NEO•GRIOT

Ai (1947 - 2010)

BIOGRAPHY

Ai is a poet noted for her uncompromising poetic vision and bleak dramatic monologues which give voice to marginalized, often poor and abused speakers. Though born Florence Anthony, she legally changed her name to Ai which means “love” in Japanese. She has said that her given name reflects a “scandalous affair my mother had with a Japanese man she met at a streetcar stop” and has no wish to be identified “for all eternity” with a man she never knew. Ai’s awareness of her own mixed race heritage—she self-identifies as Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Black, Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche—as well as her strong feminist bent shape her poetry, which is often brutal and direct in its subject matter. In the volumes of verse she published since her first collection, Cruelty (1973), Ai provoked both controversy and praise for her stark monologues and gruesome first-person accounts of non-normative behavior. Dubbed “All woman—all human” by confessional poet Anne Sexton, Ai has also been praised by the Times Literary Supplement for capturing “the cruelty of intimate relationships and the delights of perverse spontaneity—e.g. the joy a mother gets from beating her child.” Alicia Ostriker countered Sexton’s summation of Ai, writing: “‘All woman—all human’; she is hardly that. She is more like a bad dream of Woody Allen’s, or the inside story of some Swinburnean Dolorosa, or the vagina-dentata itself starting to talk. Woman, in Ai’s embodiment, wants sex. She knows about death and can kill animals and people. She is hard as dirt. Her realities—very small ones—are so intolerable that we fashion female myths to express our fear of her. She, however, lives the hard life below our myths.”

Ai explained her use of the dramatic monologue as an early realization that “first person voice was always the stronger voice to use when writing.” Her poems depict individuals that Duane Ackerson characterized in Contemporary Women Poets as “people seeking transformation, a rough sort of salvation, through violent acts.” The speakers in her poems are struggling individuals—usually women, but occasionally men—isolated by poverty, by small-town life, or life on a remote farm. Killing Floor (1978), the volume that followed Cruelty, includes a poem called “The Kid” which is spoken in the voice of a boy who has just murdered his family. Sin (1986) contains more complex dramatic monologues as Ai assumes actual personae, from Joe McCarthy to the Kennedy brothers. Ai’s characters tend to speak in a flat demotic, stripped of nuance or emotion. Poet and critic Rachael Hadas has noted that “although virtually all the poems present themselves as spoken by a particular character, Ai makes little attempt to capture individual styles of diction [or] personal vocabularies.” For Hadas, however, this makes the poems all the more striking, as her “stripped-down diction conveys an underlying, almost biblical indignation—not, at times, without compassion—at human misuses of power and the corrupting energies of various human appetites.”

Fate (1991) and Greed (1993), like Sin before them, contain monologues that dramatize public figures. Readers confront the inner worlds of former F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover, missing-and-presumed-dead Union leader Jimmy Hoffa, musician Elvis Presley, and actor James Dean as voices from beyond-the-grave who yet remain out of sync with social or ethical “norms.” Noting that Ai “reinvents” each of her subjects within her verse, Ackerson added that, through each monologue, what these individuals say, “returning after death, expresses more about the American psyche than about the real figures.” Vice: New and Selected Poems (1999) contained work from Ai’s previous five books as well as 18 new poems. It was awarded the National Book Award for Poetry. Ai’s next book, Dread (2003), was likewise praised for its searing and honest treatment of, according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “violent or baroquely sexual life stories.” In the New York Times Book Review, Viijay Seshadri wrote that “Dread has the characteristic moral strength that makes Ai a necessary poet.” Aiming her poetic barbs directly at prejudices and societal ills of all types, Ai has been outspoken on the subject of race, saying “People whose concept of themselves is largely dependent on their racial identity and superiority feel threatened by a multiracial person. The insistence that one must align oneself with this or that race is basically racist. And the notion that without a racial identity a person can’t have any identity perpetuates racism…I wish I could say that race isn’t important. But it is. More than ever, it is a medium of exchange, the coin of the realm with which one buys one’s share of jobs and social position. This is a fact which I have faced and must ultimately transcend. If this transcendence were less complex, less individual, it would lose its holiness.”

In addition to the National Book Award, Ai’s work was awarded an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, for Sin, and the Lamont Poetry Award of the Academy of American Poets, for Killing Floor. She received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Bunting Fellowship Program at Radcliffe College and the National Endowment for the Arts. She taught at Oklahoma State University. She died in 2010.

 

[Updated 2010]

CAREER

Poet. Visiting poet at Wayne State University, 1977- 78, and George Mason University, 1986-87; writer-in-residence, Arizona State University, 1988-89; visiting associate professor, University of Colorado at Boulder, 1996-97. Has also worked as an antiques dealer in New York City and elsewhere, and as a jewelry designer.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

POETRY

• Cruelty, Houghton (Boston), 1973.
• Killing Floor (Lamont poetry selection), Houghton, 1979.
• Sin, Houghton, 1986.
• Fate, Houghton, 1991. 
• Greed, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1993.
• Vice: New and Selected Poems, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1999.
• Dread, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2003.

OTHER

• Black Blood (novel), W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1997.

Contributor of articles and poems to magazines, including American Poetry Review, Antaeus, Caprice, Paris Review, Poetry, Ms., and Zone. A collection of Ai's manuscripts is housed at the New York Public Library.

FURTHER READINGS

BOOKS

• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit), Volume 4, 1975.
• Contemporary Women Poets, St. James Press (Detroit), 1997.

PERIODICALS

• American Poetry Review, November, 1994, p. 23.
• Kenyon Review, winter, 1995, p. 150.
• Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 1973.
• New York Times Book Review, February 17, 1974.
• Publishers Weekly, September 27, 1993, p. 46.
• Times Literary Supplement, March 29, 1974.
• Ms., June, 1974; June, 1978.

POEMS

Conversation

Cuba, 1962

Disregard

Killing Floor

Nothing But Color

Passing Through

Salomé

The Kid

Twenty-year Marriage

Woman to Man

 

Conversation

BY AI

for Robert Lowell

We smile at each other

and I lean back against the wicker couch.   

How does it feel to be dead? I say.

You touch my knees with your blue fingers.   

And when you open your mouth,

a ball of yellow light falls to the floor   

and burns a hole through it.

Don’t tell me, I say. I don't want to hear.   

Did you ever, you start,

wear a certain kind of silk dress

and just by accident,

so inconsequential you barely notice it,   

your fingers graze that dress

and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,   

you see it too

and you realize how that image

is simply the extension of another image,   

that your own life

is a chain of words

that one day will snap.

Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,   

and beginning to rise heavenward

in their confirmation dresses,

like white helium balloons,

the wreaths of flowers on their heads spinning,

and above all that,

that’s where I’m floating,   

and that’s what it’s like

only ten times clearer,

ten times more horrible.   

Could anyone alive survive it?

 

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