Deaf American Poetry: An Anthology

Clayton Valli (1951–2003)

178  Clayton Valli (1951–2003) Clayton Valli’s gliding and eye-widening “A Dandelion” is, hands down, the signing community’s best-loved American Sign Language (ASL) poem. It has been watched on video many times over and recited with much relish and pathos. Like many of his contemporaries who pioneered the art form, Valli thought for many years that his work could not be translated into English. How could something so beautiful and so powerful in its native airspace be harnessed on paper, in mere words? One suspects this skepticism toward translation arose from a mistrust of the English language that many Deaf people share, partly because many of them themselves are not fully literate in it and are unable to be moved by words in the same ways literate readers can be moved. Another factor is the relative lack of literary interaction between ASL poets and fluent signers who have an intimate knowledge of poetry in both languages. But once Valli met and read Raymond Luczak’s poetry, he took what he called a risk and let Luczak translate his most famous poem and another poem, “Pawns.” The results convinced Valli that ASL poetry could be translated after all. Something, as is always the case, is lost in translation, but it is good enough and does literature a great service. Unfortunately , these two poems were the only translations of Valli’s work that he approved before he died. One important reason the two translations are a success is that Luczak is the same kind of poet in English that Valli was in ASL: a formalist, someone who plumbs artistic force from working within strict structures. Valli was the first to develop a kind of taxonomy of ASL poetry, replete with its equivalents of the line, rhyme, and other parameters, and, unlike 179 Clayton Valli some others, his feet stayed on the same spot so the camera angle need not move at all, letting his hands write within the frames. Clayton Valli was born deaf in Seabrook, New Hampshire. After graduating from the Austine School for the Deaf in Vermont, he went to the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, where he earned an associate degree in photography. When he learned the Gunners needed a signing photographer to help in their work teaching the chimpanzee Washoe sign language, he applied and got the job. In Nevada, Valli also studied social psychology and received his bachelor’s degree in 1978. Discovering on his own a way to express poetry in pure ASL rather than mere approximations of English verse in signs, Valli became fascinated with linguistics, which he studied at Gallaudet, securing his master’s degree in 1985. He then designed his own doctoral studies in linguistics and ASL poetics at Union Institute in Cincinnati, where he received his PhD in 1993. Valli performed his poetry and presented on sign language poetry worldwide, becoming easily the best-loved poet in any sign language. In addition to many scholarly publications and best-selling textbooks on ASL linguistics, Valli made two video collections of his poetry, one produced by Sign Media Inc., and the other by DawnSignPress, still available today. A victim of AIDS, he died of health complications . His sign memoir, “Poetry Exploding from the Heart” (a reference to the way the word “poetry” is signed, the fist representing the heart opening or “exploding” into the sign for “expression”), translated by Raymond Luczak, appeared in John Lee Clark’s anthology Clayton: A Tribute to Clayton Valli. ...