Adrienne Rich - A Human Eye: Essays on Art 1997-2008

Sometime in the 1990s the mail brought a literary magazine entitled The Bastard Review , with a letter from its editor, Thomas Avena, asking for poems. The quality and range of poetics interested me, as the promised method of payment appealed to me: a package of smoked salmon to be shipped from San Francisco. I sent poems, and the smoked salmon duly arrived. In the same issue was a poem addressed to Alan Turing, the gay British mathematician who cracked the Nazi Enigma code during World War II, later to be convicted of Gross Indecency, committing suicide two years later. What struck me in the poem was the poise within its tension, the intimate tenderness of the speakers voice. This was to become the opening poem of Avenas Dream of Order (1997), for which I wrote the foreword that follows (in slightly revised form.)

Avena was an artist, an activist, and editor of the anthology Life Sentences: Writers, Artists, and AIDS (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1994). He also curated the Smithsonian AIDS history project Face to Face. Living with lymphoma and with many beloved seropositive comrades, Avena was determined to make explicit, investigate, and articulate life and art in the face of debilitating illness and treatments, not to mention official denial. He died at forty-six in 2005, leaving a still-unpublished second book of poetry, Magi , and an unfinished expansion of Marinol, his personal essay in Life Sentences .

We became friends, though we met rarely; once, he and his then lover, William Lyon Strong, cooked me a superb dinner in their small apartment (Strong later died of AIDS). We read together at a book festival in San Francisco but mostly exchanged letters and work. He wrote in Life Sentences of the heroic effort to go on making art from the truths revealed by disaster, the divestiture of the body and the implications of such loss for the struggle to create. He was engaged in that effort to the end.

Preface to Thomas Avena, Dream of Order (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1997).

W HEREVER I TURN these days, Im looking, as from the corner of my eye, for a certain kind of poetry whose balance of dread and beauty is equal to the chaotic negations that pursue us. Amid profiteering language, commoditizing of intimate emotions, and public misery, I want poems that embodymake into fleshanother principle. A complex, dialogic, coherent poetry to dissolve both complacency and despair.

Among the human disasters of the twentieth century, AIDS has summoned up its share of poetry; and under the gaze of AIDS, remarkable poems have been, are being, written. The poems in Thomas Avenas Dream of Order are passionately wrought as to craft, tensile, sensual, and delicate, un-selfish in a profound way. For Avena, AIDS is not simply his experience or that of those he has known and loved, concrete as these are in the poems. The plague becomes part of a moral question haunting the generations, specific to now, yet floating in time. Thus poems on the post-Hiroshima architecture of Osaka (The Rage of Tadao Ando) or Eva Hesses Holocaust witness in sculpture (Sans II) along with 5 MOMA Poems in Time of Plague reiterate arts critical resilience wherever human extremity seems to have crushed all response. Avena implies that art is the projection of that in us which does go on responding, and also that to which our sealed consciousness opens in response.

Most poems about visual art tend toward predictable set pieces, appreciations. Film, architecture, pieces of sculpture, painting appear in Avenas work not to be described or commented on but rather invoked, interrogated.