The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Prose - 90. Kim Addonizio "Preface to Persistent Voices"

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Preface to Persistent Voices

In the early 1990s, another poet, Beret Strong, and I decided to offer a free workshop for people with HIV/AIDS. We got permission to use a room in San Francisco's Davies Hospital, got the word out by posting flyers around town, and ended up with a core group of four to seven men who came regularly to read their work and to talk about their illness, their lives, and poetry. It was a small gesture that we made, as teachers and poets, in response to what was going on all around us. The Castro was full of gaunt men. They walked slowly with the aid of another man's arm around their shoulders, or were pushed along in wheelchairs, bundled in blankets even on warm days. Everyone seemed to know someone who had died, or was dying. Getting out of my car in the hospital parking lot one afternoon, I watched a man carry another in his arms, up the hill away from the hospital – was he taking him home to die? Had they been turned away for lack of insurance? There was no way to know. I went inside and tried to help the students in our workshop tell their own stories, because they needed to tell them, because they wanted someone to know who they were, because they wanted to create something out of the circumstances of their lives.

A writing group for the dying – and these men were dying; all but one would be gone within the next couple of years – might appear to be a grim enterprise. But what I remember from the workshop belies that idea. There was sorrow, of course; one man whose lover also had AIDS described their arguments over which of them would die first. A man in his twenties was reeling from his recent diagnosis. But beyond that, beyond the fear of death and the humiliations of the body, there were jokes and laughter, and a sense of a shared endeavor. There were intense discussions about word choices and metaphors, about line breaks and imagery, interrupted by the occasional Code Blue being called over the intercom. There was something I can only call attention: the moment attended to, experienced, lived in.

So it is with this anthology of poets. Poetry is a record of consciousness, bearing witness to life fully lived, and as such it can transcend even death. Poems bring us the spirits of those who wrote them. Those spirits are variously amused, grieving, angry, longing, observing, questioning. They are here, in these pages, available to us. We encounter them each time we read their words. For anyone with HIV or affected by it, and for those who have not encountered it before, this anthology is a love letter: to you, for you, who are mortal and alive, paying attention to our brief hour.

—Kim Addonizio,

2009