Currently Reading Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady By Florence King see related

I'm defending my thesis on Tuesday afternoon - so it all culminates in one presentation and a Q & A session with my committee members and whoever else decides to show up.  This will be fun in several ways.  Though my thesis is a critical look at the poetry of Mark Doty, Thom Gunn, and Paul Monette (or, rather, their works that deal with the AIDS crisis), I feel that this defense will be, perhaps, more activistic than scholarly in tenor and focus.  So much of what I'm working with deals with anger, remembrance, redemption, seeking a space to be heard in a form that is, by nature, intense. 

I begin and end the 95-page tome with personal essays that talk about my relationship to the works I am studying.  And I realize that yes, this scholarly work is a very personal work: equal parts invective, exhortation, love letter, prayer, etc.  It's been a process that demands self-actualization, especially being one who has done many, many things to forget deliberately and who then reads a Thom Gunn poem that begins "I shall not soon forget."  It's been a reminder that poetry bears witness, like Carolyn Forche says.  It's been a call to recognize human cruelty, like Miloscz did, while also celebrating an aesthetic of transgressive erotics on the path that Whitman paved for Monette, Doty, Liu, Dlugos, Gunn, etc.  And perhaps even myself. 

That idea of memory / lack of memory becomes an intensified reality as walk around my parents' house here in Jackson.  Very little has changed here since I moved to Oxford three years ago, but (in some ways) I have changed - and change need not be qualified.  So I can read myself like a text here - bringing myself to read myself.  So strange.  So interesting.  And that's what lyric poetry makes us do a lot of the time.

Working on this thesis made me do a lot of leg work in finding works to read, mainly because there really isn't anyone on campus that has studied much of what I am studying.  As a way of possibly making that community larger, I'll let you know what I read for my thesis along the way:

My Alexandria - Mark Doty; Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty; Powerless - Tim Dlugos; The Apprentice of Fever - Richard Tayson; HIV, Mon Amour - Tory Dent; What the Living Do - Marie Howe; Unending Voices - Rachel Hadas; Love Alone - Paul Monette; The Man With Night Sweats - Thom Gunn; Atlantis - Mark Doty; AIDS and Its Metaphors - Susan Sontag; Poets for Life: 76 Poets Respond to AIDS - Ed. Michael Klein; and more. 

I look forward to continuing to think about AIDS poetry in future years as a graduate student.  I think it's fantastic to see art humanizing those often demonized by sociopolitical discourse and institutions.  I think it's inspiring to see poetry offering alternative ways of seeing and thinking.