Bauman’s article gives a brief history of American Sign Language Poetry in order to show how the craft of ASL Poetry has evolved.  The area that this article focuses on is the connection that has developed between cinematic elements and ASL Poetry.  Bauman does not reduce ASL poetry to merely cinematic experience but rather uses the complex language involved in developing the cinematic experience to analyze the complexities of the performance of ASL poets.   The language of cinematography, for Bauman, offers a critical lens that permits researchers of ASL Poetry to unravel and understand the techniques of the visual art.  Bauman also states that, “although many people presume that film has introduced a uniquely modern means of perceiving the world, we can reasonably assume that the cinematic-like composition of sign predated the cinematograph by a good twenty-five hundred years” (14).

Bauman reveals that “the thought of a nonwritten, nonverbal medium of literature shook the very foundation of my education.  It ran counter to everything I had been taught about literature, yet it made perfect sense” (1).   He continues by explaining that the body becomes the medium of storytelling and the tool of performance for ASL poets.  The body tells a story through the use of symmetry.  According to Bauman, “geometric symmetry in sign languages can be seen in the spatial arrangement of the two hands and their movements. There are different ways of creating symmetry using this spatial arrangement, any of which may be used in signed poetry” (3).   He argues that:

Within poetry, the language used to express ideas is the focus of the utterance. Poets deliberately manipulate their language, either by unusual use of existing features in the language or by creating new elements, so that the language becomes obtrusive. Thus, as Leech (1968) has emphasized, the unusual regularity or irregularity of language creates a foregrounding of the language. In other words, we notice poetic language because it is odd. Manipulation of symmetry within a poem is a device to foreground the use of language. In sign languages poets may rely on unusually regular use of existing symmetrical patterns within the language, or they may create new (irregular) symmetrical patterns. (10)

Symbolic meaning results through the use of spatial opposites such as “above and below, front and back, and left and right” and the metaphors that are associated with “space and orientation” (9).  Bauman explains that “geometric bilateral symmetry, created through the arrangement of the hands, is a fundamental aspect of sign languages.  Poets work with this fundamental feature of the language to foreground it for poetic effect” (9).   Like spoken poems that are symmetrical through patterns of speech, poems that are signed can be symmetrical through sign patterns (12-13).

I found it very helpful that Bauman provides sample poems, includes tables with handshapes and movements and photographs of poets signing their poems.

I argue that like oral poems that have been written down or spoken word and slam poems that are created for performance, sign language poems lose essential elements when they are removed from the performance and reduced to print.

Douglas Ridloff’s ASL Poem “Earology”

“The United States of Poetry” by Peter Cook