Sound mind: Josephine Dickinson's Deaf poetics.(Critical essay)

 
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard 
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; 
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd. 
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone. 
 
--John Keats 
 
It is quite natural. Some hear more pleasantly with 
the eyes than with the ears. I do. 
 
--Gertrude Stein 

An essay on Deaf poetics may seem a bit out of place in a special collection on sound. Indeed, this growing, important field has taken a "performative turn," moving away from textual models of poetry to sign language poems that are performed live or recorded on video. Such poems tend to de-emphasize hearing in favour of gesture, the moving body, and other sensory modalities (Kochhar-Lindgren 14).' And perhaps this turn makes sense. After all, the traditional Western understanding of poetry is of its oral/aural nature. I always urge my poetry students to read the assigned poems aloud in order to experience and explore this unique dimension of poetic language. Listen and improvise to the jazz rhythms in Brooks's "We Real Cool"; hear the distaste in Hopkins's line "all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; / And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell" (26). But when the class encountered the rich soundscape of the British poet Josephine Dickinson, who also happens to be deaf, all of my well-intentioned exhortations as a hearing reader of poetry were called into question. Her work demands a return to the text in the study of Deaf poetics, for it may open up our limited understanding of how sound functions in poetry and how we as readers, both deaf and hearing, process that sound. (2)

This limited understanding can manifest itself even in discriminatory ways. Deaf poet Pamela Wright-Meinhardt describes how her Shakespeare professor once announced in his lecture that he "pitied deaf people" because they "missed so much of the beauty of language, especially the spoken magic of the dramatic voice" (139). She responded in a letter in which she attempted to expand his understanding of sound processing to include the whole body: "The organ of the ear is a small compartment of a whole, not the whole of a person. Millions of nerves race through a body; what's to say a few in the ear destroy a person's ability to understand music? Or poetry? [...] And if the message is acoustic, is it always missed? Absolutely not" (139).

Lennard J. Davis, in Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, highlights our audist biases about language and communication in general, which are "based on the premise that language is in fact sonic, audible, vocalized" (100). When speaking or writing of a text, for example, we will often use the words "says" or "speaks" to refer to what the writer conveys. As Davis points out, however, the acts of reading and writing take place in silence. This "deafened moment" becomes a useful "critical modality" for Davis, a dialectical position from which to reveal the "ostracism of those who are differently abled linguistically" and to "highlight the buried assumptions of the process of reading and writing" (101). Davis focuses most of his attention on silent reading of the written narrative, describing the text of the novel as "neither silent nor auditory. It is a phantasm of sound, an insubstantial echo. [...] What [people] write and read they hallucinate into sound. But the sound is a silent sound" (117). In a footnote, Davis bemoans the fact that English has no word to describe these silent sound, but intriguingly writes, "The best we can do is turn to poetry as in 'When to the sessions of sweet silent thought ...'" (180-61). Denotatively, this line merely repeats Davis's point--thought is silent. But the loping dactylic rhythms and alliterative susurrus of Shakespeare's line seem to belie this claim, or at least to suggest that the silent reading of poetry involves much more than "an insubstantial echo."

Davis and others have argued that American Sign Language (ASL) poetry highlights the body as a locus of expression (Rose 144), but I would like to assert a similar benefit from the study of Deaf poetics on the page. The poetry of Deaf writers such as Josephine Dickinson asks us to reconsider the silence of the printed poem, opening up a hearing-listening space that incorporates more than the tiny organ of the ear. Exploring this textual Deaf poetics, I believe, will help expand or even redefine ruling notions of sound in poetry, shifting the locus of sound experience from the voice and ear to other important sites of sound-processing, such as the mind's inner voice(s), the mouth, the lips, and the resonating spaces of the proprioceptive body itself. As Dickinson writes in the preface to her book Silence Fell, "It's as if, when I see and write words, I experience their sound, rhythm, and meaning with my whole body, not just with my mouth or ears" (xiii). In this essay, I use current research in cognitive science on deafness and inner speech to explore the ways in which Dickinson's deafness influences her unique embodied poetics, and how this poetics reintroduces devices such as onomatopoeia and homophony to the reader, revealing the kinesthetic dimension of the printed poem.

Dickinson's life story is quite fascinating in itself. After suffering from meningitis for more than a year, one morning when she was six she woke up to a completely silent world. She went on to study classics at Oxford, to pass the notoriously difficult Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music, and to become a gifted music teacher and composer. She later moved to a rural area in the north of England near Alston. At the time, she was addicted to heroin, having turned to …