| Since the early 1980s, many of the social, political, and cultural changes for persons living with HIV/AIDS in the United States have depended on the power of narratives to personalize AIDS. This struggle is a prominent, resistant theme addressed by the poets of AIDS. AIDS poetry is characterized by the intersections of grief, rage, desperation, love, and action. Central to the poetics of AIDS is a need to communicate individual tragedy within the pandemic while also advocating socio-political change. AIDS verse is a form of activism, imagining a world without discrimination as it graphically details life with HIV/AIDS, confronting what I term a "culture of blame.";In the tradition of American poets like Whitman and Williams, AIDS poetry is a contemporary example of Carolyn Forche's "poetry of witness" (a concept borrowed from Walter Benjamin and Czeslaw Milosz), working aesthetically and politically for social change. Analyzed against the history of twentieth century poetry and its roots, AIDS poetry is revealed as a new type of democratic verse, a populist poetry with a powerful and socially engaging vision.;Using feminist, Marxist, and queer literary theory, I trace the history of AIDS poetry, from the early, gay elegy represented in the work of poets like Paul Monette to an increasingly democratized AIDS poetry represented by the group I call the "post-protease poets." Within this history of AIDS poetry, I identify and analyze seven central sources of AIDS poetry---anthologies, writing groups, performance poetry, literary magazines, the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, the Internet and the work of many prominent AIDS poets. As part of this discussion, I conducted interviews, included in the appendix, with nine AIDS poets and editors: Rafael Campo, Diana Cohn, Tory Dent, Rachel Hadas, River Huston, Michael Klein, Joan Logghe, Leslea Newman, and Aaron Shurin,;Each chapter begins and ends with my own AIDS poetry; like Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera and other feminist texts, the use of creative work extends the literary analysis, demonstrating a critical/creative analysis through careful attention to aesthetic, formal, and content choices. |
