Sound Consequence

1.

Last fall, I was given a new name sign. I say given because it was a gift, as all Deaf name signs are, and it was conferred upon me without warning by a queer Deaf elder who did not love poetry but did love me. Names are difficult things; they sit among the first of many acts done to us without our consent. We carry their baggage—inherited, semantic—like heavy magnets that attract connotative jetsam and accumulate over time, sharpening and shaping us. How many of us get new ones—and at what cost? Marriage, divorce, transition—these are choices, often expensive in various, hidden ways. Name signs are different; they are bestowed, and only by a Deaf person from within the community. To receive a new one so deep into life lowers the likelihood that the name sign is arbitrary, like my first, and increases the chance that it will be descriptive. I couldn’t have known, but it’s a little like being born again, or witnessed for the first time. Mine still feels new and light and perfect, as surprising as it is grounding. I won’t describe it here because we don’t know one another and I don’t know what else you do with your hands, but it probably doesn’t involve American Sign Language.

2.

Which is maybe unfair. Maybe you are learning ASL this fall, or maybe you have a Deaf beloved. Maybe your Boy Scout Handbook had the manual alphabet and you’re trying to remember, right now, whether or not the M in Meg hooks two fingers over the thumb or three. Maybe I have, once again, been caught assuming my reader is hearing. Are you? It’s easy, that assumption. Deaf poets writing in English are trained well to believe we are the outlier in American poetics: the exception, the accident, even. Because isn’t poetry about sound? And isn’t silence my thing?

3.

You’d think so, but hearing poets sure have a lot to say about it. This makes sense; they invented it. Silence is just another ableist metaphor, a mismatched name. Hearing poets load up silence with solitude and stillness, emptiness and calm. Doing so decenters the sensory reality of sound and, like most cheap metaphors, acts as a protective shield or a distancing, a way to say a thing and also say I didn’t mean it like that. Beneath the metaphor, though, is the corporeal denotation built, in part, on the mythology of deafness. You need deaf bodies to invent silence. It’s done on our backs. Done poorly, but done nonetheless.

4.

(Hearing poets also like to put things in cardinal numbered sections, so I will, too. It seems easier than choosing ordinal numerals as subheadings in ASL, which would be thumb, forefinger, middle finger, and so on.)

Pinky finger.

(But ease isn’t the way of things. There’s a Deaf anagram in the penultimate stanza of my poem, “Portrait of My Gender as [Inaudible].” It’s not a riddle, but then I guess you didn’t intend for lipreading to be, either.)

6.

For a long time, I didn’t know what to call my gender. I came up during an intermediary moment in Bay Area social justice and queer communities when transgender, as a name, seemed to me to require more binary than I could muster. As a proud disabled person, I resist the cure-model resolutions medical interventions promise; as a proud genderqueer kid, I felt pressured to pursue medical transition as an answer to the glaring question mark of my body. When the cultural conversation shifted suddenly to pronouns, I was both relieved and annoyed. Pronoun conversations continue to baffle and frustrate me. We don’t have them in ASL; we have other problems, but not pronouns. I don’t want to tell you what mine are. I don’t want to put them in my email signature. I want you to call me by my name. No, not that one. With your hands.

7.

In their most recent book, Rocket Fantastic, Gabrielle Calvocoressi chooses the segno symbol as a pronoun when referring to the figure of the Bandleader. A note to the reader at the beginning of the book explains that the segno sits in for “a confluence of genders in varying degrees, not either/or nor necessarily both in equal measure. It is simultaneously encompassing and fluctuating, pronounced by [Calvocoressi] with the intake of breath when a body is unlimited in its possibilities.” I would be lucky to call Calvocoressi queer crip kin, so I read their choice as an embodied one: to use inhalation to remake a pronoun—pronouns, which name us without naming us—via a notation marking the beginning and end of a musical repeat, is to invite the reader into a space of endurance, of exhaustion and breathlessness. I don’t mean it’s not hopeful; it is. It’s the breath before, the breath of life. When I teach this book, I always expect to identify with the Bandleader, relieved of conventional pronouns and replaced by voicelessness; instead, I always end up feeling the most kinship with whomever is trying to read aloud in the room. It’s difficult to gasp for air when performing yourself. It’s difficult to always feel confident being read as endless possibility.

8.

This issue of Poetry arrived on the same day my ears went in to be serviced. (I say ears, but I mean tech—my hearing aids, my cyborg self. Even here I’m trying to teach you my language.) The loaners are silver and say DEMO in large letters on each side. The audiologist who fitted me with these temporary borg parts apologized, said, “All of our older patients have been losing their hearing aids because they fly out when you pull off a face mask.” Every time I go to the audiologist, I look for somebody under sixty. Every time I read Poetry I look for Deaf kin. This week, without my ears, I’m rereading Gloria Anzaldua’s “To(o) Queer the Writer—Loca, escritora y chicana” in anticipation of teaching her this spring in whatever form COVID-19 makes possible. She writes, “I believe that while there are lesbian perspectives, sensibilities, experiences and topics, there are no ‘lesbian writers.’ For me the term lesbian es un problema.” Is there such a thing as a Deaf poet? I’m trying to figure out which name was gifted to me and which one I chose. I’m trying to figure out if I want the pair of them if you, dear hearing reader, are the one dictating what it means.

9.

Deaf poet kin Ilya Kaminsky started a conversation on twitter that helped me think through the kinds of conversations we could be having about silence and sound, if we wanted to. How do we—I’m talking to us, finally, Deaf poets—how do we find relevance in much of poetics, which denotatively pursues musicality and claims to puncture and perforate so-called silence? How much of English poetics remains unassembled simply because we—yes us, Deaf poets—keep trying to fit their English names, play by English rules? (Prosody, for one. Sound is stressful, I agree. Are we really going to keep trying to make language about speech? Nobody’s got the same body, but here we go trying to stress language in the same way again.) What does it mean to be a poet with a name that makes and requires no sound? If I am made in the image of a thing without an image and then I make a poem—a sound, I’m told—without sound? I think I can show you. I think you’ll mistake me for silent white space on the page, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take.

10.