much more than metaphor. Even contemporary graduate programs rarely honor the oral history—and subsequent performance lineage through spoken word—in their curriculum; they certainly don’t pay homage to the disabled history of creative writing—Homer, Milton, Dostoevsky, and Borges, among them—by hiring Deaf and disabled faculty, anticipating Deaf and disabled students, teaching Deaf and disabled work, or managing to acknowledge the rich, diverse, rigorously crafted, and uniquely American literature that happens to be made in ASL.
Ekphrasis in Air will include a series of ekphrastic responses in ASL to the art and architecture of the Guggenheim. Just as ekphrastic poems in English serve to magnify and augment the meaning of particular works of art, the ekphrastic responses in ASL will no doubt expand and complicate the attention and insight we lend to and collect from the pieces in question. It’s my hope that these filmed ekphrastics will find their place projected onto walls and installed via screens, then housed digitally via the museum’s website and app and remain available for viewing, studying, consideration, and rumination. The first—an ABC story I made while reflecting on my experience of the Guggenheim as both a beautiful example of Deaf architecture (see: DeafSpace) and also a rare public reprieve from the stress of audism—was installed as a film projection in tandem with Jenny Holzer’s Light Line exhibition.
In the opening week, I had the opportunity to survey visitors encountering my poem—uncaptioned and running on a loop—as it appeared on the wall in the Guggenheim’s Aye Simon Reading Room. I sat and watched, half-stunned to see my face appear on those hallowed curved walls and then moved, I confess, to see myself signing instead of speaking. And the patrons? Because, in part, the poem is an ABC story—a traditional, inherited form in Deaf literature that transforms signs into classifiers alphabetically, distantly akin to the English abecedarian—and therefore tricks the inattentive (or non-signing) viewer into thinking they are watching a story in mere mimed gestures instead of strictly patterned, closely rhymed handshapes—the reception seemed smooth and clear, untroubled and even reverent. While I believe the poem is easy enough to track on its semantic surface, I was struck, especially when recognized as the person on-screen, by the way the conventions of the building—the site itself, the paid admission, the demure museum etiquette, the expectation of art whose meaning might not be immediately available, the Guggenheim name, even—created an opening, a warmth, a welcome. I can’t properly approximate here, in English, how rare it is to be caught signing in the hearing public and not be punished for it, in some small or significant way.
This, too, is a site of tension on my mind as I curate Ekphrasis in Air. Linguistic minorities are not often met with healthy curiosity and social permission; this is surely never the case when it comes to the disabled body. In my experience, however, our collective and cultural shame around disability seems to torque when it comes to ASL. Hearing non-signers are quick to fetishize the ASL interpreter at the reading, the ASL music video, the Certified Deaf Interpreter (CDI) onstage at the rap concert. Everybody wants to learn ASL, but nobody wants to talk to the Deaf poet. Everybody wants to praise the access, but nobody wants to pay for it. Hearing folks often tell the interpreters in my classroom they’re doing a great job—which indeed they are—without any intel on the matter, any authority to lend to the topic. They thank them; they shake the interpreters’ hands. What’s at play here, underneath the socialized audism and the thinly veiled whiff of charity? How is it different from what’s happening in our larger poetic culture? Why is it easier to get an ASL interpreter at a mainstage poetry event (though, forgive me, I’m chuckling a little at the suggestion of ease) than it is for that event to welcome a Deaf headliner to share their work—in English or in ASL? Why is it that I’m more approachable in public the second I’m not just a person with hearing aids, that instead I’m art?
And then what of other ekphrastic responses in ASL? What of the ones that are less gestural and more linguistically dense, as I hope will occur with the Deaf poets I’ve invited to join me on the walls of the Guggenheim? What then? The question on everyone’s mind seems to be the one that occurs to Deaf folks daily: but how will I understand?
In many ways, for me, the political and sociolinguistic risks of putting ASL on the walls of an art museum feel tempered by the power of the ekphrastic conceit. If you don’t understand the signing poet’s response, Kandinsky is right there to assist. If you’re puzzled—or pushed out—by the Deaf poet’s quick fingerspelling, their nuanced facial grammar, then surely the Degas or Cézanne, the Klee or Picasso in question will hold your hand. Ekphrasis, for me, is a kind of bridge, a kind of beckoning. Depending on who you are, a body—even one signing in a language you can’t understand—might feel more accessible to you than an abstract painting. Ekphrasis lends options as it inverts the power dynamic of access and allows another opening. What’s more, it activates your engagement: a single text or piece of art is one thing. Two in conversation? Participation feels almost compulsory. The human brain, it seems, delights in connections—in narrative, in patterns. It offers up a richer experience, a more thorough understanding, a sense, even, of ownership. Belonging.
Take the building itself. I think a lot about architecture, not because I appreciate it but because I can’t see through walls the way most people can hear around them; my tech is good, but no hearing aid is going to summon me to the kitchen if there’s a wall between us. I like very much the idea of the Guggenheim’s architecture receiving the Deaf treatment, if you will; Frank Lloyd Wright did not imagine me when he sketched that rotunda onto a blueprint, but I can sign about it with ease from the Thannhauser Collection to someone four stories below. A rudimentary search shows the building has received excessive critique—often through inexact similes; “inverted oatmeal dish” is my personal favorite of the failures—for its size, shape, design, color, and tension between form and function. It’s as evocative to the eye as it is to the hand, and perhaps more so. If ekphrasis intends to expand and amplify the available meaning of its original source, what more could we ask for than a building that requires your body, a piece of framed art that is felt, even as those blessed gallery guides ensure you never touch it? If I ask you (hearing) to describe the Guggenheim’s architecture with your (non-signing) hands—let’s just play charades for a moment, let’s risk the faint and reductive comparison between ASL and a goofy party game of miming—you’ve entered very swiftly the neighborhood of the persona poem. Your body must become the Guggenheim. Your hands must show how smooth and gently curved the walls; your shoulders, how low the ceiling of the rotunda ramps; your arched neck and distant squint must perform the open air of the atrium, its cathedral-like oculus, its gentle light. How can one avoid coming to know something new in the process of description? Things you couldn’t have known: the cup of your palm that shapes the thick spiral of the museum’s iconic exterior on the corner of Fifth Avenue is the same handshape that makes chocolate or church, one half of the sign for email. As an ASL classifier, it becomes the heft of a book, a thick dusting of snow. Can you see now what I’m trying to show you? You’ve helped me make connections you didn’t even know were there.
It’s not a false memory, the one in the car. We drove to Yellowstone from California that summer, and my pops was at the wheel of the gray 1987 Chevy Suburban for years before and after my memory of it. But Lentz’s poem “Eye Music” lends me context for that time of my life and camaraderie in remembering its joy and simplicity. Her poetic response—which one might argue is ekphrastic in the way that many poems are perceptually ekphrastic—creates a larger narrative that includes more than just some version of myself as a child. I understand myself better because of that poem; I feel tied to a cultural lineage, my imaginative root, the first inklings of becoming a poet. What’s more, it makes me want to write.
In this way, ekphrasis remains, for me, one of most accompanied forms of poetic investigation: you’re never alone, you’re never starting from scratch, and you’re always mingling with a lineage you’ve yet to comprehend fully. In some ways, it’s the closest you and I will ever come to understanding each other on our own terms. See that color? You say blue and I tuck my thumb into my palm and wave right back.
Reprinted from the Fall-Winter 2024 issue of American Poets, the biannual journal of the Academy of American Poets. Copyright © 2024 by Meg Day.