Friday, April 4, 2025 ~ Free Event
7:00 pm - 8:00 pm ~ The Bertschi Center & Technology Commons
No videotaping or photographs allowed.
Registering for the event allows us to make sure we have correct seating and handle other preparations.
Registration is now closed. It was a great show!!
FLYING WORDS PROJECT is an American Sign Language (ASL) poetry troupe comprised of Deaf Poet Peter Cook and hearing coauthor Kenny Lerner. The goal of Flying Words is probably the same as all other poets, to play with language. As luck would have it, ASL is a language of moving pictures. So Kenny and Peter juxtapose imagery you can see in creating their work.
The pieces are first written in ASL. When a poem is completed, Peter and Kenny try to figure out how the hell to voice it! In other words, how to express just enough words and sounds so that hearing members in the audience can see the images for themselves. Together they create a moving tapestry uniquely accessible to both hearing and deaf audiences.
This collaboration commenced in 1984 when Cook and Lerner began performing poetry together. They soon established a deaf poetry series in Rochester, NY which culminated in the First National ASL Literature Conference in 1992. In performance, Flying Words was asked to close out the 36th Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. They have been featured at the Poetry Days Festival (Dzejas Dienas,) in Latvia, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Harvard University, The People's Poetry Gathering in NYC, Theatre de Lucernaire in Paris, and many places in between. Cook and Lerner have been the recipients of grants from the New York State Council of the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Puffin Foundation and are the authors
of four dvd anthologies, The Year of the Walking Dogs (1984-90), the Can't Touch Tours (1990-2003), and "Live at the Bowery Club" (2007) and Flying Words Project: Live in Colorado (2014.)
In addition to his poetry, Peter Cook is an internationally reputed Deaf storyteller who teaches at the American Sign Language Department at Princeton University. Kenny
Lerner has worked with other deaf artists and is the co-author of "Missing Children" with Debbie Rennie. He is a retired professor of history at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester, NY and lives in the country with his wife and two dumb dogs.
You can contact Flying Words Project at Flyingwordsproject@yahoo.com
FREE RECEPTION FOLLOWING EVENT
Reviews:
Flying Words Project has accomplished what poets have been trying to do for several centuries now; to make their poems more visual, more embodied, more alive...It is remarkable to think that they are currently influencing the entire course of ASL poetry.
Dirksen Bauman, Department of ASL and Deaf Studies Chair, Gallaudet University
I have long been skeptical and easily jaded by attempts to jazz-up, sex-up, spice-up poetry...
Last year, upon visiting the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam I was less than impressed by the idea of attending a poetry reading in deaf sign language. I asked myself is this political correctness gone mad or what? I'm glad I had my prejudices smashed on that occasion because I saw the Flying Words Project for the first time. The term Poetry-in-Motion must be one of the most abused terms on the English language, applied to everything from the way a celebrity chef tosses a pancake to how a soccer player foots a ball. Let me tell you quite plainly that the Flying Words Project really is, literally Poetry in Motion. They have done translations of standard poems such as a Neruda love lyric into ASL as well as composed their original pieces. Their performance is full of energy and joy that is wholly infectious. It is as much dance as it is mime or language hand-signed.
Anyone who sees their performance in Cork next week will be talking about it for years to follow, making everyone who missed the event know they've missed something truly special and should be sorry for themselves.
Patrick Cotter
Frank O'Connor House
Munster Literature Centre Review
Cork, Ireland
For information about the cancellation policy, refund, or if special accommodations are needed, contact us at interpretingconference@mtaloy.edu
PARID is approved by the RID CMP to sponsor Continuing Education Activities. This program is offered for 0.1 CEUs in general studies. Participants should have some knowledge of the topic.
