Reprise: “How am I going to express my poetry?”
Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner of the Flying Words Project
Originally published on How to Grow a Poem in November 2023.
It’s intriguing—although not surprising—to discover that Allen Ginsberg left his mark on American Sign Language poetry, thanks in part to the Beat poet’s idiosyncratic imagery.
And, in doing so, he directly influenced The Flying Words Project, the innovative duo composed of Deaf poet Peter Cook and his hearing and voicing partner Kenny Lerner. The two have been pushing the boundaries of the discipline and mesmerizing audiences worldwide—Deaf and hearing alike—for just under four decades now (bios below).
But all that still lay ahead when Cook—then a student at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) in Rochester, New York, and still a newcomer to American Sign Language—attended a workshop led by Robert Panara, a poet, professor, and a founder of both NTID and the National Theater of the Deaf. (Panara’s impact on Deaf culture was so great that he was later commemorated with a U.S. postage stamp.) At the 1984 workshop, he was joined by both Ginsberg and Patrick Graybill, a renowned Deaf actor, poet, and storyteller.
Their task that day? Translate Ginsberg’s verbal inventions into ASL and the related techniques that Deaf performers employ.
How, for example, can a Ginsbergian phrase like “hydrogen jukebox” from the poem “Howl” be meaningfully rendered?
Graybill, steeped in the art of theatre, provided a creative answer that day, and Cook says now it proved to be an eye-opening one for a young poet.
“I wrote poetry before that,” Cook said, “and I used English as my language. [But] I thought maybe I could “sign” my poetry.
“How am I going to express my poetry?” he asked himself.
The workshop offered some answers to that question, and a creative collaboration with Lerner that formed that same year proved to be transformative for not only the two men, but for the entire field of ASL poetry.
Lerner, who trained in history at Beloit College and earned an MA degree in Deaf Education at the University of Virginia before beginning a long career teaching history at NTID, soon became Cook’s creative partner and performance collaborator.
“We didn’t have a big canon [of ASL poetry] when we started,” Lerner said. “We were not doing traditional poetry; ours was more political and not about deafness.”
Neither was it written in English. They write their poems in ASL based on an initial idea either might bring to the table, and then “throw things back and forth,” Lerner explained. Those “things” might be any of the tools in their creative toolkit, from ASL to mime, movement, and what they think of as “film techniques” like poses and positions that mimic varied camera angles.
“We’ve learned that we have to let the poem create itself.”
“Sometimes it takes a weekend, sometimes three years. We don’t know where it’s going to go,” he added. “We’ve learned that we have to let the poem create itself.”
In fact, when they try to force a new creation into a preconceived conclusion, “it’s always a lousy poem,” Lerner said, touching on a creative reality that poets working in any language are likely to recognize. “Through the process, we learn what the poem means.”
“People think that I’m the creator, but we create the signs together,” Cook said.
Their poem “Thuup,” an ambitious and complex work that takes about eight minutes to perform, is one of those poems that revealed itself over time.
The initial idea was Lerner’s, one that came to him when he was reading “A Tale of Two Cities” and was struck by Dickens’s descriptions of the storming of the Bastille, where a mob became “an ocean.”
“When I read that, I had an image of a river of people, rather than an ocean. And Peter came up with more images.” he said.
“Kenny and I were really into metaphors and personification,” Cook said. “So the river became protesters, and vice versa.”
And the metaphors and personifications built, over time, to cascading images of a sort of surrealistic chaos. But not right away. It was only later when The Flying Words Project traveled to Latvia to appear in that country’s National Poetry Celebration—a major event that showcases poets and poetry in every Latvian city, town, and village—that “Thuup” fully gelled.
Today, the Baltic Sea port city of Liepāja is touted as an important tourist destination, but Cook and Lerner remember it in another light shortly after Soviet rule had ended.
“The place was destroyed,” Lerner said, including a former Russian naval base that the locals, thrown into poverty by the Soviet collapse, had plundered. “They stole everything.”
So much so that Cook and Lerner ended up performing with car headlights serving as stage lights, they recalled.
But the bleak cityscape provided the poets with a plethora of images that found their way into “Thuup,” along with a reminder that Eastern Europe didn’t have a lock on poverty, Lerner said. Around the same time Latvians were scavenging in the abandoned Soviet base, he noted, there were people in the U.S. digging through empty buildings for copper pipes and other valuable recyclables.
“It showed how communism and capitalism both leave people behind,” he said.
Here’s the English language transcript of “Thuup,” by Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner; the video is above.
Thuup
The wall is down
Barbed wire
Weeds overgrowing the wall
guarding a bumpy road
with curbs crumbling, crumbling
streets, streets
Weeds overgrowing a shed
A house with no roof
Staircases suspended
No windows
Slats missing
Down the hill
a statue with chunks
missing chunks and chunks
and a vine intervenes
Some kind of steeple
Signal lights
street lights
dim
except for one
lone
And the streets are empty!
The weeds recede
as the wall stands up
with barbed wire
Soldiers goosestepping
They’re goosestepping
They’re guarding over a fine paved road
with curbs smooth, smooth
A fine lawn with flowers
A nice new shed
with a new house
with a new roof
A steeple with a cross
And the statue with the arm reattached
uniform reforming
Beard, eyes, colonel’s cap
ribbons and medals and medals and medals
and an arm pointing the way
Signal lights flashing
Street lamps on
And the streets are alive with people
Oh, there’s a bread line!
An empty shelf
a loaf of bread!
A butter line
with three empty shelves
One, two, three
And a slab of butter!
Beyond the wall
Pastures
and cows and cows
chewing their cud, swallowing
Producing milk!
Milk pouring
Milk loading
into ships
Ships steaming
steaming off
Back on the shelf
Is a slab of butter
And a butter line!
A door opens
and someone is marching
Two marchers
three, four
A river of marchers
When a door opens
someone is swept downstream!
When a door opens
someone leaps downstream!
From a window up above
a waterfall plunges down
into the water!
Raindrops join in!
As the river
marches
downstream
swallowing up…cars
swallowing up…marchers
Then the river
rears up as it nears
the guards
Then it slams into the wall
buckles
Beyond the wall
a canal
leading to a lock
She opens her gates
and the juices flow
A tugboat
She beckons
And he enters her (heavy breathing)
enters……(heavy breathing)
enters the lock
Water levels rise
as she tickles his hull
He leans on the walls
His boilerplate pops!
The lock
The canal
The wall
The river
And they rear up
Then way in the back
more
marchers
push
forward
until in a final wave
they surge towards the wall
collapses
Water floods out
streams out
drains down
until someone gets up
and shakes off
Someone shakes off
And the houses
The houses
are quiet
A door opens
And someone jimmies a window!
and carts it off
A door opens
and someone jimmies a door!
and carts it off
And someone
and someone
and someone
and someone
and someone
There is a sink
Out of the faucet
drips
someone!
who rips off the sink
And carts it off
Someone is taking a shower
Water lines lead underground
across town
to where someone with pipe cutters
Shower runs dry
Someone checks the handle
and carts it off!
Even in the streets
Someone!
Stone by stone
It’s a shambles
Everything is a shambles!
The houses
the sheds
and everything you can think of
The statue
Arm lopped off
face chipped
chunks and chunks
Then the ribbons ripped off
Medals picked off, each and every one
picked off!
The vine grows and dies
Signal lights out
On the power lines
a ladder
Someone
clips the wire
pulls the plug
Street lights out
It’s gone, gone
It’s all gone
Gone!
Look at me!
And you!
Bios:
Peter Cook is an internationally renowned Deaf performing artist whose work incorporates American Sign Language, pantomime, storytelling, acting, and movement. Cook has presented his work both nationally and internationally, including at the Kennedy Center, the National Book Festival and in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Japan. He has also appeared on PBS and traveled extensively as part of the Flying Words Project to promote ASL literature. Cook is Chair of the ASL Department at Columbia College in Chicago.
Kenny Lerner has performed as a co-creator and as the voice of Peter Cook in Flying Words Project since 1984. He has also worked with other Deaf artists, among them, Debbie Rennie with whom he is the co-author of "Missing Children" and "Willie." In performance, he has developed a style of voicing that aims to support the images of an ASL poem. To Kenny, the poem is the signed imagery, while the voice is a vehicle to help hearing audiences to see the images created on the signing poet's body. Kenny received a BA in History at Beloit College in Wisconsin and a MA in Deaf Education at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. Kenny coordinated the First National ASL Literature Conference in 1991. He teaches History at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester, New York. Kenny lives in the country with his wife and two dumb dogs.