Queer Transport:John Ashbery’s April Galleons and the HIV/AIDS Pandemic

John Ashbery’s 1987 collection April Galleons is a subtle yet sustained meditation on HIV/AIDS and its implications (for writing, for queerness, for human survival). Reading April Galleons, we are attuned to what Muñoz calls ‘the hermeneutics of residue’; in other words, we are alert to the ephemera, the traces, the imprints or impressions of HIV/AIDS as they shape the text. Just as HIV/AIDS itself is not always immediately apparent – as the text in Robert Farber’s painting Western Blot #15 enunciates, ‘To look at me, you’d never know that I was HIV+ … you’d never know the chaos and menace I carry within me 24 hours a day’ – so April Galleons, as HIV/AIDS text, requires reading between the lines, close listening, and, yes, some speculation. April Galleons is difficult – it is not easy: but as Samuel R. Delany suggests disease can be read as a kind of ‘Dis-ease’, or non-easiness. This essay suggests Ashbery enacts this ‘dis-ease’ in his poems, endeavouring to capture those things that are difficult to articulate, those things that are not known, and to emphasize the incoherence of experiencing the inexorable sweeping-forward away from life and into death, as well the private and public rages and ravages of grief.