Unending Dialogue: Voices from an AIDS Poetry Workshop

by Rachel Hadas

In a collection that features forty-five poems written by gay men with AIDS, an English professor tells how she instituted a poetry workshop for AIDS sufferers and includes pieces of her own poetry that evolved out of the workshop.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT

166 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Rachel Hadas, is a teacher, writer, and the author of numerous books of poetry,
essays, and translations. She has been a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize."

Reviews

[Arlo Dolven · Rating 4 out of 5]

First poetry book since I was a kid reading Shel Silverstein. I saw some of the poems in here posted on Reddit and really liked them, so I went digging to find where they came from. Turns out the poet I liked was a patient at an AIDS end-of-life center in the 90s. One of several whose work is captured in this book. Unfortunate for both me and him.

The poems are really string. The ones I found most compelling worked on comparing love and death, very similar things from the perspective of the patients. An idea that landed quite strongly. Both are enrapturing, both are beyond our control, both are inevitable, and an argument that sifts through the poems is that both are ultimately futile. Love and death are both pointless while also being the two main tensions in most people's lives. They are just things that happen. Experiences and non-experiences. And yet, our perceived proximity to one or the other has so much to do with how we go about our days.

It is not that they are the same thing, but that they share more characteristics than is ostensibly visible. Here are two poems that I found particularly good. For more, read the book!

FALL SONNETS
The park is like a tapestry.
Yellow, deepened with illusions,
black boughs, a scrim of leaves in dry dusty green
the summer flutters through.

Leaf by leaf, a hint of red, of clay,
of rust, motion is a sea of trees,
each with its tale of happier days--
Remember me!

So now I've got this picture.
I've got to get my words to make it play,
(science meeting art at form and structure),
remake myself as valuables you put away.

For death is the turn where science and art part.
The point of art was never truth, but art.


THE MEAL
this has nothing to do with eating
but with the dinner plate
and where it's placed on the table
and the layout of that table
and the people who dine at that table
she to my left
he to my right
i sit across from the tv
the living color news
jeopardy, vanna white are there
in all their gory might
a snug dinner for for

this has nothing to do with the food
although it's piled high on the plate
this has to do with him plowing
through the meal
sipping, gulping a glass or two of scotch
and running to the bathroom
throwing it all up

this has nothing to do with cooking
but the aching slow dance of aging
and the creaking of bones
and the shattered dreams
crashing like plates and glasses
in the steamy kitchen

this has nothing to do with dessert
she complaining about the puerto
ricans next door or the blacks
or the jews or my aunt upstairs
she giving updates of the family news
while the tv supplies us a good healthy
dose of robberies, murders, rapes
and George Bush and coca cola commercials

this has nothing to do with tasting
it has to do with swallowing words
words of frustration and anger
each of us caught in a crossfire
of pointedly pointless conversation
i channeling my anger through politics
or anecdotes or rhetoric
he reminiscing about when he
was young and did this
and when he was young and did that
and how the world is not quite
the world it used to be
she eating cookies

this has nothing to do with dining
but living in a tight space
and loving as best one can
this is tv seven nights a week
this is a wrestling match
this is america's saturday night date
this is prime time
this is me on the F train
heading back to Manhattan

P.S.

There are basically three sections of this book. One where the author introduces the book and the context in which it came about, the second which is poems collected in a poetry workshop in the 90s the author hosted at an AIDS end-of-life center, and the third where the author writes poetry and prose of her own about the first two sections. I did not read the third section because honestly it was boring and pretentious and I did not give a fuck about what she had to say. This review of for the first two sections, which are great.

[Jennifer Collins · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a difficult review to write simply because, at the end of the day, this read was so incredibly up and down for me. The opening material is interesting and worthwhile. The poems that make up the center of the book (loosely half the book's length) are incredibly powerful, and a five-star read in and of themselves--though featuring the same voices over and over again, which did surprise me, they offer so much variety of expression, power, and gorgeous language that I read many of them repeatedly before moving on to the next. They are, without question, worth discovering and sharing, and far more polished and powerful than what you might expect from the more casual title of the book.

The truth is, if the whole book had been composed only of the intro and these poems, whether with added poems or not, this undoubtedly would have been a five-star read for me.

And yet. The last third (loosely) of the book is made up of poems and related explications of those poems, all of this written by the author who put together the collection. But even with my interest opened up to her by the opening essay, I still found it incredibly difficult to get through this section. The poems felt needlessly belabored, and often more like cut-up prose than poetry. The explications were...well...I felt like they wandered between being painfully academic and self-congratulatory. They made me dislike the author and her voice, to be honest, and I had to keep reminding myself what the first two thirds of the book had felt and looked like in order to push myself forward.

So, where does that leave me? I would absolutely recommend the first two portions of this book, the opening material and then the actual poems from the workshop. I cannot recommend what comes after them, but even so, those first two pieces--loosely a hundred pages, and more poetry than makes up many contemporary collections--are more than worth the time/effort of searching out this little-known book.

[Julene · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1991, this book was created through a workshop Rachel Hadas did with HIV positive men back in the days when AIDS was a death sentence. The poems written by the men in the group are powerful. I enjoyed their poems much more than hers, which are the second half of the book with comments on each.

Here are two poems from two men in the group that struck me.

Keith Haring, Deceased

Like a shotgun down an open street,
his finger on the trigger
tears a path in history's map.
Returning from the future,
consequence becomes reverse annihilation
forming him in lines and pictures,
values and portfolios.

Appreciation is collective consciousness,
the artist getting bigger.
Stronger than our memory's half life,
his finger on the brush and pen
has made a voice that can't be silenced—
timeless messages created
by his restless hand.

Invisible matter we produce
and then destroy, our sorrow in reflection
briefly gives existence
to the one who doesn't exist.
Sleepless nights bent on forgetting
feed the energy we spend.

And little can we say, or take away
from visionary consequence
projected from the artist's pen.

James Turcotte

Death in Abstract

death is abstract
but the process of dying
is terrifying
and one can't shake off
those moments of
subterranean living
when a shadow prevails
and panic seizes
one by the heart and throat
and will not let go
this comes at night
at the turning off of lights
and the sounds of humming
alarm clocks, dripping taps,
footsteps above, nothing and
everything drums in one's ears
the pounding heart, the itching skin
gasping, gasping for breath
not now, now now one pleads
there are still ahead
days of living, whatever they may be
death is too abstract
one must have life, must live
must exist another day

Tony J. Giordano

[Lisa M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am so lucky to live in a city with an ivy league university. Why, you ask? Our used bookstore's selection is particularly good. Lots of older books, specialty books, academic books. I feel like I couldn't find such a good used bookstore anywhere. When I came across this book for $2.95, I knew I had to have it.

The book looked like it was either going to be very good, or very bad. As a queer, the topic is very close to my heart. AIDS changed our nation's views and emotions on sex, and ruined a whole generation. As a poet and someone who loves poetry, I understand that poetry can be cathartic for the writer and informational for the reader, but not necessarily good poetry.

This collection turned out to be very good! The second section of the book contains 57 poems about men with AIDS who attended Hadas' poetry workshop. I was surprised with how good the poetry was! Since it wasn't written by professional poets, my standards weren't very high. But these poems were good! Some of them went beyond good, the quality represented was stunning. Seriously, great poetry, great writing skills. I also felt like they explored AIDS well - a variety of moods and opinions were explored, and gently repeated over and over. This section was gut wrenching.

But, this book is unique in that it contains more than these poems. There are two other sections. In the first section, Rachel Hadas gives us some background information about the class and why she chose to teach it. Hadas was in her 40s when she volunteered to teach the class, but she came off as really immature. She told a group of AIDS patients, "I would be angry if I were you." How can you even begin to conceive what this group of dying, gay men are going through (you are not a gay, dying man with AIDS?) I just find this type of talk so condescending. Why not ask the group of people how they feel, not tell them how they feel when you have no experience with people with AIDS and just met them? No wonder so few people attended her workshop!

The third section of the book is a sort of combination of the first and second. It includes some poems Hadas wrote during this time period of her life. She felt the poems could stand alone, but truly wanted to portray her experiences during this time period, so she includes brief essays between each poem. Hadas is clearly academically intelligent, and it shows in these sections. She breaks down her poems easily and draws parallels between the famous poems and the poems of the men she is working with.

Now, on to her poems. They were fine, technically. None of the writing really blew me away, but they weren't bad. She has published several collections but was easily outshone by the men in the collection. They were too abstract for my style; I really wanted to learn about what working with these men was like for her in rich detail. Instead, we're given a lot of abstract images that portray very little.

For $2.95, it was not bad. I am glad I own this collection so I can remember these men, and the many men we lost to AIDS at this time.