Detail View: Deaf Studies, Culture, and History Archives: Allen Ginsberg poster

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Allen Ginsberg poster

Sam Abrams

Poster promoting events held during Allen Ginsberg's visit to RIT/NTID.

1984

9/8/2022

poster

RIT/NTID Deaf Studies Archive poster collection

https://archivesspace.rit.edu/repositories/2/resources/906

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Note from donor Jim Cohn- Produced by RIT English professor emeritus Sam Abrams, this poster contains brief biographic information regarding iconic American poet Allen Ginsberg, left column, and itinerary notes regarding events Professor Abrams, a poet himself associated with the Beat Generation and the Black Mountain School, scheduled for Ginsberg at RIT and Writers & Books, right column, for the international renowned Beat poet's visit to Rochester in early 1984. The poster documents, among scheduled events that Ginsberg would participate in, a "Sign Interpretation of Poetry Workshop" scheduled for "Wednesday 2/1/1984 from 9:30 a.m. to 11:00 a.m." The date listed on the poster for this event was in error and actually took place 4 February 1984 (at the correctly published time). The actual event itself was coordinated and arranged by Jim Cohn, a former Ginsberg teaching assistant at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University (1980), who was also a student at the NTID Interpreter Training Program at the time of the event. Cohn informally billed the workshop to friends as a "Deaf-Beat Summit" featuring Deaf American poet and Deaf Poetics scholar Robert Panara and Allen Ginsberg. This event, which was photographed and videotaped, featured a discussion of the words "Hydrogen Jukebox" from Ginsberg's 1955 poem "Howl" and how this specific juxtaposition could be expressed in American Sign Language. First, Robert Panara presented his own Signed English interpretation of the words, but Panara's interpretation was rather flat, literal, without creative invention essential to poetry in translation. Then NTID Theater faculty member and ASL poet Patrick Graybill stood up and presented a highly visual and spontaneous, creative narrative as his ASL interpretation of the phrase "Hydrogen Jukebox" that was met by applause from all in attendance, including Ginsberg himself, who responded, "That's it!" Cohn had invited two NTID students, Peter Cook and Debbie Rennie, both friends of his, to this event. It was this workshop that convinced Cook and Rennie that poetry was not simply "a hearing thing." The event was enshrined in a Deaf Poetry documentary film by Miriam Nathan Lerner and Don Feigal, The Heart of the Hydrogen Jukebox (2009).