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4. Tree Tangled in Tree: Resiting Poetry through ASL
- University of Michigan Press
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Chapter 4 Tree Tangled in Tree Resiting Poetry through ASL What Is Golf? At a 2004 conference on disability studies in the university, Simi Linton spoke about Casey Martin, the golfer who was denied access to the PGA national golf tour because, as someone with a mobility impairment, he needed to ride in an electric cart. As Linton pointed out, his disability is not located in the game of golf—which he plays spectacularly—but in the rules by which golf tournaments are conducted. This prompted Linton to meditate on the seemingly unproblematic meaning of institutions and activities when they are limited to an able-bodied individual. The big question , she mused is, “What is the game of golf?” (“What Is Disability Studies ” 519). This is a signi‹cant issue because it forces us to reevaluate impairment not from the standpoint of a physical condition but from the environment in which that condition gains meaning. Is golf radically different when it is played by someone who rides rather than walks from tee to tee? Who decides on the meaning of games and their rules? The same questions could be asked of poetry when it is regarded from the perspective of poets who utilize American Sign Language—for whom poetry is no longer governed by the voice, page, or writing. Although poets often describe their work as emanating from the body and voice, these 100 tropes mean something quite different when literalized by poets who sign their poems by and on the body and whose voice is removed from some interior space of the body and represented on its surface. Walt Whitman’s claim that “my voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach” suggests a metaphoric expansion of poetry beyond its phenomenological origins and extended through the medium of print. But, as I have said in my previous chapter, when Peter Cook of the Flying Words Project sends language “around the world” by throwing the ‹nger-spelled letter l into space, language ceases to be a metaphor for extension and becomes, visibly , a “›ying word” in space. On the model of Linton’s golf metaphor, we might ask the big question, What is poetry? when considered from the standpoint of sign language. And more particularly for our own era, what is modernist poetry when its ocularcentrism—its presumption of a transparent relationship between sign and object—is resited through sign? This latter question requires some contextualization. Modernist ocularcentrism is manifested in the retinal aesthetics of a good deal of postimpressionist art. Cubism, futurism, constructivism, and fauvism all have, at their core, a critique of single-point perspective that has been in place since the Renaissance.1 In its various modalities, painting from Cézanne and Pissaro to Duchamp fractures the unity of the object as well as the (presumed) perspectival integrity of the viewing subject. Whether attempting to render the play of light and shadow on the retina in impressionism or blasting the sculptural unity of an object into facets, as in cubism, modern artists subjected the ocular and painting’s mimetic abilities to a severe challenge. Of course, like all attempts to characterize an epoch under a single rubric (mannerism, the Age of Reason, the Pound Era) this ocularcentric reading of modernism involves a reduction of a spectrum of pictorial gestures to a single emphasis. That emphasis is the product of a formalist aesthetic, whether one links it to Greenbergian abstraction or New Criticism, and this tendency has come under severe critique by Leo Steinberg, Martin Jay, Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, and others . Be that as it may, it is hard to miss the way that ocularity organized the construction and rhetoric of modern poetics. Literary counterparts to the visual arts—imagism, vorticism, objectivism—emphasize visual clarity and economy against the expressivism and rhetorical abstractions of late romanticism. The various metaphors for modernist distanciation, whether via Ezra Pound’s ideogram, T. S. Eliot’s objective correlative, Tree Tangled in Tree 101 [54.205.116.187] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:28 GMT) Louis Zukofsky’s object “brought to a focus,” or Gertrude Stein’s repetition (based on ‹lm), privilege the eye as a way of achieving, as Pound said, “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (4). Emphasis on the ocular is reinforced by what Joseph Frank has called “spatial form” in modern literature. According to Frank, modernist literature aspires to the condition of the visual arts by creating the illusion of a simultaneous apprehension...