Friday, December 19, 2008

first snowfall

Galatea Resurrects #11 is out.  There's lots to peruse.
And you can read my review
of Kate Greenstreet's chapbook,

It's snowing here in the east. And a snow day is a reading day. I'm reading Talking Hands by Margalit Fox. It's non-fiction --about a remote village of Bedouins in Israel where the residents have over centuries developed their own sign language. I've just started, looking forward to getting into the details of how this indigenous language was constructed, how gesture/image and "word" go hand in hand, so to speak.  I continue to think and read about the way image-making informs language-making -- and vice versa. We talk with our hands, our bodies, whether we're deaf or not.  Though it's not signing, our gestures are used to emphasize and illustrate our words, as we scribe the air. I'd love to make a poem that could be translated into sign language and then re-translated and then even painted or sung or danced.

2 comments:

Christine said...

A fascinating topic! Plucking words from the air...

Pam said...

yes, especially as the book gets into the makings of a language