If you find yourself in New York City any time before March 9, 2025, you’ll want to visit the Guggenheim Museum to check out “Sixth Stanza,” an installation that includes the revolutionary video series “Ekphrasis in Air.”
“Ekphrasis in Air” showcases poetry by talented deaf poets such as Douglas Ridloff and Abby Haroun, who present their poems using American and British sign languages. Each poem in the series is a response either to art from the museum’s permanent collection or to the museum’s iconic Frank Lloyd Wright building, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The video series is one of several initiatives introduced by the Guggenheim’s 2024 Poet in Residence Meg Day.
Day, a deaf poet, essayist and English professor at North Carolina State University, is the museum’s third poet-in-residence. According to Guggenheim.org, Day’s residency, called “All Ears”, has three goals: “to highlight Deaf poets as visual artists by welcoming them into the museum space in new ways; encourage the hearing-majority public to engage with American Sign Language and Deaf sonics through unexpected encounters; and to encourage people to reorient their understanding of language and fluency as visible, just as much as it is aural.”
The poems “honor the long history of Deaf literature by engaging traditional and contemporary uses of rhyming handshapes, facial grammar, the manual alphabet, and visual vernacular (a physical art form that combines ASL, mime, and theatrical techniques to create a visual narrative). When signing poets engage in ekphrasis (verbal description of a visual work of art), the visual nature of sign language and of art intermingle to invoke an experience of shared embodiment.”
Though ASL poetry has existed for at least 100 years, and has grown in popularity in recent years, it is still relatively unknown outside the ASL community. Day’s efforts at the Guggenheim have brought the artform to new audiences.
In December, the museum presented Sound Off: An Evening of Poetry. The celebration of poetry included the work of Deaf and hard-of-hearing poets from across the United States who presented their poems in English and ASL. Day told North Carolina State’s Humanities and Social Sciences News that the program was “a dream and an overdue joy.
“To have Deaf and hard-of-hearing poets writing poems in English share the stage with Deaf and hard-of-hearing poets making poems in sign language is a rare thing,” Day added. “To invite audiences of all kinds to consider their own access needs regarding these poems — while celebrating these world-renowned poets — felt exciting.”