We started with this ALS gloss/performed poem
Otters by Raymond Luczak
: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LPheGnxJNo
dance, poetry... beautiful moving silence loud enough for us to access.
the poet grew up deaf (and long forbidden to sign until fourteen years old) in a hearing family of nine children in the U.P.(Upper Peninsula, MI) ; his says: "my feelings about the region are intricately colored by how I was treated as a second-class citizen within my own family; ‘Otters’ hints at this situation. The woods across the street from my mother’s house enabled me to cope with the hearing world in ways that ultimately saved me.”
[English
in a documentary
they dove in
into the burble
of river, braiding
around each other
their combed fur
shining in the sun
their eyes twinkling (see signs!)
watching them
I wished my hearing siblings
had been more like them
always pulling me in
to cavort with them
[ASL gloss]
me watch-watch d-o-c-u-m-e-n-t-a-r-y
{creature-wriggle creature-wriggle}
water {cascade-left-right-down}
{creature-dive-down creature-rise-up
around-each-other
fur-lining-arms-chest} wet
sun {on-me}
chest-shine-shine
eyes-shine-shine
me-wish hearing brother-sister
same-same
{creature-dive-down creature-rise-up}
come-on-come-on
join play-play
We ended with this poem by Danez Smith.
**
not an elegy for Mike Brown by Danez Smith
I am sick of writing this poem
but bring the boy. his new name
his same old body. ordinary, black
dead thing. bring him & we will mourn
until we forget what we are mourning
& isn’t that what being black is about?
not the joy of it, but the feeling
you get when you are looking
at your child, turn your head,
then, poof, no more child.
that feeling. that’s black.
\\
think: once, a white girl
was kidnapped & that’s the Trojan war.
later, up the block, Troy got shot
& that was Tuesday. are we not worthy
of a city of ash? of 1000 ships
launched because we are missed?
always, something deserves to be burned.
it’s never the right thing now a days.
I demand a war to bring the dead boy back
no matter what his name is this time.
I at least demand a song. a song will do just fine.
\\
look at what the lord has made.
above Missouri, sweet smoke.
https://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/not-an-elegy-for-mike-brown
**
links shared from Carnegie-Mellon Org. presentation American Monuments,
American Cities https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX1uItbxIkg
https://www.mellon.org/ideas/monuments-and-memory
How do we relate to monuments? What is celebrated? Remembered?
https://www.broward.org/BCT/Threads/Pages/default.aspx
Puerto Rico: Jaime Suárez "Tótem Telúrico*" (1992)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_del_Quinto_Centenario
Numbe Whageh (means "spiritual center place" in Tewa Language spoken by Pueblo peoples in Northern NM by Nora Naranjo Morse's earthwork.
NPR News 7/25:
President Biden is expected to designate three sites as a national monument for Emmett Till today. Two sites are in Mississippi, where Till was abducted, tortured, and killed in 1955 at 14 years old. Today would have been his 82nd birthday. A third site in Illinois will honor his mother, who insisted on an open casket funeral for her son to show the brutality of the Jim Crow South.
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