Poetic Kin: Meeting Melvin Dixon

My first exposure to Melvin Dixon’s work was in the summer of 2009 when my friend Sean Singer emailed me Dixon’s poem “Blood Positive” to motivate me as I revised new poems. I was largely writing in first person at the time and revising poems that interrogated vulnerable bodies. Dixon’s use of the second person pronoun and allusion to the AIDS epidemic pulled me out of my seat. There are stakes in Dixon’s poem—whole lives in immediate peril—and so “Blood Positive” reminded me to identify what was at stake in my poems as I labored over revisions. The following poem is the first I read by Dixon:

1. The Children Wonder

What did you do when the thighs of our brothers
were nothing but bruises and bones?
Where did you go when the songs said to march
and you only meandered and minced?
Whom did you kiss with your cough
and elaborate phlegm? How much time
did you borrow on blood?
What was the price of your fear and your fist?

DON’T MOVE.
YOUR MEMORY OR YOUR LIFE.

2. The Dead Speak

Leave us alone.
We did nothing but worship our kind.
When you love as we did you will know
there is no life but this
and history will not be kind.
Now take what you need and get out.
—“Blood Positive”

Dixon wrote in various genres, including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and translation. He earned his BA in American studies from Wesleyan University in 1971 and a PhD in the philosophy of American civilization from Brown University in 1975. His excellence as a scholar and writer led him to a career in academia; he was a professor of literature at Queens College from 1980 until he died in 1992.

Although the most crucial element of his creative and scholarly texts is the exploration of memory and geography in African American and Black Diaspora cultures, Dixon enriches his work by centering gay Black men as subjects, characters, and speakers. Vanishing Rooms (1991), his second novel, revolves around the murder of a gay man in New York City and chronicles the lives of three people deeply affected by his death. His second book of poems,  Love’s Instruments (1995), foregrounds the lives of gay men suffering and dying from AIDS.

Dixon rendered lives that were subject to erasure, not the least of which was his own. He died from complications due to AIDS. Poets including Elizabeth Alexander assured that his work was not lost; Alexander wrote the introduction to his posthumously published  Love’s Instruments.

In 2012, I was a new faculty member at Columbia College Chicago and creating a graduate seminar focused on marginalized bodies. Marginalization often calls race to mind first, but I wanted to represent sexuality, socioeconomics, disability, and illness. This seminar eschewed the idea of not conflating a poet with her poems and dug deeply into a concept I’d recently seen Adrian Matejka articulate on Twitter, of all places, that “aesthetics and identity in poetry are linked because the poet is experimenting with both simply by writing a poem.” This linkage of aesthetics and identity describes Dixon’s thorough poetic representation of the lives of gay men and his life as a gay Black man. Dixon’s poetry consistently arrests me with its impassioned focus on the body—the body in love, illness, labor, and the endless personal and collective grief of the AIDS epidemic. I taught Dixon’s Love’s Instruments  for the first time that year, with other books including Tory Dent’s HIV, Mon Amour, Spencer Reece’s The Clerk’s Tale, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee.

By the time I began teaching his work, Dixon’s two books of poetry, Change of Territory (1983) and Love’s Instruments, weren’t widely available, but I taught the latter from time to time and always thought, “Someone has to republish these in a single volume!” After reading a posthumously published collection of poems by Christopher Gilbert, I wondered, “Why not me?” I desired the book—I couldn’t wait for it to be made for me, so in 2017, I wrote to Dr. Justin A. Joyce, the coeditor (with Dwight A. McBride) of a collection of  Melvin Dixon’s essays on literature and life titled A Melvin Dixon Critical Reader (University Press of Mississippi, 2006). Joyce already had a connection to Dixon’s work and estate, and I needed guidance on how to edit a volume of work, attain rights, permissions, a publisher, etc. Joyce became my partner and we launched into practical efforts, such as communicating with multiple parties about the rights to the work as I dove deep into Dixon’s archive at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to look for extant poetry.

Reviewing Dixon’s work at the Schomburg was my first time undertaking archival research, and I felt an anticipatory excitement while thumbing through the manila folders in eighteen file boxes over three days. I was given a small table to work on and one box of files at a time. I found handwritten drafts of poems, correspondence to friends and editors, to-do lists, syllabi for Queens College, and lecture notes. My favorite discovery was a spiral-bound pocket notebook containing notes Dixon jotted on renovating his home from the first to third levels, everything major and minor from refinishing wood floors to reupholstering the sofa in damask fabric. Through my excavation of his files, Dixon became even more than the poet and scholar I’d long admired; he was also a glorious human architecting and beautifying his life.

Years on, far removed from my time in Dixon’s archives, I have edited this archival folio of his work, which is part of a forthcoming edition of the collected poems of Melvin Dixon, edited by myself and Dr. Justin A. Joyce. The project is under consideration with Northwestern University Press/Curbstone Books. The edition will contain the poems within this folio as well as the rest of the poems from both Change of Territory and  Love’s Instruments; after all my research, I did not find any unpublished poems in his archive.

Dixon’s work has been with me for the last fourteen years, and this is my first opportunity to share what I’ve long loved with a wide audience. I have compiled and ordered a selection of his poems to give you a glimpse into his verse and life. I do not doubt that this will make it into the hands of people who knew and loved him deeply. Dixon lived with nuance and clarity of vision; he was a luminary. I offer his light to you here.