All Sorts of Secret Treasure

In John Lee Clark’s hands, all language becomes a verb: relentless, unfolding, born from bodies and their varied interactions with each other. To converse with Clark is to examine how we think and communicate, and to plunge into the same mélange of questions that animates his vigorous debut collection, How to Communicate (Norton, 2022).

Clark is a National Magazine Award-winning DeafBlind poet, essayist, translator, editor, and independent scholar who lives and writes in St. Paul, Minnesota. Alongside colleagues such as Jelica Nuccio and aj granda, he is also a practitioner and educator of Protactile, a groundbreaking language of touch that first emerged among DeafBlind communities in Seattle in 2007. As chronicled in the New Yorker earlier this year, linguists and educators increasingly recognize Protactile as a novel language distinct from American Sign Language. Unlike ASL, which uses the “air space” around a signer’s body to convey information visually, Protactile uses physical touch and the contact space between signers’ bodies to forge communicative meaning and social reciprocity. Clark, whose instruction skills are in demand at workshops around the country, frequently describes Protactile as a revolution, not only for its tactile grammar and signs, which often have no relation to ASL’s visually-based signs, but also for how it has enabled more interconnected forms of community and DeafBlind identity.

How to Communicate emerges from this vibrant linguistic moment, and it expands Clark’s previous work. He is the author of the chapbook Suddenly Slow (2008) and the essay collection Where I Stand: On the Signing Community and My DeafBlind Experience (Handtype Press, 2014), as well as the editor of the anthologies Deaf American Poetry (Gallaudet University Press, 2009) and Deaf Lit Extravaganza (Handtype Press, 2013). The poems in How to Communicate, several of which were first published in Poetry, are at once formally inventive and thematically varied. They confront the poetic canon (which has largely excluded poets like Clark), pay tribute to DeafBlind figures of yore such as Laura Bridgman and Morrison Heady, reclaim histories of disability and ableism, reference Deaf linguistic idioms and folklore traditions, and chronicle the many quirks of everyday life among other human beings. Clark includes several translations of poems from ASL and Protactile, and the book’s six sections shift easily across subjects and registers while being consistently sensuous—and often unexpectedly funny. Several poems retell old Deaf jokes and schoolyard stories about cross-cultural misunderstandings, and the ending of one cinquain demands: “Can’t I pick my nose / without it being a miracle?”

One of Clark’s most striking innovations is his “slateku” form, which makes novel use of the spatial and tactile affordances of the Braille slate as an elegant site for poetic expression. As Clark explains, each Braille slate has four rows of 28 cells each, and Braille itself teems with characters and contractions ripe for wordplay. One slateku poem reads:

Wood duck
I feel for you
You never had hands to stroke
Your own wings

In opening with these slateku poems, the book places Braille and tactile communication firmly at the core of its poetic understanding—a sharp declaration when very little contemporary poetry is available in Braille. In the coming years, Clark’s oeuvre promises to underscore this declaration. Several of his projects-in-progress center DeafBlind writers from the past, and he is completing a new forthcoming essay collection (also with Norton) about the Protactile movement.

During a lively written exchange punctuated with his characteristic warmth and wit, Clark and I held the following interview over email. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I’m intrigued by how this book opens with your innovative “slateku” poems, which make fresh use of the physical and linguistic idiosyncrasies of the Braille slate. Tell me more about your process of creating this new form.

Writing poetry, I’m always searching for forms. Not traditional ones, because I don’t know anything about syllables or what rhymes. Yet I need a poem to wrestle with something. It can be something simple, a cookie cutter that trims the edges off of a lump. Or I stuff a lump into that cookie cutter and see if it holds up. Or it can be so rigorous it’s science. Alchemy. A blender that liquefies a pile of produce, and I take the froth off the top and spread it on a baking sheet to dry, and I roll the vellum-thin thing and snip off an end and that end is the poem.

So, I’m someone looking for potential form. Sometimes a form is so obvious it takes decades to discover. I’ve handled Braille slates since I was seven years old. Why it didn’t occur to me earlier I don’t know. The classic slate has four lines of 28 “cells” each where you write Braille characters into, pressing down with a stylus to make a dot stand out on the other side. Writing like that you develop a relationship with the text that’s similar to what printers have when they set type. We’re behind the text, not in front of it. It’s a level of intimacy. But that wasn’t enough for me to make the connection between the slate and a possible form.

I was fortunate to become even more intimate with Braille when I went for a gig as a Braille instructor. For a few years I taught DeafBlind folks, through Protactile, how to read and write Braille. It’s so elegant to talk about Braille in Protactile! To understand what I mean by that you need to know how hearing blind instructors talk about Braille. Braille is made up of six possible dots, and each dot has a number, which refers to its location within a cell. So, you may hear at a blind training center a teacher saying “What’s M?” and a student responding with “Um, dots one three… five, no, four.” It’s because they’re sitting apart and not touching each other at all. Distantism! They have dot numbers so they can talk about Braille in the air. You need to think about it in two ways—you may know the actual dot locations of a letter but your head needs to turn its wheel a few times to produce the right numbers.

In Protactile, I can simply take your hand and press those locations on your palm. I can ask you what is M and you can press M right on my palm. No numbers. No going off somewhere else to refer to this. That’s what I mean by the elegance. Teaching Braille found me talking about Braille by using my students’ hands, and I could easily explain how the slate works, or how the Braillewriter—our version of the typewriter—works. All the affordances are right there in our hands, through touch. Also, I read what my students typed on the Braillewriter as they pounded the keys. I found it quite easy to read it upside down, sitting across from them as I did, following their progress. I began to notice that certain Braille words spelled out other words upside down. All sorts of secret treasure! It’s a whole other level of intimacy, this all-encompassing handling of Braille.

So, yes, I did finally say, “Hey, how about I write a four-line poem of up to 28 cells per line?” And such warm, light, joyful poems flowed out of the form. I understood how it was that Basho grew so light with the haiku. Those slateku poems are definitely the happiest poems I’ve ever written. I don’t know about best. Happiest, yes.

Your slateku poems do feel suffused with joy, and I get a similar sense about the conversations you have in Protactile. These last few years have been such a boon for the DeafBlind community and the emergence of Protactile. What has that time been like for you, and how has Protactile informed your poetry and your art?

What I’m going to say about Protactile isn’t the tip of an iceberg. It’s only one-eighth of a snowflake riding that tip of the iceberg. I wrote a whole book of essays about Protactile, and that’s maybe worth three snowflakes. Protactile is such an epochal event. We are in the year 15 A.P. I was born in 28 B.P. Most people reading our interview cannot understand what a wild time it is for us, but the good news is that you can pretend you know all about it. And in pretending and saying, “Oh yes, I know exactly what you mean,” you will begin to understand.

Maybe we can go with a few Before-After takes. Before, we didn’t touch much of the world around us, since we felt the force of distantist norms, all the ways sighted society maintains distance between people. After, we began to claim the world around us, to change it, to tousle its hair. Before, we often went out with a sighted guide, clutching at their elbow, and had them describe things to us, tell us about things. After, we threw out the whole concept of a guide and replaced it with what we call co-navigation, where we touch many things ourselves and together. Before, during classes or meetings, we sat next to an interpreter who fed us the proceedings. After, we discovered that we could conduct classes and meetings through direct communication by having clusters that we rotate among, instead of having one person address the many. Before, we listened to ASL by placing our hands on an ASL speaker’s hands moving through the air, which led to feelings of shame for misunderstanding so much of what was said to us. After, when a new language emerged in this unprecedented modality, we suddenly realized how little we had gotten from other languages, mere crumbs, and this, this, this is the real thing! Protactile has revolutionized every aspect of our lives. 

Closer to my poetry, there are a few things to mention. One is that my collection of poems does represent a journey, with some poems that belong to the before times and others that came out after. Unlike my essays, which shifted right away with the emergence of Protactile, it took years for the shift to work its way through my poetry. I wanted my poems to reflect the massive change in the world order immediately, but you can only do that on the surface. As I’d already been writing as a DeafBlind person, that surface didn’t change much at first. I longed for the bones and the muscles to be rearranged.

One challenge is that there’s not much language or idiom in the English poetic canon that is born of touch, that lives in a tactile environment. The English language felt so ill-equipped to me. Protactile now has a growing body of its own literature, and that has helped me in many ways, including slowly grasping a new idiom in English. No, not just one new idiom, but a multiplicity of textual bodying.

And it works both ways, it’s a reciprocal process. For it hadn’t been easy to hatch Protactile poetry. I learned how hard it is to attend to both content and form. It’s much easier to create content for a ready form, or come up with forms for existing content you don’t need to create. To do both at once is incredibly hard. So Protactile poetry did need to grab existing content to be hatched. This is where translation is so helpful. To translate is to focus on figuring out to convey something in another language. You don’t have all those other decisions to make, what the poem is about or what its amodal structure is. Some of my first Protactile poems are really translations or spinoffs of some of my poems in English. 

The Protactile movement, for me, has meant stopping frequently to exclaim, “Yesssss!” Every day brings an earth-shaking revelation. One of those I want to share here: The fact that I also compose poems in Protactile is quite something. You see, I was born into an ASL-speaking family. ASL was the first language that I spoke. But I could never make ASL poems. This had grieved me for years. Why was I able to write poems in English, my second language, which I had learned much later, and not in my native language? It turns out that the reason was simple: ASL may have been my first language but it wasn’t truly my native language, and it could never be, because I was DeafBlind. It told me a great deal that I began to compose poems in Protactile. It may be, technically, my third language, but it is my native language. Your native language, it turns out, doesn’t have to be the first one you absorbed. Isn’t that wonderful? Your native language is the one that goes deepest.

Your book includes several translations of poems that originally existed in ASL or in Protactile. What guides you in making such translation decisions, especially across sensory modes?

I know it’s a common sentiment within sign language-speaking communities that sign languages are very different from the dominant languages spoken by the hearing masses. It’s true. Syntactically, phonologically, modally, everything. But there’s also a large amount of unnecessary and sometimes harmful mystique and mystification. I am here to dispel some of that, and thus one of my goals as a translator is to disappoint. To disappoint in order for folks to appreciate the poetry in another way. You’re familiar with the whole “ASL is so beautiful” trope. Those who don’t know ASL think they love ASL poetry. They love it without knowing what the poetry is saying, because, until recently, it had never been translated.

While ASL speakers roll their eyes over ASL non-speakers’ professions of admiration, many ASL speakers view ASL poetry with a certain species of awe. Yes, that poem is fantastic. Don’t get me wrong. But this awe, it comes partly from a place of feeling intimidated, where one thought they have is, “Oh, that’s so amazing. And I will never, ever be able to touch that! I shall not even attempt it.” That’s one result of language deprivation, of linguicism. Many ASL speakers still do not possess in full their own language.

Translations provide one way for ASL speakers to see the original poem as less intimidating, less overwhelming, and, most important, less remote. I love ASL, but I am also capable of holding it in some contempt, and that is helpful to me as a translator. You need to cut it down to size before you can mess with it. The ways in which ASL and English differ don’t fool me into thinking that they share nothing in common. I was pleased to feel firsthand what the brilliant late ASL poet Clayton Valli already knew, that ASL poetry has structures not unlike the line, the stanza, enjambment, rhyming, repetition, and so on.

Some of my translations are indeed the kind that you find in bilingual editions with facing pages and you can compare the two versions and you say “Ah, I see that” even if you don’t know the other language. There are certainly decisions to make for the English version. Why did I decide to translate John Maucere’s “The Friend” as an English prose poem? Because the original felt like it is a prose poem, it’s so slick, the kind of slick that is also run-on, one long smooth slide to the end. You could do a super-smooth version involving line breaks, sure. It could still be a valid translation. I just made the decision to have it slide out in that way, as a prose poem. Why is the English rendering of Noah Buchholz’s “The Moonlight” this very tall, angular poem with short lines and no stanza breaks? Buchholz relies on repetition and imagery having to do with narrowness—the narrow shape of vertical windows, the narrow hallway, the narrow open grave. On so many levels the poem urged me to go narrow, too. I am so happy there’s no shortage of devices and forms at our disposal when translating.

The context is different for Protactile poetry. As a young language, it’s like we’re still living in a cave and anyone can decide to tell a story or tie together a poem. There’s no sense of intimidation, as Protactile has not yet spent much time within institutions, whether friendly or hostile. So, everyone has a poem or could easily have one. Sometimes it means I do make a few further decisions as a translator, as if I’m also editing the original. Out there, sometimes a translation is better than the original. Nothing wrong with that. But here, all of those Protactile poets are my friends. We work together. I love that translations in and out of Protactile are very much present. I wonder what the long-term effects of this dynamic will be for Protactile literature, because this is a different beginning than the one ASL literature had.

My translations of Protactile also tend to differ from my translations of ASL in that I allow more of the phonology to jut through more for the Protactile ones. I suppose an impetus there is to try and reduce distantism, to have how we actually touch each other to speak Protactile reach through the confines of the page. In those translations, it may say “Give me a tree.” It is asking the reader to provide what the poet needs to say something.

One of the pieces in the translations section, in my book, isn’t a translation per se. “The Rebuttal.” My own Protactile poem. Instead of translating it, I wrote a narrative of the performance, from the performer’s first-person perspective. All the physical things I did, how I and my two receivers sat together, where their hands went, where my hands went. So this goes way inside, right? An invitation to readers to inhabit the performer while he performs the poem. A wonderful aim to have, but there’s a more practical reason for choosing such an approach. The original Protactile poem is of a kind found in many sign language poetries where if you did translate it, there’s almost no point in the English version. It'd be a boring, almost content-less text. The point is in the performance, not the text. Sometimes hearing Spoken Word artists will include making noises, making those special-effects sounds, maybe mimicking the roar of a lion instead of saying, “There was a lion.” To just be evocative and not say, in this boring way, “There was a lion.” We are able to do a lot, much more, of that personification, that mimicking. Sometimes the whole poem is all mime or all evocation and no “words.” It’s not that those pieces are untranslatable. It’s just that the translations would mean very little. Those pieces require other approaches if you want to invite readers into them.

Can you tell me about the published poems that are available in Braille, and how this has shaped your own work?

It’s hard to say what difference it would make in my work if I could walk into any bookstore or library and haul out any assortment of books. Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise that there are only a few poetry books available in Braille. I read every new one that the National Library Service for the Blind produces, including titles I wouldn’t have picked up if I had hundreds to choose from. Maybe I don’t have time to read much more than I already do.

But it’s true that I’ve spent much more time with poetry available in the public domain, which goes up to the early Modernists’ first offerings. Then there’s a kind of immersion that involves reading poets’ letters, their prose, and criticism inspired by their work. In the public domain, this means that kind of anthropological reading is possible up to the Romantics. Fifty years later is the sweet spot for penetrating criticism, for judicious biography, and for the curation of writers’ literary remains. Great stuff.

So, for example, while I may be taken with Wallace Stevens’s first collection, available in the public domain, it’d be an enormous expense to have his Collected Poems transcribed, along with some biographies, his letters, and key criticism. Not to mention books by and about others he was in conversation with. Per our current copyright laws, those materials won’t be available in the public domain during my lifetime. There are efforts to make books accessible, but nothing makes books accessible like their being in the public domain. We do need copyright reform, not just for this reason but also for many other reasons.

Keep in mind, though, that I happen to be a poet with scholarly inclinations. I love research. Research I can do for free has led me to be quite immersed in 18th century British poetry. It’s a glorious mess. Much of it is delightfully bad. I may be running a risk, ingesting so much pompous versification. The research that costs money, especially in transcription services, I’ve devoted to excavating DeafBlind histories. A few poems in my collection are based on this research, though my next collection will be a more sustained exploration.

I’d like to talk more about your research and excavation of DeafBlind histories. I noticed several of the poems in this book are dedicated to DeafBlind (and Deaf and blind) writers and historical figures.

When my partner Adrean and I set up a literary magazine in 2000 to showcase the art and literature of sign language-speaking communities, we needed to fill the first issue. The few writers I knew and others I was able to get in touch with constituted a good start, but I needed more material. So, I decided to go digging, in order to reprint long-lost items. I found in the pages of my alma mater’s paper, The Companion, a pen fight in the correspondence section between two poets. This was 1927, and involved J. Frederick Meagher, the enemy from Chicago, challenging my man J. S. S. Bowen to a verse-writing duel, the winner of which was to be declared the best Deaf poet alive. The editor, Dr. James Lewis Smith, didn’t need to intervene, because Bowen was so adroit there was no question he was the best. I put that whole spat in the first issue.

This opened what has grown into a sprawling archeological dig. A community of writers did form around our small press and our magazine soon filled to the brim with new, unpublished material. And we began publishing books and added a weekly zine. The sea may have been Melville’s Harvard, but small-press publishing was my Iowa. And I continued to research, and got into two projects. One led to the publication, in 2009, of my anthology Deaf American Poetry. I’m now embarrassed by it. You could say that, for a college castaway, it was my answer to an undergraduate capstone project. I’d love to do a completely revamped edition someday!

 The other project—DeafBlind writing—proved slower. Unlike Deaf communities, the DeafBlind community has no schools or institutions of our own. There are no central reliquaries. I had to recover most everything from separate and scattered places, a birth date here, an address there, a newspaper item. I am happy to report that, after 20 years of digging and counting, a series of books will soon begin coming out that are the fruits of this labor.

For my creative writing, that slow process means that sometimes the first time a historical figure reemerges is in a poem, without a reference. That reference doesn’t exist yet. There’s no Wikipedia page. How it often works out there is that there are history books and biographies and Wikipedia pages, and then they may inspire poets. Here, there are no such secondary sources. As a result, some of my creative work that draws on history point out not just the ghosts of the folks themselves but also to books that should have been written about them. I’m not going to be able to write all of those books. I am writing some of them, yes, but not all. Yet a large ghost library does live behind my poems.

Speaking of ghost libraries and ghost ideas, could you say more about your “erasure” poems in this book? Or about writing in response to past traditions and ableist ideas?

Those erasures! They’re magic. They do so much work, almost without my conscious supervision. I’d somehow started doing those long before I learned the term “erasure.” I was just reading all of those books on Project Gutenberg, being immersed, and I began playing with the material there. Doing erasures was just one of the things that wriggled out of there.

I suppose it was more of a diversion for a while. When Protactile came along, one of the first conversations I had about it, with my friend Jaz Herbers, was that there could be Protactile poetry. At that time, we had a single “line” of what felt like poetry—a brief reenactment of waves half-crashing into and half-climbing up a rock. That was it. We couldn’t do anything more at that time. Protactile was itself too new, and too new to us.

As Protactile evolved, the possibilities of prosody became more apparent. Yet it was still difficult to throw out a poem or two. There were too many things to figure out all at once.

Then it hit me that my erasures could serve as a kind of scaffolding. Translation can do that, too, but I gravitated toward those erasures as a way to hack into Protactile poetry, to hatch it. Perhaps it’s because the erasures allow for Protactile spin-offs to be quite different, to experiment, in ways that wouldn’t happen if I was trying to translate existing content into Protactile. Using the erasures as a springboard proved extremely fruitful, and the first Protactile poems were wild, were all over the place, revealing much of what is possible.

Readers of my book may assume that those erasures are an end in themselves. But how it has developed is that they are more of a byproduct of a complex process. Even before Protactile sneaked up on us, the erasures were evidence of an expedition in progress. That they can also be here in my book and offer something in their own right is wonderful, a blessing on top of everything else! And, yes, there are things to be said about how they take those old poems and respond to them, how they help push back on ableist canons. But that’s only the easy part, a more predictable way to contextualize and place them. Nothing wrong with that. But there’s so much more going on!

Tell me about those Protactile poems and how they sprang from your erasure poems, or about your process of writing them.

It’s hard to talk about process when an essential element is a blissful ignorance of what the process is. Ha. While I do seem to rotate among several processes, I’m rarely aware of what I’m doing. Some people say they think in ASL or they think in English, and they can relate to stories where the narrator’s thoughts are written out on the page, as if the narrator is thinking out loud. I happen to be someone who can’t relate to that. I don’t think in this or that language. I don’t think in words. I’m unaware of thinking at all. Yet thought is obviously involved.

Often, when writing or translating or doing an erasure, I land on a knot. It’s “the problem” of the piece, at least for me. I pick at this one knot, obsessing over it. It can be about the right word or phrase for a part of the piece or the form. Not necessarily even the most important part. But this knot, it’s a hitch. It is what holds the piece in check. Everything is at the verge, but for this one tiny thing. I pick at it until, finally, it gives way.

I’ve come to believe that this obsessing over an oblique matter is a function of allowing the real writing to be taken care of without my supervision. Not without me, not without my sweat and blood. Not without my vision. Just without my supervision. Here I am reminded of what the great Victorian critic George Gilfillan once said of Thomas Gray. “You see his genius,” he wrote, “like a child, always casting a look of terror round on its older companion and guardian—his taste.” Gray knew too much and could not help supervising.

Maybe one reason it has been vital for me to avoid supervision—mine and anyone else’s—is that my reality as a DeafBlind person is not recognized in any currently accessible canon. Early on in my writing I had been a puppet. I may have typed those poems, but it wasn’t me writing them. Those poems knew too well what was expected, what was considered worthy. Thankfully, I became aware of THAT. I worked hard at cutting off those puppet strings. And I’m not done sawing them off. But I’ve grown loose enough to fumble all over. It's a good thing that there’s this decoy factor in most of the processes I go through, a diversion, something to keep the boss in me busy while the goods get carried out behind my back.

And the same dynamic is playing out, collectively, with the Protactile movement. The most revolutionary aspects are always the ones that sneak out into the open without us quite realizing it until it’s too late. Then things got to where enough has escaped our internalized supervision so that it’s okay for us to notice new developments faster, because now we’re cheering them on. We’re not going to say, “You can’t do that!” We’ve learned not to censor, not to take anything for granted. It is a new kind of discipline. But for a good while, it was important that we had no idea that a whole world was being born.