Policing, Politicizing, Poeticizing the Virgin/Whore Split: Contemporary American Women's Poetry about AIDS — Page 2:
6 Here, I will look at four women poets: Lesléa Newman, Marie Howe, Tory Dent and River Huston and the impact their work has had on the literary, poetic construction of HIV/AIDS.[3]This article focuses on four poets. Some other U.S. women poets writing significantly about HIV/AIDS include: Rachel Hadas, Sonia Sanchez, Joan Logghe, Belle Waring, Joan Larkin, Marilyn Hacker, Jean Valentine and Charlotte Mayerson. Michael Klein's <em>Poets for Life</em> (New York: Persea Books, 1989) and the sequel, <em>Things Shaped in Passing</em> (with Richard McCann. New York: Persea, 1997), are good places to begin to explore the wide range of HIV/AIDS authorship in the U.S. Implicit in their poetry and their activism is a constant wrestling with their own subject position in relationship to HIV/AIDS.
7 The book-length works of Lesléa Newman and Marie Howe, published between 1995 and 1998, speak to the virgin/whore dichotomy as they redefine the elegy describing the AIDS pandemic as women caregivers. Writing as the "good girls" of AIDS, as friend and sister, respectively, these care-givers are left to witness to HIV/AIDS in a different way than the gay male community. Close enough to HIV/AIDS to know the social stigma, to have maintained a constant vigil at the deathbed, they are also always outsiders to HIV/AIDS, living in the seronegative world. Newman and Howe thus write from a particular moment of privilege in the HIV/AIDS pandemic. They are certainly affected by HIV/AIDS through their own losses and by their continued interactions within the HIV/AIDS community, but they are at a different distance than others in the HIV/AIDS community. As women, differently than their gay male counterparts, they don't see themselves as at risk for HIV/AIDS. Instead, because of the early ignorance around transmission — something that changed radically with a better understanding of the virus — AIDS was something that happened to people they loved. The grief inherent in their work differs from the grief-stricken and terrorized subtext of gay writers like Paul Monette and Mark Doty — my lover, then me?
8 What characterizes this poetry, and much early HIV/AIDS poetry in general, is the framing of a life. Howe and Newman are left behind with the responsibility for framing and defining the life and loss of the person they loved. Their books — much like other early collections such as Ron Schreiber's John or Paul Monette's 18 Elegies for Rog-document the earliest HIV/AIDS era in the United States, but they do more than simply eulogize. In Illuminations, Walter Benjamin posits that "a chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history" (254). While the seronegative caregivers are immediately removed from the situation of HIV/AIDS, their nevertheless intimate contact and participation in the HIV/AIDS community serves to establish a different kind of gendered witness to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Their role, as caregivers and as poets, is to act as a translator for HIV/AIDS. Living in the seronegative world, these poets understand and take in HIV/AIDS at a distance.
9 Accordingly, they can relate to those in society who are also negative for HIV and believe they are in no way at risk for the virus. However, the caregiver — here, Howe and Newman — also stands in proximity to HIV/AIDS, understanding the course of the illness and the social stigma arising from it. They are able to chronicle HIV/AIDS outside of one person's lived experiences and posit HIV/AIDS in a world that extends beyond the life of a loved one. Walter Benjamin believes the task of the translator is "finding the intended effect [Intention] upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original" (76). He differentiates between translation and poetry through language: the language (linguistics) is the aim of the poet while effect is the goal of the translator. For the poetry of HIV/AIDS, however, caregivers are mid-way between these two juxtapositions. They first translate HIV/AIDS for the community-at-large, which believes that it has no direct connection to the HIV/AIDS community. As poets, they seek to affect their readers and provide a translation of the experience of HIV/AIDS through language.
10 Ironically, then, while Newman and Howe are perceived socially as "virgins" in contrast to the women positive for HIV, by their very subject position they are immersed in the world of HIV/AIDS. They are removed from their subject matter by the distance of direct experience, but they are also closer to their subject matter than those outside of the HIV/AIDS community. Their translation becomes the easiest entrée into the world of HIV/AIDS for the outside world. How much more palatable is the book of a woman care-giver than the book penned with the righteous anger of a gay man mourning to devastating losses in his community? Their position as translators gives them an incredible power for social change as they add their voices to the HIV/AIDS community because they are able to speak to the "outside" community.