By Michael Broder

I am not going to tell you how to write an HIV poem.

But I am going to ask you to write an HIV poem. And I am going to ask you to consider the issue of HIV as a matter for poetry.

A number of poets I’ve solicited for The HIV Here & Now Project turned me down, saying “Thank you for asking, Michael, but I don’t have any relevant work.”

When I heard that response, I thought two things: (1) this poet is not interested in contributing to the project; and (2) this poet is not comfortable with the topic of HIV.

But perhaps neither of these is the case. Regarding (1), I might want to be more assertive in asking poets to write a new poem for my project if they do not have an existing one that they can contribute. And regarding (2), I might want to think about the possibility that if there is indeed discomfort, it may not be a lack of sympathy with the issue, but it may represent a kind of failure to connect. That is, I think I need to give greater credence to how great a challenge it is to connect with HIV as a topic if you are not yourself HIV-positive, do not have an HIV-positive  partner, relative, or friend, or are not in the field of HIV advocacy.

So that’s what I’m doing here: If you are a poet and you are reading this post and you have not previously given me work for this project: I am asking you to write an HIV poem for me. 

So much for (1). The rest is a matter of (2).

Just what is an HIV poem, and does a poet have to have a personal connection to HIV in order to write one?

Well, yes and no. Yes, I think a poet needs to have an intimate connection with that about which he or she writes. But no, that connection does not have to be one’s own HIV-positive status or that of a partner or relative or friend or any other such mundane connection, any more than we need to have been in the war to write about the war or to have been in the towers to write about the towers.

What we do need to do, however, as poets, I believe, is each to find our own way to establish that intimacy with a subject matter. To make the war our war, the towers our towers, the disease our disease. And it’s dicey, to be sure—as we are seeing now, for example, with the issue of how each of us relates to the idea and the language of “Black lives matter.” It doesn’t work simply to say something like “We are all Eric Garner,” because we are not all Eric Garner. On the other hand, it does not work to broaden the category: it does not work to transform “Black lives matter” into “All lives matter” because that constitutes the erasure of black life and its value. Finding our authentic way into a strange topical landscape is hard work, hard poetic work.

But it occurs to me that the reason many poets who were not in the war or in the towers or born into a black body nevertheless think they can write about Iraq or 9/11 or Michael Brown is that we tend to see these as public issues.

And it occurs to me that while I see HIV as a public issue, and HIV advocates and activists see HIV as a public issue, many people, including many poets, who have no personal HIV connection in the mundane sense, do not see HIV as a public issue in quite the same sense as they do war or politics or race. It occurs to me that they see it, in fact, as an intensely private issue, and not one that they are free as poets to tread on without some kind of invitation.

And by invitation, I mean the kind of invitation that is special to poets: the invitation of experience—Wordsworth’s daffodils, if you will. But that experience can take many forms. I’ve received submissions from men my age who have been HIV-positive for many years; men 30 years younger than me who tested HIV-positive recently; and men who are HIV-negative but think about HIV risk in their daily lives with boyfriends, dates, hookups, whatever.

But even if you are a poet who cannot draw on any of these or similar personal experiences, there are ways in. The ways we poets use as entry points to many issues that are outside our own intimate experience. Through our reading. Through our observation of the world around us. Through talking to people, hearing their stories, putting ourselves in their places, empathizing. You don’t need a virus to empathize.

Then there’s also the idea of the challenge or the prompt. Thomas Dooley asked poets to write a poem about an element in the periodic table for an Emotive Fruition project he was doing with Radiolab. Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker asked poets to write poems for President Obama’s first 100 days. Carrey Wallace asked poets to write poems marking the death of every person killed by police in the summer of 2015 and every officer who loses his or her life in the line of duty.

To date, the HIV Here & Now Project has not posed any such specific challenge or prompt. But such a thing is not hard to pose to yourself. More than 1.2 million people in the US are living with HIV, and more than 35 million people worldwide (3 million of them younger than 15). Write a poem about one of them, real or imagined. Each year, about 50,000 people in the US become newly HIV-infected, as do about 2 million people each year worldwide. Write a poem about one of them, real or imagined. About 13,000 people each year die with an AIDS diagnosis in the US, as do about 1.5 million people worldwide. Write a poem about one of them, real or imagined.

I’m going to leave this where it is for now. This is a blog post, not long-form journalism. But I will come back to this issue of HIV as a public matter and a matter for poetry from time to time throughout the life of this project. Let me know if you have any thoughts you’d like me to consider, questions you’d like me to answer, etc.

By Michael Broder

Today’s post is about showing up.

I’m working on a blog post about why you should write a new poem for the HIV Here & Now print anthology. That’s taking me some time because I don’t want to wag fingers, I want to say something real and true about HIV as a public issue and the poet’s responsibility to address it the way he or she would address other public issues like racism, violence, or poverty.

But here I really just want to show up. To keep my commitment to you who are being so kind as to support this project with your visits to the website, your submissions, your readership, your sharing on social media, liking the Facebook page, following us on Twitter. You are showing up. I am showing up. For poetry and for HIV.

Showing up sounds easy, but it’s not always. I didn’t show up for AIDS 20 years ago. I had so much respect and admiration for ACT UP, and I loved and dated active members of ACT UP, but I went to a few meetings and a few demos and decided it was “not for me.” I did not like the spirit of confrontation. I felt like on some level it was bad for my own health, I mean once I myself tested HIV-positive in the fall of 1990.

I showed up in other ways. My day job as a project editor at a medical communications company that helped the drug company GSK educate physicians about the new HIV drugs—I do believe that made a difference. I edited a newsletter about new developments in HIV treatment, funded with GSK dollars, that was very well regarded among the HIV counselors and allied healthcare workers to whom it was targeted. But I could never get completely out from under the feeling that at the end of the day, I was selling drugs.

Something happened to me in the past year. First I got profoundly depressed; then I showed up. I put my fingers in a lot of pies, maybe too many pies, but I showed up. At AWP last year I got the idea for the HIV Here & Now anthology. A few weeks later I got the idea for the online poem-a-day countdown to 35 years of AIDS on June 5, 2016. After a while I realized the project needed to be about more than poetry. Poetry needed to be a vehicle for advocacy. I want to do more, but for now, I have an advocacy agenda expressed in the hashtags I now routinely append to my posts on social media: #hivtest #hivtreat #hivprevent #nohivshame #nohivstigma #hivPrEP.

Since starting the project I’ve realized there’s a disconnect out there, that many poets would of course agree that HIV was a problem, a tragedy, a crisis—but not their problem, not their crisis, perhaps because: not their tragedy. This is what I want to push against moving forward. I don’t know any poets who feel disempowered when it comes to writing about race, class, gender, sexuality, violence, justice, freedom, war, etc. But I do know that some poets feel they have no right to write about HIV or the impact of AIDS, because it hasn’t touched them personally, or perhaps they have a different kind of scruple, a discomfort, that I do not even want to speculate about here.

But everyone can show up for HIV, regardless of their own HIV status, regardless of whether they have a partner, family member, or friend with HIV. And poets, in particular, come supplied with a vehicle for showing up: their poetry.

So we’re up to Poem 50 in our poem-a-day countdown to 35 years of AIDS on June 5, 2016. Take a look at the stunning roster of poets we have featured to date:

Michael Broder
Julene T. Weaver
Merrill Cole
Sarah Sarai
L. Lamar Wilson
Joan Larkin
Risa Denenberg
Steven Cordova
Eileen R. Tabios
Joseph Osmundson
Danez Smith
Daniel Nester
Jennifer Michael Hecht
Patrick Donnelly
Phillis Levin
Jason Schneiderman
Charlie Bondhus
Michael Montlack
Guillermo Filice Castro
Sophie Cabot Black
Michael Carosone
Robert Siek
Jericho Brown
Elizabeth Alexander
David Groff
Tom Capelonga
Debora Lidov
Donna Minkowitz
Stephen Mills
John Medeiros
Antoinette Brim
Stephen Riel
Perry Brass
Philip F. Clark
Billy Merrell
Nina Bennett
Steve Turtell
Jim Elledge
Austin Alexis
Sarah Russell
Nancy Bevilaqua
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Allen F. Clark
Christopher Gaskins
John Whittier Treat
Marie Howe
Chip Livingston
MAR
Eduardo C. Corral
Cheryl Clarke

That’s about 14% of the way to the end. Or 86% of the way from the end. 50 days/poems down, 315 days/poems to go. A lot of awareness to spread about testing, treating, and preventing HIV and eliminating the shame and stigma associated with an HIV diagnosis. Come with us on this journey. Stay with us on this journey.

On this date in 1981, an article appeared in The New York Times by Lawrence K. Altman with the headline, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” The rare cancer was Kaposi’s sarcoma, or KS, which was generally seen in older men of Mediterranean descent, and even then in small numbers as a slowly progressing cancer. These patients, by contrast, from New York and Los Angeles, were often under 40 and as young as 26. This article would prove to be the first report in a major newspaper anywhere in the world of what would come to be known as AIDS.

Just a month earlier, on June 5, there had been an article in a public health newsletter from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), about 5 cases of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) in gay men in Los Angeles.

It’s chilling to read these media reports now, today, for me, sitting here in my house, with my husband in the next room, antiretroviral drugs in my body suppressing my HIV infection, preserving my immune system, preventing me from developing opportunistic infections like KS or PCP.

There’s an eerie kind of dramatic irony when I read these media reports now, like watching a movie where I know the ocean liner will sink, the derrigible explode, the British socialite will murder his wife.

The article about PCP in MMWR begins:

In the period October 1980-May 1981, 5 young men, all active homosexuals, were treated for biopsy-confirmed Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia at 3 different hospitals in Los Angeles, California. Two of the patients died. All 5 patients had laboratory-confirmed previous or current cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection and candidal mucosal infection.

The article in the Times says in part:

Many of the patients have also been treated for viral infections such as herpes, cytomegalovirus and hepatitis B as well as parasitic infections such as amebiasis and giardiasis. Many patients also reported that they had used drugs such as amyl nitrite and LSD to heighten sexual pleasure.

These ideas, images, tropes—active homosexuals; concomitant viral infections and fungal infections, some of then generally associated with severely compromised immune systems, others with unprotected sex; mention of amyl nitrite (poppers) and LSD to “heighten sexual pleasure.” While Altman’s article seems to me on the whole to be quite fair and balanced, it uses the language of its times (“homosexual” instead of “gay”) and, whether it means to or not (I strongly suspect not), it lays the groundwork for the demonization of gay men that the emerging AIDS epidemic would soon spawn.

You can see the slow motion train wreck unfolding. The Times reports that, while the cause of the outbreak is unknown, and there is as yet no evidence that the condition is contagious, “the doctors who have made the diagnoses, mostly in New York City and the San Francisco Bay area, are alerting other physicians who treat large numbers of homosexual men to the problem in an effort to help identify more cases and to reduce the delay in offering chemotherapy treatment.”

Within a few years, the notion of identifying affected gay men so as to provide treatment will morph into a hysterical public outcry to round up the carriers and quarantine them as pariahs. And all too soon we will come to know that while chemotherapy might be effective in treating AIDS-related KS, there is in the long run no way to stop the relentless onslaught of immune deficiency in the wake of whatever was causing this mysterious, deadly, and terrifying new disease.

For many years I read The Great Gatsby every year, generally in summer, after my spring semester of high school or college was over, not only for the pleasure, but so that I would never forget how beautiful and brilliant it was. Today, on NPR, as they do every year, all the correspondents and anchors joined in reading the Declaration of Independence, not only for its soaring revolutionary rhetoric, but so that we will never forget how brave and inspired were the members of the Continental Congress. (I will risk admitting that I got choked up as I recited aloud with them the line, “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.”) Perhaps I should begin reading Lawrence K. Altman’s “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals” in The New York Times every year on July 3, not only for its measured and professional reportage, but so that I never forget the relatively…what—benign, innocuous, innocent? None of those words seem right. But the small, almost banal origins of what would come to be such a devastating and at the same time socially, culturally, and historically transformative crisis.

It was not until about 18 months later, after similar cases of PCP, KS, and other signs of severe immune deficiency were noted in injecting drug users, Haitians, hemophiliacs, blood transfusion recipients, and women with no apparent risk factors that a wider public began to take notice of this disease, to realize that it was not going to remain confined to specific populations, and to understand that it was on its way to reaching an epidemic scale. And except for the public health wonks who read MMWR, that entire public unfolding of what-would-be began on this date in 1981, under the headline “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” in the national newspaper of record.

Read an interesting op-ed piece about those early days of AIDS by Altman himself from 2011.