How to Continue: The poetry of HIV/AIDS four decades on

Abstract

How to ContinueThe poetry of HIV/AIDS four decades on Sam Huber (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Still of a balloon release from Jim Hubbard's 1989 Elegy in the Streets, a film that captured the growing political mobilization around the AIDS crisis. [End Page 212] John ashbery's "how to continue" (1992) is the most moving elegy I know for the HIV/AIDS epidemic's early losses. It's also the most moving tribute I know to the solidarity engendered by those losses, though Ashbery is an unlikelier witness in this regard. Our late patron poet of idiosyncrasy—recognizable by his digressions and reversals, who once wrote of "fence-sitting / Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal"—was roused by AIDS into the clarity of a group perspective. "How to Continue" eschews [End Page 213] documentary details for the neater tools of parable. Once upon a time, the poem tells us, there was an island with a "shop / selling trinkets to tourists." On that island a community flourished, a refuge for its inhabitants and a curiosity to outsiders: And it was always a party therealways different but very niceNew friends to give you adviceor fall in love with you which is niceand each grew so perfectly from the otherit was a marvel of poetryand irony Like the past half-century of gay life, "How to Continue" is cleaved by a trauma, with AIDS marking off a clear before and after. In the 1970s, gay liberation had unleashed new forms of political and sexual experience, promising communal pride and promiscuity without consequence—"always a party," but also "a marvel." Like the urban enclaves of that decade, Ashbery's nest of intimacies is porous ("always different") but coherent ("very nice"). The poem's island is more vibrant and satisfying than its residents might have ever dared wish for: "everybody was happy to have discovered / what they discovered." Until one day, without warning, the party sours. The former revelers, now "sleepers / in heavy attitudes," hang around their old haunts like zombies. The tourists leave, abandoning the islanders to their new condition. A "gale" descends and announces, "it is time to take all of you away." Oddly, the natural disaster seems both to break up the scene and to arrive after its end has already been set in motion. Cause and effect are murky. Whatever its source, the disruption gives rise to a new kind of beleaguered fellow feeling: And when it became time to gothey none of them would leave without the otherfor they said we are all one here [End Page 214] and if one of us goes the other will not goand the wind whispered it to the starsthe people all got up to goand looked back on love AIDS is never mentioned in the poem, but what other referent might there be for a melancholic gay man in 1992? By then, the epidemic had torn through communities, enveloping every thought, dream, and desire in its terrible context. Governmental inaction, blinkered public health initiatives, a rabidly homophobic and racist news media, and a scientific establishment stalled by lack of funding and researchers' competing egos allowed the virus to spread practically unabated for the better part of a decade. By the time Ashbery's poem was published, AIDS had laid waste, in the eyes of many, to entire ways of living. If the governing vibe of the 1970s had been celebratory and assertive, much gay writing in the epidemic's early years was riven by ambivalence. "Now we think / as we fuck / This nut / might kill us," the poet Essex Hemphill proclaims in Marlon Riggs's 1989 film Tongues Untied. Hemphill's lines bridge two competing impulses—we might call them introspection and activism—among artists of that era. The existential threat of AIDS drove many queer people inward, forcing them to confront their own mortality, the strain of caring for sick lovers and friends, and the persistence of shame in the wake of ostensible liberation. Currents of self-implication tugged at writers who wondered if the plague bore some cosmic referendum on their...