Unbound: A Book of AIDS - Softcover

Shurin, Aaron

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1643621548 ISBN 13: 9781643621548

Publisher: Nightboat Books, 2023

Synopsis

​​A moving collection of essays that bring poetic insight to the sheer facts of the AIDS epidemic, in an attempt to make meaning from suffering.

​​Unbound is a poet’s intimate account of life in San Francisco in the 80s and 90s during the apex of the AIDS epidemic. In his search for meaning, Shurin dives down into the broken-hearted, revelatory core of the social landscape and the lives of friends who both succumbed to and transcended the disease. Twenty-five years after its initial publication, Unbound continues the search, resonating inescapably with the perils of our new pandemic. Shurin brings to life a familiar world tensed on the threshold of living, balanced precariously on the edges of love and friendship, family and community, rapture and mourning.

About this title

About the Author

Aaron Shurin is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose, most recently The Blue Absolute (Nightboat, 2020), Flowers & Sky: Two Talks (Entre Rios Books, 2017), and The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks (University of Michigan Press, 2015). His work has appeared in over forty national and international anthologies, from The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry to Italy’s Nuova Poesia Americana: San Francisco, and has been supported by grants from The National Endowment for the Arts, The California Arts Council, The San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Gerbode Foundation. A pioneer in both LGBTQ studies and innovative verse, Shurin was a member of the original Good Gay Poets collective in Boston, and later the first graduate of the storied Poetics Program at New College of California. He has written numerous critical essays about poetic theory and compositional practice, as well as personal narratives on sexual identity, gender fluidity, and the AIDS epidemic. A longtime educator, he’s the former director and currently Professor Emeritus for the MFA Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

FULL CIRCLE: Postscript To “City of Men”

 

            When I read my erotic rampage, “City of Men,” to a group of students a couple of years back, one aw shucks type with wider than ever eyes responded: “Boy, that sure isn’t safe sex!” Chagrined, I held up the pages, pointing to the poem itself, the act of writing it. “No,” I smiled, “this is safe sex.!” But — chastened — I’d copped out; it was exactly what I had not intended with “City of Men.”

            I did have a hidden agenda. The poem uses only Whitman’s language, culled from poems in the Children of Adam and Calamus groupings from Leaves of Grass. As most careful readers of Whitman know, Calamus is his collection of homoerotic love poems, emotional, tender, idealistic, radically political, prophetic, obliquely erotic, but — alas — not sexual. If you want sex, go to the grouping Children of Adam, Whitman’s putative heterosexual songs. They are filled with body and body parts, physical material catalogues, paeans to the sex act — but — alas — no love. The body is electric but it is not affectionate.

            I have read Whitman’s private journals, the most private parts, where they are written partially in code to keep the secret — perhaps from himself as well as others — of his love for Peter Doyle, the secret — but we’ve heard this many times from the 19th and 20th centuries — torment of his awakening but not yet awake homosexuality, the revelations of his self-expressed desire to (using for homoeroticism his code word “adhesiveness”) “depress the adhesive nature/ It is in excess — making life a torment/ All this diseased, feverish, disproportionate adhesiveness.” Depress it in himself! Anyone who has been there can immediately recognize the call of the closet. This pernicious disregard for truth caught Whitman — in spite of his revolutionary outspokenness about sex and the body as well as male/male affection — and forced him to sever his love poems — his writing of eros — into two mutually exclusive — and incomplete — halves.

            My historical period has permitted me to come full circle, to write my eros out of spirit and body, shamelessly, and perhaps for the first time in history from a completely integrated viewpoint. In composing “City of Men” I chose to graft — by interspersing them — poems from Whitman’s Calamus with those from his Children of Adam. Where the body in Calamus is incessantly hidden, metaphorized as leaves, roots, blossoms, scented herbage, live oak, moss, vines and buds, now it can be revealed in its polymorphous glory as arms, shoulders, lips, fingers, loins, elbows and necks. No more will we hear — as in Calamus — “I dare not tell it in words” or “Here I shade and hide my thoughts;” rather, as in Children of Adam: “Be not afraid of my body.”

            It seems essential to me, in the age of AIDS, to keep the body forward, to keep the parts named, to not let ourselves get scared back into our various closets by those who would profit from sexual repression, from sublimation and fear of sex. What losses do we suffer by blindly embracing — if not “compulsive” sex — compulsive dating, compulsive monogamy, compulsive matrimony and domesticity, and when does avoidance of particular sex acts deteriorate into avoidance of creative exploration: dulled nerves, consumerist complacency, couplist or nuclear family paranoia, social scapegoating, stereotyping and moral sanctimony? Didn’t my generation become sexual pioneers not just by increasing the range of permissible sex acts and sex-enacted places but by tying sexual expression to socialism, feminism, national liberation movements, consciousness expansion, legal and individual rights and radical psychologies, and if it gets squashed what else gets squashed with it? The chaotic force of eros — once called desire — is a depth charge for change. Contain it and we may live an ordered existence, sure: following orders.

            So I do not propose “City of Men,” or any other creative act, as a substitution for sex. I do of course propose safe sex — medically safe but not politically safe, not socially or even psychically safe. And toward the day when the Human Immunodeficiency Virus is consigned to the dustbins of history, I’ll dream — with Whitman — “Unscrew the locks from the doors!/ Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!”

 

(1988)

 

 

 

Edition details

• Publisher: Nightboat Books
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1643621548
• ISBN 13: 9781643621548
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144