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Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS
From Reinaldo Arenas, Tory Dent, and James Merrill to Paul Monette, Essex Hemphill, and Joe Brainard, Persistent Voices memorializes these poets and many others by presenting their work—often dealing with AIDS but also written on other enduring topics—in the context of an unending epidemic that has profoundly affected our literature. David Groff is a poet, editor, and teacher in New York City. Philip Clark is a writer and teacher from the Washington, DC, area.
282 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
3 people are currently reading
94 people want to read
About the author
David Groff
24 books10 followersDavid Groff is an American poet, writer, and independent editor.
Groff graduated from the University of Iowa, with an MFA, and MA. He has taught at University of Iowa, Rutgers University, and NYU, and at William Paterson University.
For the last eleven years, he has worked with literary and popular novelists, memoirists, journalists, and scientists whose books have been published by Atria, Bantam, HarperCollins, Hyperion, Little Brown, Miramax, Putnam, St. Martin's, Wiley, and other publishers. For twelve years he was an editor at Crown Publishing.
Groff's work was published in American Poetry Review, Bloom, Chicago Review, Christopher Street, Confrontation, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Men on Men 2, Men on Men 2000, Missouri Review, New York, North American Review, Northwest Review, Out, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Poz, Prairie Schooner, QW, Self, 7 Days, 7 Carmine, and Wigwag.
Groff was awarded the Louise Bogan Award by the Lambda Literary Foundation in 2012 for his work, Clay.
He is currently an editor under the agency of Rob Weisbach Creative Management.
Groff graduated from the University of Iowa, with an MFA, and MA. He has taught at University of Iowa, Rutgers University, and NYU, and at William Paterson University.
For the last eleven years, he has worked with literary and popular novelists, memoirists, journalists, and scientists whose books have been published by Atria, Bantam, HarperCollins, Hyperion, Little Brown, Miramax, Putnam, St. Martin's, Wiley, and other publishers. For twelve years he was an editor at Crown Publishing.
Groff's work was published in American Poetry Review, Bloom, Chicago Review, Christopher Street, Confrontation, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Men on Men 2, Men on Men 2000, Missouri Review, New York, North American Review, Northwest Review, Out, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Poz, Prairie Schooner, QW, Self, 7 Days, 7 Carmine, and Wigwag.
Groff was awarded the Louise Bogan Award by the Lambda Literary Foundation in 2012 for his work, Clay.
He is currently an editor under the agency of Rob Weisbach Creative Management.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 6, 2012
Persistent Voices is an aptly titled anthology of poetry by poets “lost to AIDS.” Many of the poets in this collection died in the early 90s, before combination therapy became standard of care. The poets range from well-known and well-published, to many whose work had not yet been published in book form.
The poems are as varied as the poets; while HIV is the connecting thread, it is not the only topic discussed. There are poems extolling the beauty and joy of sex, of individual lovers, and of life itself. While reading and re-reading this collection, I was constantly reminded of the power of poetry to leave a legacy, and to persist in sharing the personal reality of each poet. In the preface, Kim Addonizio states “Poetry is a record of consciousness, bearing witness to life fully lived, and as such it can transcend even death. “ I was frequently overwhelmed by thoughts of people gone too soon and careers interrupted at the beginning. Reading this book was bittersweet, as I mine poetry anthologies to discover poets unknown to me, and then I purchase their work. Much has been written about the impact of HIV/AIDS on the performing arts, and this book serves as a reminder that the literary community has also taken quite a hit.
Richard George-Murray’s poem, [Someone should], speaks to why each of us should read this powerful book.
Someone should
listen to the wind dying in the birches,
hear the crows and crickets,
eat the berries too ripe to carry,
hear the apples fall,
stand ready to testify
it all happened.
The poems are as varied as the poets; while HIV is the connecting thread, it is not the only topic discussed. There are poems extolling the beauty and joy of sex, of individual lovers, and of life itself. While reading and re-reading this collection, I was constantly reminded of the power of poetry to leave a legacy, and to persist in sharing the personal reality of each poet. In the preface, Kim Addonizio states “Poetry is a record of consciousness, bearing witness to life fully lived, and as such it can transcend even death. “ I was frequently overwhelmed by thoughts of people gone too soon and careers interrupted at the beginning. Reading this book was bittersweet, as I mine poetry anthologies to discover poets unknown to me, and then I purchase their work. Much has been written about the impact of HIV/AIDS on the performing arts, and this book serves as a reminder that the literary community has also taken quite a hit.
Richard George-Murray’s poem, [Someone should], speaks to why each of us should read this powerful book.
Someone should
listen to the wind dying in the birches,
hear the crows and crickets,
eat the berries too ripe to carry,
hear the apples fall,
stand ready to testify
it all happened.
August 14, 2019
Okay poetry, but great concept. I was most impressed by William Barber's and Don Garner's poems.
May 14, 2022
First off, I want to thank Philip Clark and David Groff for not only communicating with me when I messaged them about not being able to find this book anywhere [it has been out of print for over 10 years], but to thank them especially for arranging the time in their busy schedules to email me a PDF of this book that David has on hand. It really means an awful lot, if y'all ever read this.
Secondly, this book makes me so unbelievably sad, angry, invigorated, motivated, and optimistic. I read this and think: we WILL win. But the sadness of the reality of these incredible poets permeates every page. Every single poet in this book is dead, killed by AIDS and the capitalist government's inaction towards it. There were certain poets in here whose poems I would get so into that I would forget, just for a fleeting moment, that they are no longer around to have grown as a poet and writer. It hurts.
I used to write poetry regularly and stopped many years ago, including reading poetry aloud. But for this book, when alone, I read the poems aloud, and the emotions experienced while doing this were immense. In my naiveté, I assumed this would be JUST poems about these poets living with AIDS. I was sorely mistaken; while those poems are scattered throughout, a wide variety of topics are explored: music, nature, sex, liberation, racism, surrealism, and many other multifaceted topics. More often than not, the poetry is introspective and of course it is; many of these poets were writing these pieces while knowing that they could die, and for some, knowing that they would do. Theyre personal. Emotional. You are, at times, reading the last words of a dying person.
This is by far the heaviest book of poetry I have ever read. It took me a long time to read because I kept having to stop and step away from this heaviness. It's absolutely phenomenal.
Secondly, this book makes me so unbelievably sad, angry, invigorated, motivated, and optimistic. I read this and think: we WILL win. But the sadness of the reality of these incredible poets permeates every page. Every single poet in this book is dead, killed by AIDS and the capitalist government's inaction towards it. There were certain poets in here whose poems I would get so into that I would forget, just for a fleeting moment, that they are no longer around to have grown as a poet and writer. It hurts.
I used to write poetry regularly and stopped many years ago, including reading poetry aloud. But for this book, when alone, I read the poems aloud, and the emotions experienced while doing this were immense. In my naiveté, I assumed this would be JUST poems about these poets living with AIDS. I was sorely mistaken; while those poems are scattered throughout, a wide variety of topics are explored: music, nature, sex, liberation, racism, surrealism, and many other multifaceted topics. More often than not, the poetry is introspective and of course it is; many of these poets were writing these pieces while knowing that they could die, and for some, knowing that they would do. Theyre personal. Emotional. You are, at times, reading the last words of a dying person.
This is by far the heaviest book of poetry I have ever read. It took me a long time to read because I kept having to stop and step away from this heaviness. It's absolutely phenomenal.
April 13, 2022
POETS LOST TO AIDS
Philip Clark and David Groff, the co-editors of Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS (2009), say in their introduction that this collection is “a reminder of poets who didn’t write us enough poems.” Every one of the forty-five poets included in this collection, forty-three men and two women, were struck down by AIDS at various stages in their writing careers. These poets will never give us any more poems. I first encountered Persistent Voices in 2010, when several local writers read selections from the collection at Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia.
Persistent Voices was preceded by two other collections of poetry about AIDS. Poets for Life: Seventy-Six Poets Respond to AIDS, edited by Michael Klein, was first published in 1989. Things Shared in Passing: More “Poets for Life” Writing from the AIDS Pandemic, edited by Michael Klein and Richard McCann, was published in 1997. Four poets included in Persistent Voices appeared in both of these collections: Melvin Dixon, Tim Dlugos, James Merrill, and Paul Monette. Nine poets whose work appears in Persistent Voices were included in the 1989 edition of Poets for Life. They were all alive then. By the time the paperback edition was published in 1992, two of them were dead: David Craig Austin and Tim Dlugos. Eight poets who appear in Persistent Voices were included in Things Shared in Passing, five of them posthumously: Melvin Dixon, Tim Dlugos, James Merrill, Paul Monette, and Donald W. Woods. Years of death of the forty-five poets included in Persistent Voices range from 1986 to 2008. The majority of these forty-five poets died in their 20s and 30s during the 1990s.
The poets appear in alphabetical order by last name. That is probably the fairest arrangement that can be done with a collection such as this. But I wonder: Would the effect of the book have been different if the authors had been arranged by year of death or age at death? In most cases, the poems included are just a tiny selection of these poets’ work. I was introduced to poets I had heard of but had never read, such as Tim Dlugos, as well as poets who were new to me. Persistent Voices is an embarrassment of riches.
Who can resist Joe Brainard’s “I Remember”? Selections from his memoir in verse are included in this collection. Lines such as the following deeply resonate with me: “I remember duck-tails,” “I remember shirt collars turned up in back,” “I remember jumping into piles of leaves and the dust, or whatever it is, that rises,” and “I remember learning very early in life the art of putting back everything exactly the way it was.” I’m from the same generation as Brainard. We were both born in 1942 and grew up in Tulsa, but we went to different high schools.
Five powerful poems by Essex Hemphill appear, including “American Wedding,” which begins with the famous line, “In america / I place my ring / on your cock / where it belongs.” I like that he does not capitalize America.
I love this line from William Bory’s “On Seeing Farmboys in Church”: “What is J.C. to them, but a boy / they wouldn’t like at school?”
In “His Face in Every Crowd,” Daniel Diamond describes, as do many of the poets in this collection, the physical devastation of AIDS: “His own body / giving way / to dissolution / with him caught / inside.”
David Matias’s “Fooling the Forsythia” starts out matter-of-factly, “Another friend died. Howard. He’ll be missed. / He and all the others who have demystified death.” Then, in an attempt to make sense of it all, the poet likens death to a branch of forsythia that is cut off, put in a vase indoors, and fooled into blooming: “Bleeding, but bursting with color, these flowers / somehow blaze, with as much presence, as Howard.”
In “D.O.A,” Tim Dlugos cleverly interweaves the themes of a film noir with what is going on in his life as he deals with AIDS. “I don’t have / fifteen years, and neither does Edmond / O”Brien.” Dlugos closes the poem with these lines: “A day / like any, like no other. Not so bad / for the dead.”
Adam Johnson’s “The Departure Lounge” is devastating. It begins with this line: “’He’s gone to the departure lounge,’ you said— / Meaning, of course, he had not long to live.” The poem concludes with “I had not reckoned that the sky would fall.”
In the lushly written “Late May. Toronto,” Michael Lynch describes his ravaged body as being analogous to a garden: “Abed the body becomes a plant abed / where weakness bends in the wind but doesn’t snap” and “Each day new flax buds open, cast / glances around the sky-blue firmament, / fade, linger, waste.”
The editors must have really liked the poems of Richard Ronan. I do, too. Ronan is given thirteen pages in the collection, more than any other poet. His sensuous “Soe” begins with these lines, “You step from the shower, / the water beaded, / worked into ringlets down a tight / oiled skin: our lives / are running beside each other / like vines climbing themselves.“ In the middle of the poem, Ronan gives the definition of “Soe” as “the place of man / in the line from earth to heaven; / also, the purpose of a man: / to be the eyes and ears of heaven, / the blood of earth, mouth of god, the flesh / shining before a speechless tongue / of clay.” He concludes the poem with these lines, “All day long I write this, / drinking the thin waters / that gather on your spine, / mouth of god, tongue of man.”
Kim Addonizio says in her preface to Persistent Voices, “Poems bring us the spirits of those who wrote them.” With this collection, we have forty-five poets and their poems, their spirits, to enrich our lives at any time we want. We can open the book to any page and find a poem that will mesmerize us. I wish that each and every one of these poets were still with us and still writing poetry. These poets powerfully use words to describe life and death. Ironically, words are inadequate to describe the enormity of the loss of these beautiful poets.
Philip Clark and David Groff, the co-editors of Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS (2009), say in their introduction that this collection is “a reminder of poets who didn’t write us enough poems.” Every one of the forty-five poets included in this collection, forty-three men and two women, were struck down by AIDS at various stages in their writing careers. These poets will never give us any more poems. I first encountered Persistent Voices in 2010, when several local writers read selections from the collection at Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia.
Persistent Voices was preceded by two other collections of poetry about AIDS. Poets for Life: Seventy-Six Poets Respond to AIDS, edited by Michael Klein, was first published in 1989. Things Shared in Passing: More “Poets for Life” Writing from the AIDS Pandemic, edited by Michael Klein and Richard McCann, was published in 1997. Four poets included in Persistent Voices appeared in both of these collections: Melvin Dixon, Tim Dlugos, James Merrill, and Paul Monette. Nine poets whose work appears in Persistent Voices were included in the 1989 edition of Poets for Life. They were all alive then. By the time the paperback edition was published in 1992, two of them were dead: David Craig Austin and Tim Dlugos. Eight poets who appear in Persistent Voices were included in Things Shared in Passing, five of them posthumously: Melvin Dixon, Tim Dlugos, James Merrill, Paul Monette, and Donald W. Woods. Years of death of the forty-five poets included in Persistent Voices range from 1986 to 2008. The majority of these forty-five poets died in their 20s and 30s during the 1990s.
The poets appear in alphabetical order by last name. That is probably the fairest arrangement that can be done with a collection such as this. But I wonder: Would the effect of the book have been different if the authors had been arranged by year of death or age at death? In most cases, the poems included are just a tiny selection of these poets’ work. I was introduced to poets I had heard of but had never read, such as Tim Dlugos, as well as poets who were new to me. Persistent Voices is an embarrassment of riches.
Who can resist Joe Brainard’s “I Remember”? Selections from his memoir in verse are included in this collection. Lines such as the following deeply resonate with me: “I remember duck-tails,” “I remember shirt collars turned up in back,” “I remember jumping into piles of leaves and the dust, or whatever it is, that rises,” and “I remember learning very early in life the art of putting back everything exactly the way it was.” I’m from the same generation as Brainard. We were both born in 1942 and grew up in Tulsa, but we went to different high schools.
Five powerful poems by Essex Hemphill appear, including “American Wedding,” which begins with the famous line, “In america / I place my ring / on your cock / where it belongs.” I like that he does not capitalize America.
I love this line from William Bory’s “On Seeing Farmboys in Church”: “What is J.C. to them, but a boy / they wouldn’t like at school?”
In “His Face in Every Crowd,” Daniel Diamond describes, as do many of the poets in this collection, the physical devastation of AIDS: “His own body / giving way / to dissolution / with him caught / inside.”
David Matias’s “Fooling the Forsythia” starts out matter-of-factly, “Another friend died. Howard. He’ll be missed. / He and all the others who have demystified death.” Then, in an attempt to make sense of it all, the poet likens death to a branch of forsythia that is cut off, put in a vase indoors, and fooled into blooming: “Bleeding, but bursting with color, these flowers / somehow blaze, with as much presence, as Howard.”
In “D.O.A,” Tim Dlugos cleverly interweaves the themes of a film noir with what is going on in his life as he deals with AIDS. “I don’t have / fifteen years, and neither does Edmond / O”Brien.” Dlugos closes the poem with these lines: “A day / like any, like no other. Not so bad / for the dead.”
Adam Johnson’s “The Departure Lounge” is devastating. It begins with this line: “’He’s gone to the departure lounge,’ you said— / Meaning, of course, he had not long to live.” The poem concludes with “I had not reckoned that the sky would fall.”
In the lushly written “Late May. Toronto,” Michael Lynch describes his ravaged body as being analogous to a garden: “Abed the body becomes a plant abed / where weakness bends in the wind but doesn’t snap” and “Each day new flax buds open, cast / glances around the sky-blue firmament, / fade, linger, waste.”
The editors must have really liked the poems of Richard Ronan. I do, too. Ronan is given thirteen pages in the collection, more than any other poet. His sensuous “Soe” begins with these lines, “You step from the shower, / the water beaded, / worked into ringlets down a tight / oiled skin: our lives / are running beside each other / like vines climbing themselves.“ In the middle of the poem, Ronan gives the definition of “Soe” as “the place of man / in the line from earth to heaven; / also, the purpose of a man: / to be the eyes and ears of heaven, / the blood of earth, mouth of god, the flesh / shining before a speechless tongue / of clay.” He concludes the poem with these lines, “All day long I write this, / drinking the thin waters / that gather on your spine, / mouth of god, tongue of man.”
Kim Addonizio says in her preface to Persistent Voices, “Poems bring us the spirits of those who wrote them.” With this collection, we have forty-five poets and their poems, their spirits, to enrich our lives at any time we want. We can open the book to any page and find a poem that will mesmerize us. I wish that each and every one of these poets were still with us and still writing poetry. These poets powerfully use words to describe life and death. Ironically, words are inadequate to describe the enormity of the loss of these beautiful poets.
April 2, 2013
Some of these poets I know of, most I did not. Do not skip the brief biographies of the poets at the end: many are incomplete. It's not just that lives were cut short-- birth and death dates are uncertain, manuscripts are unpublished, poems yet uncollected. The simpler of the poems are my favorites, none more than William Barber's "Coming of Age." But perhaps none of them are actually simple.
August 10, 2010
Sharing the Rites of Passage
PERSISTENT VOICES is a collection of poems written by poets who represent one tragic gap in our world dueling with the spectre of AIDS. These are the words to each other, to fellow travelers in that heinous disease, to those bonded brothers left behind, and to all of us. These poets are not only some of the finest in the 20th Century, they are also heroes in their own right, heroic enough to leave behind whispers of the passage that during the time of their writing seemed without hope for reversal. In a very fine Foreword by Kim Addonizio the idea of this collection is stated: ' Poetry is a record of consciousness, bearing witness to life fully lived, and as such it can transcend even death. Poems bring us the spirits of those who wrote them. Those spirits are variously amused, grieving, angry, longing, observing, questioning. They are here, in these pages, available to us'.
Some anthologies dedicated to a specific subject can grown tiresome as the book is read. Not here. These are great poems by great poets, each of whom stands alone as a prime example of the quality of rich poetry that has been born in these times. Yet for all their craftsmanship and quality of writing the end result is a heartbreaking one: every one on these brilliant artists succumbed to that plague that bruised the world and remains to continue its damage. These are poems of great beauty, but these are poems that will also resonate like a harsh tattoo on the hearts and minds of all of us who have lost loved ones to AIDS.
Grady Harp
PERSISTENT VOICES is a collection of poems written by poets who represent one tragic gap in our world dueling with the spectre of AIDS. These are the words to each other, to fellow travelers in that heinous disease, to those bonded brothers left behind, and to all of us. These poets are not only some of the finest in the 20th Century, they are also heroes in their own right, heroic enough to leave behind whispers of the passage that during the time of their writing seemed without hope for reversal. In a very fine Foreword by Kim Addonizio the idea of this collection is stated: ' Poetry is a record of consciousness, bearing witness to life fully lived, and as such it can transcend even death. Poems bring us the spirits of those who wrote them. Those spirits are variously amused, grieving, angry, longing, observing, questioning. They are here, in these pages, available to us'.
Some anthologies dedicated to a specific subject can grown tiresome as the book is read. Not here. These are great poems by great poets, each of whom stands alone as a prime example of the quality of rich poetry that has been born in these times. Yet for all their craftsmanship and quality of writing the end result is a heartbreaking one: every one on these brilliant artists succumbed to that plague that bruised the world and remains to continue its damage. These are poems of great beauty, but these are poems that will also resonate like a harsh tattoo on the hearts and minds of all of us who have lost loved ones to AIDS.
Grady Harp
September 24, 2012
It took 2 years to plod through this tome. Hats off to the editors Larkin and Groff for saving and preserving these poems. Many of them suck and others outright drivel and boring. As expected most them talk about the kind sex that killed the authors. The best part of the book is the bios at the end, the feeling of loss when reading about these 30 & 40 year olds dying way too early. Reading through these made me think about the authors and how far we have come since the daily AIDS deaths. Thank you to the writers, I bet if you had lived you'd wow us all with your mature poetry.
RIP
RIP
January 6, 2011
What a find! This is one of the most beautifully curated poetry collections I have ever seen. The title is a bit misleading because the book doesn't address AIDS much, rather it captures the talent and insight of so many poets that we have lost to AIDS. I used this book for my lesbian/gay literature class and the students responded to it very positively. Several students who weren't familiar with reading poetry resonated to many of the poems -- I hope this book stays in print for years to come.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews