Hands for Clayton Valli

Good evening again everyone and welcome to this evening's presentation. Hands of Clayton for Clayton Valley. We're recognizing tonight his contributions. Hands for Clayton Valley. This hand shape is from his poem Hands. When I think of this hand shape and all the things it can represent, it might suggest applause as deaf people applaud. It might also suggest applaud as the hearing community normally applauds. Or I could refer to my colleagues here on my right or distinguished colleagues on my left or something wonderful. Or I might wave to someone, something inspiring, a whole host of meanings in different signs with this hand shape. Valli's poem Hands is about four the four different seasons, fall, winter, spring, and summer. Valli looked at the seasons as they persist through the years, year after year, and draws an analogy to American Sign Language that it has persisted. I've watched his poem on videotape over and over again and every time I'm touched by how creative his poetry is and I done this piece in honor of Valli. Hands for Clayton Valli. Salt and pepper hair. His mustache, his grin. Evokes expressiveness. That to me is Clayton Valley. Valley was born in New Hampshire. Grew up around New Hampshire and Vermont and came here to NTID as a student. Through the years, he went on to obtain his PhD first in deaf studies. Well, the first deaf person to get in a PhD in ASL poetry. No one had ever gotten a PhD in that field before. He was the very first, a pioneer and tonight you will see different people coming to the center of the stage to share their poems in memory of Valley. In information about his scholarly work and his scholarship inspiring to all of us. And I hope that you'll be struck by the similarity of the students at RSD who were exposed to workshops with Clayton Valley and his impact on college students who studied ASL literature and the impact he had upon them. Clayton as a graduate student, he's had an impact on many graduate students all over the world. He's had such an impact on scholars and linguists. And his influence has spread much as the seeds of a dandelion spread when one blows on that white puff. >> Really. What I was originally going to say mirrors what Patrick Graybill just did say. My own background I set up a I was going to do my own performances in ASL and people advised me to look at Valli's videotapes and so I did. And then the poem I'd like to perform now is lone sturdy tree. >> The picture you see here is an old RIT meal ticket the students used in the dining halls. I arrived at RIT in 1972 as a student. And a friend of mine, Harold Potter, who was from Vermont, came here about the same time, and he was telling me about his roommate, Clayton Valley. At that time, his sign name was the initials CV. He said, "Oh, your roommate was Clayton Valley." But that next fall as school started, my roommate, Harry Potter, had his photograph, a photograph of Clayton Valley and Harry Potter together. And he showed it to me. And I was talking with him about Clayton Valley. And he was my roommate and he was talking about the fact that he was from Vermont. And I knew him from a basketball tournament because he was quite the fan. And we all ended up chatting together and kind of bonded. We became friends. And then, one night, one weekend, I went to Clayton's room. There were a lot of people there. And he had a bird. And sometimes he'd let it fly free in the room. Out of his cage, it would land on one person's shoulder and then another. And while the bird was flying around from person to person, Clayton would tell And we take turns telling stories, but it was amazing how descriptive he could be in sign language. And just enthralling. Just the beauty of the language. Well, he went on for a graduate degree in photography and went to live in Washington, D.C. in the Maryland, Virginia area, where he worked for a photo company. He worked for the photography company. He had graduated and left, and then was about a year later. I had to get a co-op job. And I selected a job in Washington, D.C., where I became reacquainted with Clayton. Actually, I asked if I could stay with him for 3 or 4 months while I was in the area. And stay at his place. Well, he was just getting ready to move to his own apartment. At the time, he had lived with a family for a year, and he was going to move out on his own. So, when I got to Washington, I joined him and we became roommates. We stayed with that family a short time as we found an apartment of our own and then both moved together into the new place. He and I were living there, and that's when he shared with me that he was getting a bit bored with photography. It was kind of repetitious working for a company like that. And he was thinking about taking correspondence courses in English and poetry. I encouraged him to go ahead and pursue that. And he decided he was going to take correspondence courses, and he did. Well, as my co-op drew to a close, I told him that I was going to be moving back to Rochester. Clayton really wanted to get into something different, and he decided to apply for a job in Nevada studying chimpanzees with Dr. Gardner. And he applied for that job and sure enough was selected to work with Dr. Gardner doing this research. And at that point we kind of grew apart, fell out of touch. We didn't have contact for a period of about 15 years. Later on, I'd heard through friends that Clayton had present was presenting a paper at an ASL conference here in Rochester, and I was so excited. So I came here to this very theater where Clayton was presenting, as you just saw, Related. And at the end of his presentation I was hoping to talk to him, but there were so many people we couldn't even get in touch with one another. And he performed the poem you just saw previously performed here. Well, at Gallaudet the students were really inspired by Clayton's work. And I was inspired. I actually made a contribution to help support ASL poetry. And then he came back here again to once again present, and I I saw his videotape. Uh I was really excited to meet him. When he came back to present again, we got together for dinner one night, and it was like we took up right where we had left off. It was just great. We started chatting again, and from that point on we stayed in touch through email. We sent emails back and forth to one another. And we had decided eventually we were going to meet at a conference here. Oh, at Deaf Way. We decided to meet at Deafway. But once again, we didn't have a chance to meet one another. There was just so much going on. But we maintained our contact through email. And when I learned that Clayton had died, it really hit me hard. It was probably a couple of weeks later. I was on the computer and I got this email from a person whose name I didn't recognize. And they introduced themselves. Their name was Thomas Ellens from Germany. And they said they were a friend of Valli's. And I asked them how they'd heard about me. He said, "Oh, you know, let me tell you how I know you." One of Valli's poetry books had my email address on a piece of paper that someone had used as a bookmark. And he didn't know who I was, but he sent me some email and that started a little dialogue going between the two of us. And I told him that we'd be having this memorial for Clayton here. And unfortunately, he couldn't come to be with us tonight, but he did appreciate our remembrance of him. >> I wish I could be with you this evening to honor and celebrate Clayton Valli's life during your tribute, but I will be out of town at the time. So, let me share instead with you my experiences with him. I I used to work in Nevada working with chimps in Reno. And Clayton happened to be working there at the same time, but I was so envious of him because he got to work with the older chimps. He worked with Moja, who could actually sign fairly well. I worked with Dar, a young 1-year-old chimp that really didn't know many signs and so was a lot more work than Clayton had. So, I had to deal with Dar. He He worked with Moja. Well, there was one time when this one afternoon, I made a huge mistake. I had forgotten to lock the food trailer. We kept Moja's We kept um Moja away from that trailer because that was where the food was kept and Moja would just destroy it if she had the chance. Well, she got in and of course she just ransacked that food that that trailer and I was running in trying to get a hold of Moja and Clayton saw me and he ran and helped me and I apologized profusely and he forgave. And that was one of those times that I realized his personality was one where he was such a good person and he had the patience to to work with the chimps. I had never dreamed that Clayton Valli would be be so successful in his life, especially with the poetry and the research that he's done on American sign language literature and American sign language poetry. I remember him as a low-key, very humble person. But at the same time, I was so impressed with his brilliance and his academic ability. And I just want to say, I love you. As part of Rochester School for the Deaf's deaf study programs, we have a deaf artist in residence program where we bring in artists um specializing in visual, performing, and literary arts. And we would have the honor of having Clayton Valli come and be our artist in residence back in May of 1997 for 2 weeks. His first day here, he performed his poetry to students and staff in the audience at RSD. Then he conducted a workshop with our students from second to 12th grade. He worked with them it in a poetry workshop. And then one day during his stay here, our news came and filmed the students. And so we'd like to show you a clip of the R news report on Clayton Valli's work. We're all familiar with poetry, but not in the form we're about to see. Seth Voorhees reports that the local school students are learning deaf poetry. >> Poetry a poem about a hockey game or life school. Some poetry you cannot hear. These students at Rochester School for the Deaf are learning about American Sign Language Poetry. It's pretty much similar to English poetry. With ASL poetry, the hand shapes and movements and facial expressions, these become the repetitions. They're visual. There's no sound. Clayton Valli is an American Sign Language or ASL poet from Boston. It has its own structure and rhythm, but when you change it into hand shapes, it's difficult. It doesn't translate well. Valli is a deaf artist at the Rochester School for the Deaf. The Arts and Residence program is an important teaching tool there. >> There's a great deal of history and values incorporated in art. Students can learn a great deal about themselves, about other deaf people through art. >> ASL poetry as an art form is something that's just catching on. ASL poetry is really new in the deaf community. It's probably an old form, but no one noticed it long ago. Valley sees deaf people using ASL poetry in everyday communication. Some don't even realize it. They have a poetic style and you'll see poetry popping up throughout their discourse. I'll get with them and encourage them to become an ASL poet. Students will show off what they've learned in a presentation later this week. Even to a person who doesn't know sign language, it's not hard to recognize ASL poetry as an art form. You may not understand what's being sung in an opera because it's in a foreign language, but yet the sounds that come across are so pleasing. Maybe that's the same idea in ASL poetry. People may not understand, but they enjoy the visual aspect of seeing it. Set for he's our news. >> So, Clayton Valli worked with the students for 2 weeks and then at the end of the 2 weeks, the students who had learned some poems presented a performance in front of an audience at RSD. Clayton enriched our deaf studies program and he will always be a part of RSD's history. >> Let me tell you why Clayton Valley inspired me to do the poem I'm going to perform. When he came to our school about 6 years ago as Susan was describing, uh you just saw in the our news segment, I was asked to stand up and perform in front of an audience and I said, "Me? No way, I can't." He said, "Hey, I taught you for 2 weeks, now it's your turn." Well, I had no clue what to do. I thought I just couldn't do it and he sat down with me one-on-one and kind of elicited what I could do. The two of us sat there and we played around with the form. He said, "What are your life experiences?" and I started to tell him about the things I knew best and all of a sudden, I got it. That's what ASL poetry was about. I'd like to share with you tonight a poem that I ended up performing. >> I'd like to bring up two current students from RSD to share a rendition each of two of his poems. Flesh. The poem that was just uh shared, the cow and the rooster, I'd like to share with you my experiences with Clayton. I met him in the early '80s at right before a conference um that we of the NAD and um I after that kept meeting him and encountering him at various conferences. And then recently when he was the residence the artist in residence at RSD in 1997 he asked me if we could go out and just get together and catch up. So then we did and he came over to my house and we we we just caught up on our lives together. And then he shared with me what had just happened about a week before that during his artist in residence program. He told me how cow and rooster first came about. He said he was at the um learning center in Massachusetts. And he was teaching and training children to to express poetry and Marie Philip, one of the instructors there, said, "Okay, you need to share a poem for kids that are of in first, second, and uh in kindergarten, first, second grade." And he said, "I've never done it for children that young." And she said, "But you can do it." And he finally just he he was looking around the room and he saw the these Fisher-Price toys. The end um they they had all of these animals placed in the farm scene for Fisher-Price points toys and he was looking at that and all of a sudden he got this idea because he knew that kids have such a short attention span. He thought, "Oh." He saw cow and he saw rooster in the Fisher-Price toys and he came up with this poem spontaneously and shared it with the kids in class. I have one more experience with him. You may look back on your own experiences how you had a close call, a close encounter. Well, he told me about one of his close encounters that I'd like to share with you. Back when he was a young boy, he had a deaf brother as well. They used to love to play out on the farm. They lived in the a rural area. And his parents would let them just go out and play in the field and on the farm and it just so happened one day they found this oil tank, the kind that was used for providing heating to houses. And they thought, "Hey, cool. What can we do with this?" They So, they decided to open it up and look to see whether there was oil in it and they lit matches and would throw them in the can. And they'd keep throwing in the can to see if they could light a fire, but nothing happened. But looking back, he re- he realizes how fortunate he was. Can you imagine the explosion that would have burnt his body if it if it that really had been oil there? That is a memory I am going to hold. This is my first time encountering um Clayton Valley. And somebody showed me his his video tape of poems and I was so impressed that I decided to render the bridge from his film. >> My experience with Clayton Valley came from 3 years ago. I didn't know anything about poetry. And I was thinking that poetry and music really didn't relate to deafness. Well, I was here and we had to do some translation from poetry into ASL. And I thought about that and I hadn't known what poetry in ASL might look like. I mean, previously when I was a student, all the poetry I'd been exposed to was written in English and you had to translate it from English into ASL. But then I saw Valley's work in the beauty of the videotape. I thought he had a beard and his hair. Now I see posters of Valley and I didn't recognize him without the beard and mustache, but I guess that's him clean shaven. Now I realize he's passed away. But I'd like to perform this poem in honor of him. And he taught me a different way of looking at poetry. And I'd like to do this poem entitled Tears of life. Now, when we look at how one would do a scholarly analysis of poetry, this is an example of how students might analyze poetry and in American Sign Language. And it's really impressive work. Deirdre is going to explain how this fits in and how the students at the University of Rochester use this technique. Now, my personal connection with Clayton started perhaps way back in Reno, Nevada. I also worked teaching sign language with chimps, doing science, not poetry, science, until 1980. And Boston we had a conference on sign language research. People came from all over the country, all over the world, and they were on the program that there was an evening event in poetry and literature. It was an entertainment event, and I really was looking forward to going that evening. I looked at the program, and there was the name Clayton Valli. And it said Reno. I thought, "Huh." I thought back to my memories wondering if we had some connection there. And that night I was so impressed. It was so different than what I'd seen anytime up to then, like through the '70s. Deaf poetry used to be based on English, just a a literal word-to-word almost transcription of English using the signs of ASL. But all of the poetry was derived from English and then signed in a stilted sort of way. People once they would sign in written form, they were kind of locked into that syntax and grammar and locked into English. Clayton worked very differently. He started with ASL and relied on his experience and his feelings. It wasn't English translated into ASL. He never put it in written form. >> Ted's wife, Melissa Newport, invited Valli to come to the University of Rochester to provide a workshop pertaining to what ASL poetry is. And I thought, "ASL poetry? How do you study that?" I had seen performances. The National Theatre of the Deaf, for example, had provided performances, and I had seen old films and videotapes of performances. But I had no conception of what poetry was would be like in ASL. So, that made me curious. So, I took his workshop and sat back and watched his presentation on the scholarly analysis um comparing American Sign Language with written poetry. He talked about the analogy and the similarities and differences between the two forms, one based on sound, one based on movement in visual space. And it inspired me. And then he performed a number of poems and they were they I they just struck me as the most beautiful art form. And so I thought, "How can I incorporate that into my literature courses?" And then when he published his dissertation and his videotape on his poetry in American Sign Language, I I was able to incorporate that information in my ASL literature courses so that students could not only appreciate the literature, but also do an analysis of the literature from a scholarly perspective. It's so rich with information that I wanted to show you an example of the work of a couple of my students in one of my ASL literature courses. You don't have to see the words. I just wanted to show you that an example of how they were able to record the repetitions [snorts] that occur in ASL poetry, the rhythmic form of it, and they incorporated that um in the yellow highlighted area. So, let me just give you a couple of examples of these. This is an analysis of the mushroom, that's Valley's work. And they tried to develop a notation system for analyzing that particular poem. This is part of it. This is the sun um passing the day and then he takes on the role of the mushroom. So, this part becomes the mushroom. And then the sun passing over the mushroom. And notice the repetition in the in the rhythm in expressing how the mushroom grows as the sun keeps rising day by day. And the students were able to analyze it in this way. And I think without his work, his research, and his work in ASL poetry, we wouldn't be able to recognize it in American Sign Language. So, I appreciate so much his contribution to the beauty and the richness of ASL poetry. You've seen tonight examples of his his influence on the deaf community, the University of Rochester, and NTID. And now, where we work, Keuka College, where we have an ASL Studies bachelor's program. There are two courses in which we use Val Lee's work. A deaf literature course and an ASL linguistics course. In the deaf literature course, I discuss his work extensively. We do analyses of the themes, the metaphors in his work, how to gloss and analyze the work and understand what he means by his poetry. And hopefully to inspire the students. In my course, um the the ASL linguistics course, I have students, of course, studying American Sign Language and its structure. When we're done, then I give them examples of Clayton Valli's poetry and it really helps the students to understand the structure, the phonology, the morphology, and the syntax of American Sign Language. And how that working together can be used as an art form. We now have a graduating senior that's will be graduating next week. She is a deaf senior and she will be rendering one more of his poems entitled Dandelion. This poem is entitled Dandelion. Let me just provide you a brief explanation of what he meant in his poem and how it was an analogy of the deaf community and the experiences that deaf people have through life and how deaf people can survive just as the dandelion does. >> Mhm.