Meg Day shares their relationship with poetry and their goals for the residency.

Transcript
Meg Day: Well, it's such an exciting time (laughs). It's really, really thrilling to imagine welcoming signing poets, deaf poets into the Guggenheim to, to engage with and, and respond to the art and the architecture, especially as part of a, a community that doesn't often have, like, a place to gather, right, doesn't have, like, a creative hub.

I'm Meg Day, the Guggenheim Museum's 2024 Poet-in-Residence. I've long found a challenge with the limitations of the printed page, because of ASL and the way that deaf poetry, you know, it's live. We don't really have, like, a, a "published form," quote, unquote.  So what happens is erasure.

Art museums in general seem like a fruitful collaboration for writers and artists who are working in a mode that is visual in the way that sign language is visible.

I find the Guggenheim (laughs) incredibly comforting. It's a good example of deaf space, right, of, like, deaf architecture in terms of sight lines and quote, unquote, "visibility," right? We can sign to one another from across the rotunda. Um, you know, the low ceilings and the curved walls you have a sense of an enclosed, comfortable, protected, um, environment. As a gendered body, as a disabled body, I feel quite confident and at ease in the space of a museum. 

The opportunity to collaborate with the Guggenheim to invite poets that I've long respected, deaf poets' writing in English in conversation with deaf poets who are signing and making poems in ASL. That is not a thing that I encounter as somebody who moves in both worlds pretty fluently. To arrive in a place that has, has, you know, thought about you prior to your arrival. I think that's rare. that's not compulsory. It's not given. 

I think there's a good argument for having American Sign Language or any sign language as a kind of visual art. It's hard to say whether or not we as a public are really prepared to, like, encounter the thing without guidance or support. And so I've been thinking a lot about the question of access and, and who requires it. I think we're learning. I'm, I'm excited about what we're learning.

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