Deaf American Poetry: An Anthology

Peter Cook (1962– )

198  Peter Cook (1962– ) Most American Sign Language (ASL) poetry, interestingly, is universal, not Deaf, in content. When Deaf poets create work in their native language, they are likely to be much less conscious of their “otherness” than are Deaf poets who write in English. In other words, it is as fundamental human beings—citizens of the world—that ASL poets express their art. Another way to understand this is that poetry articulated in ASL is automatically Deaf and, therefore, does not need to be explicitly Deaf. It is intriguing, then, to find ASL poets’ occasional forays into more readily addressing the Deaf experience. The signing stylist Peter Cook’s two written poems here are examples of this general rule, and even though his pieces in the Flying Words Project section do touch on deafness, they are exceptions that prove the rule that very little ASL poetry is Deaf in content. Cook’s two poems here deal with questions of truth and language. Mainstream society uses language to define what is true, but thanks to Cook’s deafness and oralist background, the spell does not quite work on him; as a result, he is able to gleefully say “the truth does not lie to me.” Peter Cook was born in Parkersburg, West Virginia, and became deaf at the age of three due to spinal meningitis. His parents sent him to Clarke School for the Deaf, a staunchly oralist program. In the ninth grade, he transferred to Selebury, a private school where he was the only deaf student. He did not learn ASL until he auditioned for a play at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf and got a part that required ignorance of ASL. After six months among signing actors, Cook became a signing stylist and began to perform his own creative work. Peter Cook 199 Since graduating with a bachelor’s degree in graphic design, he has taught at Columbia College, where he received the 1997 Excellence in Teaching Award, and elsewhere while performing internationally with Kenny Lerner under the rubric of the Flying Words Project. He appeared on PBS’s United States of Poetry and has performed at many festivals, including the Deaf Way II International Cultural Arts Festival and the Tales of Graz in Austria. He lives in Chicago. ...