Poetics of HIV: Modernism Revisited
What is poetic utterance doing when it addresses itself to HIV? Moreover, what is the basis upon which poetry and HIV can be expressive of one another?
The first wager of this panel is that the function of poetry as an aesthetic practice can not be accounted for in terms of mimesis or representation. That is to say, this panel approaches poetry, and art more generally, not as symptomatic expressions of the cultures in and through which they emerge. In making this claim the panel is not advocating a transcendental or transhistorical reading of art; rather, it is interested in what has recently been called the transpersonal or architectural dimension of aesthetic experience.
The second wager of this panel is that HIV is an exemplary site to explore this transpersonal nature of art. As a disease which changes at every iteration, it is an interesting example of what Leo Bersani has called “inaccurate self-replication.” Although his ostensible intentions with this phrase were to promote an ethical relation to otherness, our interest here is in using it to explore the way ethics and aesthetics intersect. Put another way, rather than reading inaccurate self-replication as a prescription for ethical life (albeit one grounded in the aesthetic connectedness of the world, the communication of forms), this panel asks how the ethical shapes the aesthetic and vice-versa.
Thus when poetic utterance addresses HIV, we might say that, as the aesthetic practice most attentive to form but grounded in language, it gives an answer not to something or someone else but to itself: poetry subtends life not as mimetic or representational (thus jettisoning, as the modernists did, the modish “art is life” gambit) but as the very support against which life exists.
Although we have spoken of art in general, our interest is specifically in the manifestations of HIV in poetic practice. Some possible paper topics might be:
- Can HIV be an aesthetic experience, and if so, is this a diminishment of those suffering from HIV/AIDS?
- What is the relation between HIV/AIDS poetry and modernist verse? (e.g. In what ways have AIDS poets like D. A. Powell taken up the modernist practices of quotation and citation and redeployed and reinvented them?)
- Can we read, following the first wager, the initial waves of poetry in response to the epidemic—which were by and large elegiac—as nonrepresentational or as gesturing towards something “beyond” the space of HIV?
- How does form infect (that is the word) content, and vice-versa?