John Whittier Treat
Other People’s Poems: AIDS Quilt, Block Number 00169
Editor’s Note: This poem refers to a panel in the AIDS Memorial Quilt. The quilt was created by The NAMES Project Foundation, founded by San Francisco activist Cleve Jones and a group of volunteers. The first large-scale public display of the quilt was in 1987 on the National Mall in Washington, DC (see the photo on the left below). Today’s poem refers to a panel made by David Kemmeries for his partner, Jac Wall (see the panel in the lower right corner of the photo on the right below). Although you cannot see it in the photograph below, the entire silhouette, representing Jac, is surrounded by handwritten statements. These are the statements in Roman type in today’s poem. The statements in italics are the poet’s response to the statements on the quilt panel.
John Whittier Treat is the author of the novel The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House (Big Table Publishing Company, 2015), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction. His short stories have appeared in the journal Jonathan and in the anthology QDA: Queer Disability Anthology (Squares and Rebels, 2015), edited by Raymond Luczak. Originally from New Haven, he now lives in Seattle. For more information visit johntreat.com.
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Here is today’s prompt
(optional as always)
Today’s poem is an ekphrastic poem, meaning a poem that describes a work of art. It is also an elegy for a person who died of AIDS—a person the poet may or may not have known personally. Try combining ekphrasis with elegy in the manner of today’s poem. If you want to write about someone memorialized in the quilt, you can search the quilt here—look up the name of any person who died of AIDS, whether famous or obscure, and if you find a quilt panel for them, use it as the basis of an ekphrastic elegy. You can also choose other objects as the basis of your ekphrastic elegy, such as a record album cover featuring Freddie Mercury, a self-portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe, or a photograph of Elizabeth Glaser.