Policing, Politicizing, Poeticizing the Virgin/Whore Split: Contemporary American Women's Poetry about AIDS — Page 7:
31 Dent catalogs the images of silence, each as hurtful as the next. She measures and defines silence as: a plow furrowing under the earth, presumably into silence; a "saber-toothed plow of silence" reminiscent of a tiger; a phone call greeted by silence; and a locked Chinese box. "If we're not better than you, what are we better than?" asks Dent (19). This judgment is implied in the silence greeting the speaker of the poem. The homogeneity of the earth is silence opposed to the noise of the speaker, first, on the phone. The speaker observes someone making a phone call out of desperation, only to have that same call greeted by silence and a paralysis. Extending the idea of the essentially unanswered phone call, Dent writes "Ugly angels like buzzards circle overhead./Your prayers, their prey, they carry clenched between their teeth" (20). Even prayers, uttered in despair, remain unanswered and greeted by silence. Like the paralysis of the people receiving the phone call, the angels are sinister, silencing prayers by holding them, like hunted animals, in the mouth.
32 In poems like "Only Human," that homogenous society takes shape in the judgment of a lover who rejects the speaker. The woman speaker, HIV+, is categorized as other than woman; an altogether new category is created for this woman-transgressor within a diagnosis. The repeating phrase in the poem "human" and "humanness" seems to emphasize, on the part of the speaker, the need for the lover to recognize her own humanness. Definitions of humanness based on interactions and communication, on what they had shared before the revelation of a diagnosis change radically afterwards and redefine the possibilities for interactions and love:
It was the way I changed hallucinogenically before you,
my wood-colored hair matted and graying,
my blue eyes circling like crazy dice in my head.
All that materialized before you was somebody HIV positive,
another one of those silhouetted figures interviewed on David Susskind,
my true self, ghostlike, condemned to the back of your mind. (30)
The speaker becomes "somebody HIV positive," rather than a lover, a "somebody" — note the distancing effect of the language — relegated to a space of casual, unimportant thoughts; the location of the woman moved from the bed to the mind, left in the reader's mind with haunting exactitude.
33 Dent's formal approach to poetry is striking on the page. Her long lines evoke Whitman and Ginsberg. Dent's lines become even longer in her second collection, HIV, Mon Amour, which seems a lyric extension of the conversation begun in What Silence Equals. HIV, Mon Amour is a more sophisticated collection than What Silence Equals. Broken into three sections, "The Pressure" with fourteen poems, "Cinéma Vérité," a long, sustained poem, and "HIV, Mon Amour," thirty-five connected poems reminiscent of Baudelaire's Paris Spleen. Dent continues the thematic challenges in the new collection, working to activate readers. Each of the poems in the collection is balanced between emotion and intellect.
34 "Fourteen Days in Quarantine," the first poem in the collection, places the poet-speaker, struggling with the meaning of HIV/AIDS, in an unfriendly world. Formally, the poetic structure is broken into a series of fourteen related poems, presumably one per day. Dent overpowers her reader with images as she continues, in this poem and this collection, to place the body at the center.
35 She describes her own body, in a hospital bed as if it were a painting: "Hospital gown worn backwards, thus open at the neck, and I think what a great/Nan Goldin portrait it would make — 'Tory, New York Hospital, January 1996'" (3). The distance between the speaker and her own body develops the difficult relationship between HIV and the body in which it resides. The body becomes "other," something to be looked at, monitored, and cared for. In that respect, the woman's body is not so different than the portrait Dent proposes; the body, here, is an object.