AI

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Pseudonym: Florence Anthony. Nationality: American. Born: Albany, Texas, 21 October 1947. Education: University of Arizona, Tucson, 1965–69, B.A. 1969; University of California, Irvine, 1969–71, M.F.A. 1971. Career: Visiting poet, Wayne State University, 1977–78, George Mason University, 1986, 1987; writer-in-residence, Arizona State University, 1988–89; visiting associate professor, University of Colorado at Boulder, 1996–97. Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1975; Radcliffe fellowship, 1975; Lamont Poetry Selection, 1978; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1978, 1985; Ingram Merrill fellowship, 1983; St. Botolph Foundation grant, 1986; Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, 1987, for Sin.Address: c/o Jill Bialosky, Editor, W.W. Norton, 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10110–0017, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Cruelty. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1973.

Killing Floor. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1979.

Sin. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1986.

Fate. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

Greed. New York, Norton, 1993.

Novel

Black Blood. New York, Norton, 1997.

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Manuscript Collection: New York Public Library.

Critical Studies: "The Will to Transcendence in Contemporary American Poet, Ai" by Rob Wilson, in Canadian Review of American Studies (Calgary, Alberta), 17(4), winter 1986; "A 'Descent toward the Unknown' in the Poetry of Ai" by Susannah B. Mintz, in Sage (Atlanta, Georgia), 9(2), summer 1995; "Ai's 'Go'" by Michele Leavitt, in Explicator (Washington, D.C.), 54(2), winter 1996.

Ai comments:

Ai is the only name by which I wish to be and, indeed, should be known. Since I am the child of a scandalous affair my mother had with a Japanese man she met at a streetcar stop and I was forced to live a lie for so many years, while my mother concealed my natural father's identity from me, I feel that I should not, for all eternity, have to be identified with a man who was only my stepfather.

My writing of dramatic monologues was a happy accident, because I took so much to heart the opinion of my first poetry teacher, Richard Shelton, the fact that the first-person voice was always the stronger voice to use when writing. What began as an experiment in that voice became the only voice in which I wrote for about twenty years. Lately, though, I have been writing poems and short stories using the second person, without, it seems to me, any diminution in the power of my work. Still, I feel that the dramatic monologue was the form in which I was born to write, and I love it as passionately, or perhaps more passionately, than I have ever loved a man.

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Ai is a dangerous writer and means to be. Hers is a poetry that aims to be disturbing, and less sophisticated readers may take the violence and sometimes brutal sex that propel her writing at face value. There is considerably more at work, however.

This is poetry about people seeking transformation, a rough sort of salvation, through violent acts. The poems sometimes lift up stones and hurl them at the reader. At other times, especially in her later collections, the poet steps back with her burden so that we can see bits of the national psyche, wriggling and squirming in a new, raw light.

Ai's poems are almost all dramatic monologues. In earlier books like Cruelty and Killing Floor the voices we hear are often those of the anonymous poor. "Why I Can't Leave You," an early poem from Cruelty, Ai's first collection, demonstrates the author's power to suggest erotic entrapment in relationships devoid of tenderness:

   I know that we can't give each other any more
   or any less than what we have.
   There is safety in that, so much
   that I can never get past the packing,
   the begging you to please, if I can't make you happy,
   come close between my thighs
   and let me laugh for you from my second mouth.

Killing Floor is in some ways a transitional book, mixing the anonymous voices from the first collection with those of the famous, including Yukio Mishima as he commits hara-kiri and Marilyn Monroe reflecting on her mother's death. In the latter book the acts of violence that fill Cruelty and Killing Floor become emblems for psychic violence, as in "Guadalajara Cemetery," where the speaker apparently contemplates sex with a widowed man:

   It's time to cross the border
   and cut your throat with two knives:
   you wife, your son…
   You, me, these withered flowers,
   so many hearts tied in a knot,
   given and taken away.

In Fate and Greed speakers often bear the names of real people, many famous to the point of being cultural icons. Ai reinvents each persona, taking real or perceived traits to an even more archetypal extreme. What each says, returning after death, expresses more about the American psyche than about the real figures, and Ai intends it this way. Her speakers include Mary Jo Kopechne, J. Edgar Hoover, Jack Ruby, Jimmy Hoffa, James Dean, Elvis Presley, and Alfred Hitchcock. Characters include both the anointed famous and recipients of Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame, such as the possible rape victim and certain victim of media penetration in "Evidence from a Reporter's Notebook," from Fate:

   Six straight days, she's front-page news
   She makes guest appearances by the dozen
   Everybody's cousin wants their piece
   of tender meat…

By the end of the poem the reporter realizes that she has violated the victim whether an actual rapist has done so or not.

In other poems in the later collections the speakers return to perform other acts of violation, often visited on themselves as much as on real or imagined victims. Sometimes the poems pick up, as does one on Jack Ruby, on scurrilous material published about the notorious, and Ai proceeds to discover the deeper truth lurking even in lies. In "Oswald Incognito & Astral Travels," from Greed, Oswald sees himself vanishing into his own act:

   I write my name on the wall
   beside the Coke machine. OSWALD
   in capital letters.
   I erase it with spit and my shirttail,
   but it keeps reappearing,
   each time the letters get larger,
   until the "O" is a hole
   I can walk through
   and when I finally do, it closes around me
   like a mouth around the mouth of a rifle.

In "Miracle in Manila," from Greed, a posthumous Ferdinand Marcos reflects on his wife Imelda, who perhaps as much as any contemporary figure has come to personify greed. Here she stages a mock crucifixion, displays phony stigmata on her palms, and then

   After a transfusion, a facial,
   and a manicure,
   she's campaigning again, although it's useless
   and I'm back to tap-dancing at her side,
   while she proclaims herself
   the only candidate
   who can rise from the dead.

This is poetry that hardly lays claim to being poetry. It is addressed to ordinary people, not to politicians or academics. Ai faces essential questions and lies about racial and sexual politics with great assurance.

—Duane Ackerson