Deaf American Poetry: An Anthology

Dorothy Miles (1931–1993)

159  Dorothy Miles (1931–1993) At the time Dorothy Miles produced her book-and-video collection of written and signed poems, Gestures, the signing community was giving itself more and more permission to express art in its own language. Until William C. Stokoe’s academic defense of American Sign Language (ASL) as a language in its own right, “signed” poetry was in the main recitations of written poems. Miles’s work in the mid-1970s was a step away from this and a precursor to the ASL poetry revolution a decade later. Instead of performing written poems, she created poems with both writing and signing in mind—neither translations of written poems in ASL nor creations of ASL poems completely free of any thought of the printed word, but something in the middle. This paralleled the wide popularization of the Total Communication approach, which was then occurring in Deaf education. After the decades-long stranglehold of oralism on the field, signing was finally brought back in the classroom, but it arrived politely and with assurances that it could coexist with what many hearing teachers and parents wanted to see: speaking and lip-reading . However, speaking and signing at the same time, a central tool of Total Communication known colloquially as Sim-Com, did not work very well because it compromised both languages—the spoken English got muddled, and the ASL lost its full expressive power. Aside from breaking some ground in cross-lingual poetics , Miles’s work did not succeed for the same reason, at least not until after she returned to the United Kingdom and contributed greatly to research in British Sign Language (BSL) and did her poetry separately between written pieces and sign creations. Nevertheless , her “The Hang-Glider” is an apt allegory of “taking the leap” into the Deaf world. This poem, then, is a fine period piece; Dorothy Miles 160 the beginnings of the Deaf Pride movement saw the community, on all levels, taking flight. Dorothy Miles was born in North Wales. During World War II, she was deafened by spinal meningitis. Miles attended a school in Manchester, where she received training in speech and learned a limited sign language used by the students, known as the “Manchester version.” In 1946, she enrolled at England’s first high school for deaf students, Mary Hare Grammar. In 1957, Miles went to America, drawn to Gallaudet College and the chance to become an actress. She “fell in love with American Sign Language ,” which she said was “so much more complete and creative” than BSL. Miles toured with the National Theatre of the Deaf and in 1976 published Gestures: Poetry in American Sign Language. She returned to England and worked as a social worker with young Deaf people in Uxbridge, as a researcher for the British Deaf Association and Interpreter Training Council, and as a contributor to a monumental dictionary of BSL. After her death, friends established in Guildford the Dorothy Miles Culture Centre to foster theater, poetry, and love of sign language among Deaf and hearing people alike. A larger collection of Miles’s work was published posthumously as Bright Memory. ...