Sign language poetry, the result of cultural and artistic manifestations of deaf
communities, is usually theorized and analyzed from different perspectives such as
those of cultural and linguistic studies. We advocate adding to these discussions,
without valuing or underestimating, the aesthetic aspects of literary studies, especially
those related to modern and contemporary poetry. Thus, from bibliographic reviews
involving Cultural Studies, Deaf Studies and Literary Studies, especially researchers
such as Silveira and Karnopp (2014), Sutton-Spence (2005) and Morgado (2011a), we
investigate a new approach to theory and literary criticism for poetry in signs. To this
end, we discuss some poetic forms in Libras, Brazilian Sign Language, question and
propose terminologies and analyze cultural and artistic elements perceived in the
selected poems. We defined as corpus of this research a poem in free profile, two ABC
Poems and Numbers and five Haikus. From the analysis of those referred, we arrived
at the formulation of some theoretical aspects, such as poetic profiles and literary
subjects, the evidence of certain aesthetic elements typical of sign language poetry,
such as sign-art, and the need for further investigations involving other areas of
literature.
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