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This article describes the newly developing form of poetic duets in Libras (Brazilian Sign Language). What do the two people performing a sign language duet poem do to make a duet different from a solo poem? How can we categorize their actions and the effects that these actions create? Drawing on examples of duet poems in Libras, we analyze different types of sign language duets to understand what is added to signed poems when two people perform what cannot be produced by a solo signed poetic performance. Duets in which signers are arranged front-to-back, side-by-side, or above-below display a range of effects related to the modes of signer coupling, the symmetry created, and figure-ground roles. A clearer understanding of the potential of poetic duets in sign language contributes to the development and appreciation of the genre and to the aesthetics of signed literature generally.

Despite research commenting on and analyzing signed poetry, there is little research exploring the aims and intentions of the signing poets. This paper considers the producers of signed poetry, rather than their products. Using material gathered from interviews with three established signing deaf poets, we consider what they hope to achieve when they perform their poetry, including who they aim their work at, and how their perceived audiences influence their performances. This allows us to understand more clearly what challenges audiences face when trying to understand the poetry and how the poets can help audiences meet those challenges. We find that signing poets understand how deaf audiences have been conditioned to respond to poetry, and create connections between themselves and deaf audiences by using the shared specific cultural and linguistic experiences of deaf people. Although deaf audiences are their ultimate preferred audiences, poets welcome hearing audiences, especially if their engagement with the poetry leads to increased understanding of Deaf culture or encourages them to learn sign language. The close, embodied relationship between the poet, poem, and audience makes them inseparable. Written poetry may be abstracted and contained in a book; in contrast, the signing poet is, in effect, the book.

This article discusses a new way of thinking about analyzing sign-language poetry. Rather than merely focusing on the product, the method involves observing the process of its creation. Recent years have witnessed increasing literary and linguistic analysis of sign-language poetry, with commentaries on texts and performances being set within and drawing on a range of disciplines and analytical techniques. However, attention has so far been paid to the texts and performances rather than to the process of their creation. While working with four of the UK's most prolific sign-language poets, exploring and trying to understand more about British Sign Language (BSL) poetry, we became increasingly interested in the creative processes that occur and emerge in the composition itself. We decided to give them a task related to creative anthropomorphism and asked them to think "out loud" about the process as they created their compositions. We took our lead from think-aloud protocols, which have been used extensively in studies of cognitive processes and knowledge acquisition to understand how we solve problems (van Someren, Barnard, and Sandberg 1994; Tirkkonen-Condit and Jaaskelainen 2000; Stone 2009). We invited the poets to reflect upon and share with each other how they tackle a particular challenging aspect that is often incorporated in sign-language poems. This shared thinking process enabled them to explore anthropomorphic concepts together and jointly to create poetic examples, while also giving us insight into the processes of task completion (rather than only its final product). (Contains 3 notes and 6 figures.)

The work presented here considers some linguistic methods used in sign anthropomorphism. We find a cline of signed anthropomorphism that depends on a number of factors, including the skills and intention of the signer, the animacy of the entities represented, the form of their bodies, and the form of vocabulary signs referring to those entities. We consider four main factors that allow signers to anthropomorphize the whole range of entities (from animate to inanimate): the linguistic base that allows such play, the ability of the nonmanuals to anthropomorphize even when the manual articulators are signing in an ordinary way, the range of possibilities for both manual and nonmanual articulators when the signer engages in (almost) complete embodiment of the nonhuman character, and how nonhumans are portrayed as communicating via sign language. (Contains 16 figures.)

This paper considers the range of ways that sign languages use geometric symmetry temporally and spatially to create poetic effect. Poets use this symmetry in sign language art to highlight duality and thematic contrast, and to create symbolic representations of beauty, order and harmony. (Contains 8 tables, 14 figures and 6 notes.)

Focuses on the phonological deviance of the poetry of Dorothy Miles, who composed her work in both British Sign Language and English. Analysis is based on three poems performed by Miles herself. (Author/VWL)

Sign Language poetry is especially valued for its presentation of strong visual images. Here, we explore the highly visual signs that British Sign Language and American Sign Language poets create as part of the 'classifier system' of their languages. Signed languages, as they create visually-motivated messages, utilise categoricity (more traditionally considered 'language') and analogy (more traditionally considered extra-linguistic and the domain of 'gesture'). Classifiers in sign languages arguably show both these characteristics (Oviedo, 2004). In our discussion of sign language poetry, we see that poets take elements that are widely understood to be highly visual, closely representing their referents, and make them even more highly visual - so going beyond categorisation and into new areas of analogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider the role of sign language poetry in creating and expressing the Deaf poet’s identity as a “visual person” in a community living within a wider national community. We show how two Deaf poets from different linguistic, national and cultural backgrounds nevertheless have both created similar effects through their sign language poems, drawing on the folkloric knowledge of their Deaf communities and wider national folklore. Analysis of the language and themes in the poems reveals that sign language components including neologism and use of symmetry can be manipulated directly to celebrate the visual experience of Deaf people. The poetic language can be seen as a way to empower poets and their audiences to understand their place better within the world Deaf community and their own national communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]