Dementia Poets

From 1987 to 1992, I was part of an HIV+ writing workshop in Los Angeles run by the wonderful Terry Wolverton. My main partners in crime were Gil Cuadros (the most successful of the lot, who published his powerful poetry collection City of God with City Lights before he died in 1996), Kevin Martin, and Mark Lane; the four of us, plus a couple of members of the workshop whose names I’ve mislaid over time, wrote the following one silly evening, at a time where AIDS dementia was a very real prospect for us all.

It is really a chain of giddy in-jokes – those who know me will see my dirty thumbprints on 6, 7, and 11; Gil agreed with me on 7 (this is from when a time when the tiresome Dennis Cooper was considered The Thing), and he was clearly reacting to me in 10; Kevin’s lemon poem (quite a fine one too) gave us no. 1, and I can see that Mark was guilty of 3 and 4 – but, beneath the black humor around losing one’s mind, it still reflects the affectionate warmth of a group of friends huddling together and ignoring the storm raging outside.

The Dementia Poets School of Writing:
The Ten Rules of Style

1. Always start with lemons.
2. Never use proper names.
3. You don’t have to be on antihistamines to talk to your furniture.
4. Always disagree with everything so that everyone gets totally confused.
5. (I forget what no. 5 is.)
6. That is not funny.
7. All parodies of Dennis Cooper should be introduced as such, to avoid the embarassment and confusion of others thinking you actually want to write like that.
8. There are no ideas but in things.
9. Blame it on the virus.
10. If you know what an objective correlative is, just keep it to yourself.
11. It’s not a matter of opinion, you’re just wrong.