Noah Buchholz, a deaf poet, was standing on a stage on the ground floor of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on Wednesday night, with a gentle smile.
His left and right hands intermittently motioned forward, as his fingers spread open like little bursts of fire and joy. He was performing a poem inspired by his deaf grandmother’s experience in a school that forbade students to use ASL, recalling how she and her friends at the dorm would gather at night by a window to sign in secret.
This is what sign language poetry, a genre rooted in the sign language tradition, looks like: a feast for the eyes.
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Noah Buchholz, a deaf poet, at the Sound/Off event at the Guggenheim.
At night, the moon rose in the window. Its light touched the pane and spread over the floor. The girls climbed out ...
Buchholz was one of the poets invited to showcase their poetry for an event, Sound/Off, organized by the Guggenheim’s 2024 poet in residence, Meg Day. Day, who is deaf and uses they/them pronouns, has spent the year working on highlighting sign language poetry, a well-established artistic form within Deaf culture that has received little recognition among wider audiences.
Among Day’s initiatives is “Ekphrasis in Air,” a display of sign language poetry on the sixth floor of the rotunda, in the “Harmony and Dissonance” exhibition devoted to Orphism. Nestled between two areas broadcasting readings of poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars are three video screens projecting poems in American and British Sign Languages, including by Day, Douglas Ridloff and Abby Haroun.