We have finished two of the three speakers. Now Ripley’s colleague Lucille Blackwell will also speak on Laura Redden Searing. Her presentation is titled “Laura C. Redden: Public Poet.”

Blackwell: Harry Lang spoke about Redden’s interaction with the Lincolns and her life as a journalist; I will talk about the other part of her life as a poet. She wrote very accessible poetry. She interacted with everyone.

Here’s a sample of her poetry [Blackwell quickly shows a snippet]. She may have been a gardener, since she writes a lot about flowers in her poetry, and she also published a number of articles about flowers. There’s perhaps also some interest in the sciences. She also wrote romantic poems and other types of poems.

[Basically we are treated to very brief and quick samples of her poetry, and Blackwell is telling us little bits and snippets such as Redden writing about John Greenleaf Whittier, and that they sustained a friendship for many years.]

Redden became a poet for three reasons. Her father died when she was young, so she had more independence than other women, whose fathers might have guided them towards marriage or other more “acceptable” pursuits. Second, she was deaf. At fifteen, she wondered and worried about her future as a deaf woman. She did think about marrying a young man once in Illinois, but her step-father encouraged her to go to the Missouri School instead. She did so, and then was enccouraged to be a writer. Finally, the Civil War allowed her to express her thoughts through patriotic poems.

In the mid 1860’s, she went to Europe and wandered for four years. While she was there, she met other authors and artists. Her poetry shows her adaptability in absorbing new words and languages. She wasn’t a good lipreader, but as this poem shows, she picked up dogsledding terms while in Alaska [Shows this poem very quickly, and it includes words like “mush,” etc.]. In europe she learned enough of some languages to write poems in these languages.

She once wrote 70 poems, which taken together form a sort of epic. They’re not all in the same meter, the same length, etc. she could write in different registers, which indicated a high level of skill. We saw yesterday that deaf women were denied education, yet redden independently accomplished a lot, and she certainly was a role model for her times.

My Commentary: This presentation was far more accessible and appropriate for the conference than Ripley’s. Blackwell’s knowledge and enthusiasm for Redden was evident. The main problem during her presentation was that due to time limits, she was forced to show her PowerPoint presentation with the various poems at such a rapid pace, it was difficult to read the entire poem, or get a sense of why Redden was unique/important. While there was no clear tie to Gallaudet or Kendall Green, Blackwell’s talk contributes to a rounded-out sense of Deaf history through individual biography.

However, given that Redden was a poet and a journalist, and the fact that Chris Krentz also presented a paper talking about John Carlin, perhaps it might be time to have a conference at some point that focuses primarily on Deaf writers, artists, and sculptors. There certainly are quite a number of individuals that could be examined, from Edward Booth to Laura Redden Searing to John Carlin to Albert Ballin and Granville Redmond, and up into the 20th century, with people like Dorothy Miles and playwrights like Gil Eastman. Certainly something for someone out there to think about…