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 s
early as in interviews following publication of his first novel,
Taking Care of Mrs Carroll (1978), Paul Monette was articulating
his move from writing poetry to writing fiction. He later speaks
of Roger Horwitz's encouraging him to write more poetry, but he
didn't until the devastation of AIDS killing Horwitz and infecting
himself.
Shown here are the journal pages in which Monette wrote in furious
heat what would become "Here," the first poem in Love Alone:
18 Elegies to Rog (1988). At the same time as drafting the
elegies in the journals, Monette was writing other poems, which
he kept in a folder labeled "Carol poems," which he shared with
Los Angeles poet and USC professor Carol Muske-Dukes. Those not
elegies to Horwitz were not published or collected until later.
The daughter of Muske-Dukes was seriously ill at the time Roger
was ill, and she and Monette shared poems expressing their anxiety
and grief. She has written touchingly about this process and quotes
her own work and Monette's work in an essay about this: "[G]rave
frightening love poems and angry poems began to flow from Paul."
She quotes from Monette's "The Worrying":around the house with
a rag of ammonia
wiping wiping crazed as a housewife on Let's
Make
a Deal the deal being PLEASE DON'T MAKE
HIM SICK AGAIN .
Monette stated that "Carol proved to be the one who saved me
as a writer." Several of these poems were begun in holograph in the
journals and then made into a neat typescript yet half completed.
The typescripts were added to again in holograph until completed.
This remarkable group of manuscripts directs his venom at political
and cultural figures and forces which together hampered research and
treatment of AIDS and the treatment of gay men in particular. He wrote
poems criticizing William Buckley, Rudolf Nureyev's staying in the
closet (even briefly-through his doctor-after death), and the U.S.
Supreme Court's demeaning decision in Bowers v Hardwick that
upheld sodomy laws against homosexuals. Monette of course didn't live
to see this overturned in 2003 with the majority opinion that the
justices had been wrong. Even today states refuse to abide by this
Supreme Court decision, and Monette would have even more to write
about.
Monette put his protest at the heart of his new work. In a
still unpublished poem from this group he excoriates even his own
early poetry and poet friends who rejected his new direction as not
even being "poetry." The Carol poem entitled "Those Back East" continues,
"with their head up their ass will all have / tenure soon and lean
more easterly / every day ." In this work he denigrates subject matter
"safe to write" such as nature description or easy self-pity compressed
in the parody lines "leafsong gooseflight / frost why me." He saw
this style as a retreat to how he himself had written in his early
works, with subjects that were "nature" and "poetic" expressed with
clever wordplay. He needed now to reflect a world as harsh as his
life with AIDS had become and with a style appropriate to that truth.
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Manuscript of "Those Back East"
Manuscript of "The Worrying"
Manuscript leaf of "Here"
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