Rhyme without sound: handshape rhymes, A-to-Z stories, poems at the Guggenheim
If a poem doesn't make a sound, how do you know when it rhymes? Hey, I'm Salt. I'm Grace. So, rhyme without sound. I always just, uh, assumed rhyme was inherently a trick of audio — matching vowels, matching consonants.
Right, which is why for a long time, linguists kind of brushed off the idea of sign language having its own native poetry. They thought it was just a loose — well, a translation of English. But in June 1993, a Deaf linguist named Dr. Clayton Valli published a doctoral dissertation that built the first formal framework for ASL poetics. Okay.
He proved that American Sign Language has exact visual equivalents to rhyme and meter. Instead of repeating a sound at the end of a line, you repeat a visual parameter. What does a visual parameter actually look like? Valli broke it down into five distinct parts. When you sign, you're using a specific handshape, a location on your body, a movement, a palm orientation, and your facial expressions.
And you rhyme by matching one of those? Yeah. The most common is a handshape rhyme. You might do a sequence of signs that all use, um, an open, flat palm, even if the signs mean very different things in regular conversation. Huh.
And for meter, for the rhythm of the poem, they use movement. So a fast, sharp movement might sort of act like a stressed syllable, and a long, sweeping motion is an unstressed one. That makes sense. It's — it's taking the physical space the language occupies and structuring it the exact same way you'd structure a stanza. Exactly.
Valli showed it wasn't just pretty gestures. It was strict, formal poetry with its own native rules. Does that strictness carry over into how stories are told, or is it just for short poems? Oh, it gets much stricter. Have you ever seen an ABC story?
No, what is that? It's a classic Deaf narrative genre. You tell a whole story, but every sign you use has to follow the manual alphabet in sequence. You're kidding. No, the first sign uses the A handshape, the second uses B, all the way to Z.
And the story still — still has to make actual narrative sense. So A might be knocking on a door with a closed fist, B is your flat hand pushing the door open, C is your hand curving to search around the room. A to Z, in order. Yeah, and it turns out this kind of structural play does a lot more than just entertain. How do you mean?
There was a study published in May 2020 in the Archives of Psychology by Dr. Merrilee Gietz. She was, um, looking at young deaf readers. Right. She found that kids who were exposed to ASL stories featuring these handshape rhymes achieved significantly higher word recognition when they were reading English print.
Wait — what? I know, it sounds like a leap. But recognizing the visual phonological patterns in sign language helped them bootstrap their early language acquisition, and that translated directly to print literacy. So they learn to spot the visual pattern in the air, and that primes the brain to spot visual patterns on a page. Yes, exactly.
Grace, that is... I mean, that changes how you think about reading. But if these poems are visual, how do they get recorded? Are they just sitting in video archives? They used to be.
For decades, the primary way to study ASL poetry was to watch VHS tapes of Clayton Valli or other pioneers. But the scene has evolved into this — this incredibly kinetic live performance art. Like a poetry slam. Literally called ASL Slam. It was founded in New York City in 2005.
And just last year, in June 2025, they celebrated their 20th anniversary with a showcase at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Oh, wow. It was under the direction of a poet named Douglas Ridloff, who's been a big force in bringing this out of the academic archives and into modern spaces. Twenty years. So this has been building for a while.
It has, and big art institutions are really starting to treat the language as a physical medium. From December 2024 through March 2025, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum hosted a video installation called Ekphrasis in Air. Okay, what is ekphrasis again? It's when art responds to other art.
In this case, Deaf poets were commissioned to respond to the physical architecture of the Guggenheim itself, and their signed poems were projected on the walls. Seriously? Yeah, so you have these performers using the sweeping, circular movements of ASL meter to echo the literal sweeping, you know, circular ramps of the museum they're standing inside, which means the poem isn't just about the building, it physically mirrors the space around it. A poem you can touch. Pretty much.
And as signed literature keeps claiming space in major museums and classrooms alike, it leaves us to wonder how our definition of language changes when we stop listening and start looking. Thanks a lot for listening to Daybrain.
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