I started taking a short poetry class on story and silence. There only 4 classes and I’ve been to one, and already worth the money (only $200) I paid to take it.

But there was this thing on the first night, a thing that has me thinking.

We each have to do a mini project for the class and so spoke to what we thought we might do – where our work evokes silence, for example, and how to get that on a page. It came to my turn / I felt such resistance. My story is interesting I suppose. All these disparate elements come into my poetry—ASL, Salish, the idea of verb-centered reality/language, synesthesia, witchcraft, atheism, academia, philosophy – essentially where Mary surfaces is in the interstices between those various stones in my experience. I feel a bit like grass growing up through the cracks in a cobble stone road. It is such a hard thing to explain—do you know what smuckum is or táq^wu and how that might fit with the wyrd—and part of the reason why I haven’t sought publication until recently. I always feel like I am being difficult on purpose. As if by trying to talk about what it means to experience the world like Mary is posturing – centre-staging.

One time a person said, well why don’t you just say it and the thing is I just had, and what I had said had not been understood, not heard. This is not a complaint. Not at all. It’s just an observation that I speak from a really different place some of the time. I know lots of you know this feeling because we all have different pasts, different feelings, different ways of understanding. But imagine that you are the only deaf person in a world of the hearing. And you try to use your voice, you know what you want to say, and they know what they want to hear…but how could you, as the deaf person, get what it means to be deaf across to someone? I mean ASL is fundamentally different from voiced languages because it uses space in ways voiced languages cannot. There are important parts of ASL communication that cannot be translated into voiced languages.

But more importantly, does the difficulty of “translation” say anything at all about what it means to be deaf? To be hearing? To be a Salish speaker (which I am not, although it is definitely one of my “cobbles”) or an English speaker (which I am). Not really. But it is still an issue that takes so much effort on both sides that it is hardly done. We all have our cobble stones which guide where we can sprout but when the layout of the stones is very, very different, and when none of us realize just how different, communication can be a precarious affair.

My response to the danger and difficulty is to not talk about it much and to learn as much about normative society as I can – so I can pass (no, other people do not hear blue hisses). I do speak to my experience here of course, or at least sometimes. But not in public. I’d rather make something up. Something simple and clearly of the norm. But for this class I didn’t because poetry matters to me. And I felt horrible. Like I was trying to brag around about who I am. yech. Bottom line – I don’t do autobiography. Writing a memoir feels like the worst idea in the world.

Still, all this got me thinking about ASL again, about how sign space is used and how to translate sign space (not ASL signs but the active space that a signer uses to communicate) into paper space. We are to write 2 new poems exploring a “companion” poet’s use of spatial/sound signifies to code or organize the paper-space to reflect sound space. I did have a paper poet I was going to use, but thought I’d use a deaf person’s poem I saw happen on a Portland street instead. Figuring out how I might use what I saw in the production of a poem about living life from the verb’s point of view is turning out to be rather fun. Now the question will be if anyone else will be able to connect with it.

Regardless of that though, the exploration will make my poetry stretch, and that is what the course was designed to do. So discomfort aside, it’ll do.