Introduction

Portraits of an Epidemic: Timothy Liu's Swan Songs

“I Find No Escape”: Thom Gunn's Withheld Consolations

“We Are in Enemy Hands”: Paul Monette's Polemical Elegies

Transformations: Mark Doty's “Risky Gestures”

Introduction

In “‘How to Live. What to do': The Poetics and Politics of AIDS,” Deborah Landau explores the role that writers, or poets more precisely, can take in response to the AIDS epidemic in the United States. Many cultural critics suggest that the homophobic atmosphere in the country caused the lack of immediate response from various institutions during the first appearance of AIDS. Some people believe that the disease is God's punishment on people who has sinned in an increasingly “demonizing discourse” against AIDS and people with AIDS (194). Therefore, Landau focuses on Timothy Liu, Thom Gunn, Paul Monette, and Mark Doty to explore how their poetry deals with the AIDS crisis in the personal, social, and political spheres in the society.

        Landau defines the poems of this period as serving many purposes: “they provide a historical record, commemorate the dead, console readers directly affected by HIV, encourage empathy from those not yet touched, rage against public management of the epidemic, and forge alternative narratives” (194). Based on her definition, Landau looks at how the four poets contribute to the AIDS discourse.

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Portraits of an Epidemic: Timothy Liu's Swan Songs

Timothy Liu's Vox Angelica looks at how the AIDS crisis affects the gay community. The poems in this collection contain the “layering [of] distinct images to construct austere, painterly landscapes” (195). Landau closely looks at Liu's poems “The City,” “Sodom and Gomorrah,” “Eros Apteros,” and “Aphrodite As I Know Her” and finds that Liu gives a bleak portrayal of the life in the cities of late-twentieth-century North America, in which he “equates homoerotic love with self-destruction“ (196). Furthermore, “the sexual body is mutilated and desire is eroded by decay” in the gay community (196) where images of death and destruction are rampant. Therefore, although Liu's poetry records the impact of AIDS on society,  “Liu strands his readers in a deteriorating world—a striking metaphor for the experience of being an HIV-positive person in a homophobic culture—without offering direction about how physical, spiritual, or political regeneration might begin” (197).

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“I Find No Escape”: Thom Gunn's Withheld Consolations

“We Are in Enemy Hands”: Paul Monette's Polemical Elegies

Monette's poems are similar to Gunn's poems in that both looks at the effects of AIDS on a person but while Gunn “maintains an aesthetic distance from his subject matter,” Monette “situates individual suffering within a socio-political context” and forces the readers to look at AIDS straight in the face without any barriers or distance (201). In Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog, Monette writes about the decline of his lover due to the disease. His poems contain his raw emotions, which come across from his writing style. For example, in “Your Sightless Days,” there are no punctuations and one line runs on into the next one, which creates the feeling of a lack of control and a lack of containment (201). A metaphor that Monette typically uses to depict the struggle of his lover against AIDS is the struggle between the Jews and the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto (202) in order to highlight the “political evil” that is the force behind the crisis. In contrast to Gunn's way of ending his poems without hope, Monette ends “Your Sightless Days” with a moment of tenderness that could be taken as a form of consolation.

Along with the poems about love, loss, and grief, Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog also contains poems that “call for action against an oppressive cultural order” (202), such as “Ed Dying” which deals with the “homophobic mismanagement of the response to the AIDS epidemic” (202). Monette uses “hatred [and rage] as an aesthetic and political strategy” to illustrate how homophobia is “a major contributing factor to the epidemic spread of AIDS” (202). The tone of his poems is “abrasive” and the style “aggressively antilyrical” in a kind of “wrecked form” in order to create “a completely fractured, unmarked, and destabilizing text” that compels the readers to imagine the “shock and isolation that he [Monette], Rog, and other affected gay men have had to face” in the age of AIDS (qtd. in 204). Essentially, “Monette's poetry performs a crucial function by voicing the rage and frustration of those directly affected by HIV, provoking readers previously unaffected by the syndrome to confront the impact of the AIDS crisis and perhaps inspiring efforts to increase the quality and quantity of research, care, and medical treatment for people with AIDS” (205).

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Transformations: Mark Doty's “Risky Gestures”

Both Monette's and Mark Doty's poetry is aimed at creating “a more inhabitable world for people with AIDS” (205); however, their writing styles are different in that Doty's work are more receptive by all types of audience. In My Alexandria, Doty's poems “transform homophobic narratives about the disease, offer comfort to those living with HIV, and encourage empathy from those whose lives have not yet affected by the virus” (205). His works reveal efforts to “expose the codes that map meaning onto the HIV-positive body, destabilize the complex cultural networks that construct gay male identity in the context of the AIDS epidemic, and forge a transformed and transforming language in which to articulate love and loss” (206).

        One of the main themes in My Alexandria is the difference between the ideology of AIDS and the experiences of people living with HIV (207), and this is demonstrated in the first poem of the book—“Demolition.” This poem “evokes the redemptive power of poetic language” (207), while another poem “Fog” “enacts such redemption by transforming the cultural coding of AIDS” (207). Although Doty's poems are not overtly political, his writings contain, or are affected by, the current ideology of AIDS—“AIDS does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond top it” (qtd. in 208).

One way Doty tries to ‘rewrite' the AIDS discourse is to change the names, or terminology, used by various institutions, such as the government and the medicinal, which alienate the community of people with AIDS and HIV and re-appropriate the terms in order to create a language that he can use to narrate his experience. For example, the poem “Fog” shows how Doty “resist oppressive cultural response…by forging alternative narratives to those of public health discourse” and another poem “The Wings” “forges alternative ways to speak about love and loss in the context of the AIDS epidemic” (210) in which Doty celebrates the love between men. Another cultural text in the poem is the AIDS Memorial Quilt where the boundaries between bodies are blurred along with the labeling of people with AIDS as the Other (212). In “Tiara,” Doty refutes the idea of “our [homosexuals] own oppression as a consequence of pleasure” (210) and transform this ideology into one of celebration of sexuality and desire.

A metaphor that appears in Doty's “The Wings” is that of angels, who are depicted as “healing, redemptive, libidinous, and visionary” (214). Specifically, “Angel-making is Doty's metaphor for the poetry-making process that enables him to speak…If mainstream discourses script people with AIDS as alone and despondent, Doty's angel-laden poetry forces a language that deems his beloved friend ‘unharmed'” (214). Furthermore, these angels appear in the “margins of American culture and is “searching for words that elude systematic terminology and cannot be found in any concordance” (215). At the end of “The Wings,” the angel “endows the dying man with the power to narrate his own life and death and enables him to retain his autonomy and integrity despite the ‘alien air' of public rhetoric” (215).

In both “Brilliance” and “Bill's Story,” Doty rewrites the typical narrative of an AIDS death and allows transcendence beyond death. The typical concepts of mortality are also transformed in “Becoming a Meadow.” Ultimately, “poetry is a medium for imagining temporary exemption from history, from the physical and cultural constraints that circumscribe sensation and experience. [Furthermore], by revealing the myths and politics that construct the AIDS epidemic and by depicting individual acts that defy the pressure those constructions” (219), Doty creates a new narrative that allows for more freedom and a voice for the “Other”—people with and the people living with AIDS and HIV—in a homophobic society.

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