performed in front of an audience. Visual Vernacular is used to portray the scene in the poem and to use very detailed visual methods to let the audience know what is happening in the poem. It is this complex visual nature of the poetry that often makes it impossible to directly translate into English from ASL. Personification Personification in sign language involves using the storyteller's body part to represent an object in the story. Doing so allows the object to "come alive" in the story. A very common example of personification in sign language stories is using the storyteller's head to represent round objects such as different types of balls. As the story is acted out, the storyteller's head is the ball, and the storyteller can act out emotions that the ball may feel throughout the story, thus personifying the ball. This often occurs in the "animation style" of cinematographic technique. Genres Poetry The 1980s was a time of innovation for Deaf poets. It was at this time that poets such as Ella Mae Lentz and Clayton Valli began to compose original poetry in ASL, as opposed to ASL translations of English literature that the preceding generation had produced. This was paralleled by the ASL poetry scene that formed during the same decade at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) in Rochester, New York, which lasted until about 1991 when the poets moved their separate ways. Keeping with the community traditions of Deaf storytellers, older more experienced poets were influential on the younger generation of poets, and all poets openly exchanged feedback with each other. Through this process, Deaf poets developed through their own natural talent and their exchanges with more experienced poets. There was also an important exchange of ideas between hearing poets, such as Allen Ginsberg and Jim Cohn, and Deaf poets in the Rochester community. One of the most notable exchanges was Deaf poet Patrick Graybill acting out an image of a "hydrogen jukebox" from Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" during a seminar in 1984. Upon being asked why he chose the word 'hydrogen', Ginsburg explained that he wanted the apocalyptic imagery of the hydrogen bomb to work as a metaphor for the arrival of rock and roll music. Graybill's visual depiction in ASL of a "hydrogen jukebox" successfully brought the image to life, which is what Ginsberg was trying to accomplish through the words of