WHEN Carolyn Forché released her groundbreaking anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, she did not include poems from the struggle for gay rights. The anthology was published in 1993, a bleak point in the history of the gay community due to the impact of AIDS on gay men and on the arts community. But, as readers today, we can easily situate AIDS poets in the panoply of poets of witness—those who write poetry that transcends the purely personal or the purely political and operates at their intersection. This is a type of poetry that exists in a space of resistance and re-orients points of view toward new ways of seeing and speaking. As a critical lens for understanding the cultural impact of poetry, Forché establishes an especially fruitful way of seeing poetry responding to AIDS.
At a time where the public discourse is too often framed by a very few politically correct ideologies, the variety of voices and formal approaches to understanding AIDS in the poetry of the first decade or two is reassuring, even as they articulate a profound sense of loss. AIDS poetry in the United States has played a particularly important role in shaping the language around the disease and the social, political, and cultural challenges faced by people living with it. Much of this poetry depends on the power of narratives to personalize a pandemic that could easily be reduced to statistics or medical jargon. AIDS poetry is equal parts grief, rage, desperation, love, action, and empathy. In it, there is a need to communicate the gravity of individual tragedy within the pandemic while also arguing for far-reaching social, political, and cultural change.
As one born during the height of Reaganism and the conservative fundamentalist movement, I have not known a world without AIDS.
Indeed, one cannot help wondering where we would be as a community today if we had not lost so many powerful voices to the AIDS pandemic. Fortunately, we have records of some of those voices, preserved in the poetry written during the plague’s darkest years. Certainly the arts are full of humanizing works created in response to the disease and the unjust political discourse surrounding the crisis. But in poetry we experience the cries that humanize and personalize this tragedy. Poetry reinvigorates human speech to shatter indifference toward the plight of others.
With the recent release of Philip Clark and David Groff’s anthology of AIDS poetry, Persistent Voices, published by the now defunct Alyson Books, a renewed interest in poetry responding to AIDS has grown across America, with a series of readings from the anthology being staged all over the country. This year, David Trinidad will publish an authoritative collection of works by one of the most thrilling poets lost to AIDS, Tim Dlugos, whose poem “G-9” still stands as a paragon showing how clear, compassionate, humorous, and gut-wrenching a poem can be. And that is what AIDS poetry does: it reminds us what poetry can be, and how we can use words to reclaim our history, our bodies, and our rightful place as humans.
The poet-activist strives for clarified memories, ones that may exert a powerful impact upon readers. Even as the pandemic is still, over thirty years after its first appearance, raging across the face of humanity, memory of losses must translate into an awareness of present and future possibilities. Many of these poems offer an unqualified vision of human possibility, telescoping the capacity for human resilience and transience. Above all, they capture human beings’ capacity both to demonstrate love and to enact cruelty.
One need look no further than the work of poets Thom Gunn and Tim Dlugos to observe these tendencies at work. In collections by these men we see a range of expression, from rage and remembrance, to redemption and resilience. In form they range from Gunn’s measured verse in compact poems to Dlugos’ vocal and emotional lines in a longer meditation on the disease.
Thom Gunn
Around a decade into the AIDS epidemic, in 1992, British-born poet Thom Gunn, later a familiar resident poet of San Francisco, published a book of poetry titled The Man with Night Sweats. The harrowing, boldly physical title sets the tone for the collection, which explores the physical pain and emotional anguish that the gay community experienced as a result of the epidemic in the early days. What distinguishes Gunn’s collection of elegiac works from others of its kind is the highly formal verse that he employed. By representing homosexual desire and AIDS in traditional measures, Gunn filters his subject matter through a form associated with its opposite—heterosexual love and prosperity. In a way, Gunn’s work shows the potentially subversive side to the notion sometimes cited by those who favor formal verse: “form elevates utterance.”
No single explanation exists for Gunn’s decision to write in such carefully measured rhythms, but several factors seem plausible. Considering the chaotic nature of AIDS and the havoc it wreaks upon his subjects, the control exerted over his verse can be seen as an attempt to control the subject matter, which, given the context for the creation of these poems, is a Herculean task. The patterns of his poems fight against the dire unpredictability of his subject. Essentially, he seeks to render the infinite nature of death and destruction through finite form, the unstructured disease through structure.
Noting the extremely emotional nature of Gunn’s choice of subject, it may seem odd that he uses such rigid forms, but he seems to do so in order to control the elegiac emotions and to add a sense of gravity and formality to the deaths of those that the cultural and political establishment prefer to ignore. While Gunn’s subject of AIDS is relatively new and revolutionary, he works within an æsthetic tradition, and a conservative one at that. This choice highlights to some extent the universal nature of grief and loss. And yet, such grief is compounded by social stigma and the sense of urgency that charges Gunn’s poems with the feeling that, if he fails to speak up about those who are dying, their stories will go untold. By bringing new experiences as represented by the AIDS crisis to the traditional form, he asserts the values of both the traditions of poetic form and homosexual experience.
In the title poem, “The Man with Night Sweats,” a speaker struggles with the onset of AIDS-related complications. It is the only poem in the collection narrated by a PWA, who grapples with the reality of his physical situation—a body that was once resilient is killing itself and refuses to heal:
I wake up cold, I who
Prospered through dreams of heat
Wake to their residue,
Sweat, and a clinging sheet.
My flesh was its own shield:
Where it was gashed, it healed.
In a poem that discusses the breakdown of physical armor, regularly referring to the body’s “shield,” the poetic form remains unbroken—the iambs dominate; the rhyme scheme remains consistent—against the desperation of a man dying swiftly. “As if hands were enough / To hold an avalanche off,” he laments. Against the backdrop of formal strength, the speaker’s situation seems even bleaker. But the formality of his utterance adds an air of dignity to his difficult speech, a remnant of a formidable mind so at odds with his disintegrating body.
But Gunn doesn’t focus only on the body imperiled in this collection. He creates a hopeful moment in “Patch Work,” a reference to the Names Project Quilt. In this poem, Gunn argues for a renegotiation of the terms for viewing the crisis, for a revolutionary new way of seeing things. He turns his focus to a mockingbird, which sings:
A repertoire of songs that it has heard
—From other birds, and others of its kind—
Which it has recombined
And made its own, especially one
With a few separate plangent notes begun
Then linking trills as a long confident run
Toward the immediate distance.
What the mockingbird does with its song is exactly what Gunn does with his. He takes the narratives of those he witnesses, reforms them according to his own vision, and disseminates his message. What emerges is a cohesive group of poems that work together as an elegiac symphony.
Tim Dlugos
Tim Dlugos, who died at age forty in 1990, was a fixture of the New York poetry scene in the 1980’s, and is considered part of the second generation of the New York School of poets. Just as Gunn’s poetry is an unorthodox marriage of subject with form, Dlugos offers an interesting combination: a gay poet activist and an Episcopalian priest.
A sense of grace pervades the poems he wrote in response to AIDS. He wrote up to the very point of his death, chronicling his physical and emotional battles as his health declined. For someone so near to death, his sense of life is undiminished; if anything, it becomes more refined than ever. And he maintains a wry sense of humor, even in the end, not taking himself too seriously but giving every honor to love felt, communicated, and shared. While he bears witness to the atrocities of the disease and the crippling effects of official silence, he also witnesses and participates in a resilient, generous, and redemptive human response.
“G-9,” one of Dlugos’ most famous works, is set in an AIDS hospital ward. The eighteen-page poem gives itself free rein to a sprawling array of topics. It is a decidedly welcoming poem. Since he’s not elegizing a specific person, Dlugos’ vision is broad, embracing nostalgia for post-Stonewall gay culture and the heroism of the gay community’s mobilization in response to the calamity. Of the heroic response to the crisis he writes: “What we have to cherish is not only/ what we can recall of how/ things were before the plague,/ but how we each responded/ once it started.” In a space where the imperiled body is a constant reality, Dlugos considers the strength of the community as a body of a different kind.
As the poem ends, Dlugos’ sense of longing merges with his sense of spirituality. He fears his body’s and mind’s deterioration, imagines himself “pencil-thin” and “pale as the vesper light,” “scarred from surgery.” But as he expresses these fears, his lover Chris enters the room, and thus the poem. In this passage, Dlugos shows the emotional and physical complications of living and loving with AIDS:
G-9 is no place to affirm
a relationship. Two hours
in a chair beside my bed
after eight hours of work
night after night for weeks …
Last week he exploded,
“I hate this, I hate your
being sick and having AIDS
and lying in a hospital
where I can only see you
with a visitor’s pass. I hate
that this is going to
get worse.” I hate it,
too. We kiss, embrace,
and Chris climbs into bed
beside me, to air-mattress
squeaks. Hold on. We hold on
to each other, to a hope
of how we’ll be when I get out.
Frustration with the physical effects of the disease is matched by a refusal to abandon the body as an erotic site. This is the one scene where Dlugos describes a physical interaction with his lover, which he does without sentimentality. He shows the weariness of both men, the boiling frustration, the tenderness of hope, and the tenuousness of both the relationship and life itself.
“G-9” is one of most of emotionally intense and culturally important poems written in response to AIDS, as are many other of Dlugos’ poems, notably those appearing in a volume called Powerless. These poems addressing life with AIDS have such nerve and hope, a confluence of rawness with tenderness. At the end of “D.O.A.,” the last poem collected in this book, Dlugos relates a philosophy of living, one that is bound to his poetic sensibilities:
Absolute fidelity
to the truth of what I felt, open
to the moment, and in every case
a kind of love: all of the above
brought me to this tottering
self-conscious state—pneumonia,
emaciation, grisly cancer,
no future, heart of gold,
passionate engagement with a great
B film, a glorious summer
afternoon in which to pick up
the ripest plum tomatoes of the year
and prosciutto for the feast I’ll cook
tonight for the man I love,
phone calls from my friends
and a walk to the park, ignoring
stares, to clear my head. A day
like any, like no other. Not so bad
for the dead.
Dlugos, in his poetry, is true to his emotional landscape and to the sanctity of the moment. For someone so near death, his embrace of life elevates the mundane to ecstatic.
Harvard medical school professor and poet Rafael Campo has written many essays and poems about his experiences treating AIDS patients and his various relationships to the disease. In a piece in The Kenyon Review (Autumn 1993), he wrote: “I am grateful for the poetry that is written about AIDS, in that it has helped me so generously to locate myself in a world irrevocably altered by the presence of the virus.” Dlugos’ poems are deeply concerned with a similar reckoning. And while the situation is dire for the poet and for many of his friends, he does not slip into a single tonal registry. Instead, he maintains a fullness of voice and range, even when his living is compromised. In this sense, Dlugos is a profoundly hopeful poet.
Douglas Ray teaches literature and writing at Indian Springs School, an independent boarding and day school in Birmingham, Alabama.
