Recently unearthed: a long poem I wrote in 1990 (in first draft) while I was visiting at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and then revised during my year there. It’s part of the outpouring of visual art, poetry, plays, memoirs, and fiction that followed on the AIDS crisis, so it’s very much of its time (though just a bit before Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and Thom Gunn’s AIDS poetry). Thanks to friends and to Fellows at CASBS for their comments (though many were too stunned to say much about the piece, and a novelist friend judged it to be just another item in an over-crowded field). I put it aside at the end of that year and hadn’t revisited it until last week, when an old friend wrote me about it, quoting his favorite section.
I made much of white space in the lines of the poem, an effect that was completely undone — insert furious swear-stream here — by the software on both WordPress and LiveJournal. I have now created a .pdf version preserving the spaces, which you can access by clicking on Candy Store poem. (It’s just over 8 pages long.)
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