ASL poetry

I've thought before that the web would be a great way to disseminate American Sign Language in the form of little movies. In the context of a controversy over the new president of the nation's only liberal arts university for the Deaf, Gallaudet, I followed some links (good diary at DailyKos) through to a collection of ASL poetry performances. Nice to see. It's been awhile since I've been around Deaf people and sign language. I'm no better reading ASL than I've ever been at picking out the meaning of what people say when they speak Spanish or Portuguese (the two other nonEnglish languages I've studied) but the forms language takes fascinates me in a different (but complementary?) way from the denotative meaning of what's being said. I like to hear the sounds, see the shapes chosen to represent them in written form, or (as with ASL) watch the construction in air of meaning. And, yes, I do catch a few words.