It's natural I suppose that AIDS has disappeared from public consciousness, and that the present generation of young people are living in an artificial white light concerning the recent past. The era was too painful for us, too painful for anyone to have to think about. In the 20th century this phenomenon happened again and again, a trauma followed by a period immediately afterward of complete and benign dissociation, and then a third period where the original trauma can return to the brain, modulated by the twin effects of time and sobriety. PERSISTENT VOICES, the new anthology of poetry edited by Philip Clark and David Groff, thus comes along at a time that is not likely to make it a best seller, and yet, it is the sort of book that is worth reading for that reason alone.
We all knew that having AIDS did not automatically make you a good writer, and yet I found something of value in just about every poem here. Messrs Clark and Groff did a fair amount of cherrypicking here and there to find perhaps the two or three only good poems written by a few bad poets, but that's what editing is all about, and why not look at these guys in the best light honor can provide? An air of respect and yet a fine discrimination soars through the pages of this book like birds through the windows of a lighted mead-house. Then there were the writers who, no matter how sick they got, notoriously denied having AIDS: how to represent their contributions? Everywhere, you see, there were traps and pitfalls for our editors, and yet by and large PERSISTENT VOICES is just the book we all hoped it would be. Out of the writers in this book, I knew two quite well (the New Narrative boys, Sam D'Allesandro and Steve Abbott), eight or nine others well enough to cry when they left us, and some I knew not at all. (Anyone my age will have the weird experience of reading through the book and murmuring, "Hmmm, didn't know he was gay," "Hmmm, didn't know he was dead.")
In Chroma, UK writer and editor Richard Canning published a characteristically thoughtful review of Persistent Voices, though he controversially asked two pressing questions. "Why select poets simply according to their medical condition, unless that condition became the governing subject around which the poems are based? And - churlish as it may be - if you do use this criterion, why then bend the rules, to accommodate poets who, suffering from ill health, committed suicide?" At this point I depart from Canning's line, though it served him well for his own, outstanding, AIDS-themed anthology of the best short stories written about AIDS a few years back (VITAL SIGNS, 2008). In fact I can't even figure out what his reasoning is. Why all this talk of "rules" in the face of the most devastating epidemic in our time? Why go all neoformalist on us at this juncture? It is the very unruliness of Persistent Voices that best reflects the tragedy it memorializes. I don't want a book of poems about AIDS written by the poets Canning finds sorely absent from this collection: "great poets who either escaped HIV infection themselves, or have not died of AIDS: Thom Gunn, perhaps, most famously (The Man with Night Sweats collection), but also Olga Broumas, Rafael Campo, Mark Doty, Marilyn Hacker, Rachel Hadas, Richard Howard, Richard McCann, J D McClatchy, David Trinidad and Gregory Woods." That's your book, but this is not that and I'm glad.
