Ai

views updated

AI

Born Florence Anthony, 21 October 1947, Albany, Texas

Also written under: Florence Haynes, Pelorhanke Ai Ogawa

Married Lawrence Kearney, circa 1975 (divorced)

Ai is a narrative poet. Her work is intense, her writing efficient and vivid. Her poems reveal an intimacy between emotions and values that traditionally have been viewed as oppositional: love and hate are enmeshed, tenderness and violence interconnected. The characters who speak through Ai's poetry are as varied as the American, multiracial, multicultural society from which they, and she, emerged. All voices—of men, women, teenagers, children; of black, white, red, yellow, brown; famous and anonymous, infamous and obscure—are heard at equal volume. Each speaks of the effort and desire to assert one's will, to make an impact, to understand pain. Their voices are clear and even-toned, yet their messages are wrenching and sometimes shocking.

Ai grew up in the Southwest and in San Francisco. She earned a B.A. in English/Oriental studies from the University of Arizona in 1969. While an undergraduate, she met the poet Galway Kinnell, who became a mentor for her, the "most important literary relationship of my life." Through Kinnell, she went to the University of California at Irvine, where she completed an M.F.A. in 1971. She taught subsequently at the State University of New York at Binghamton, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Wayne State University. She received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in 1975.

Her first book of poems, Cruelty (1973), established her as a new, strong voice in contemporary poetry. Cruelty projects rugged images of sexuality, death, sensuality, and blood, and challenges the stereotype of "women's poetry." Noted Alice Walker, "If you want nice poems to 'like,' this [ Cruelty] is not your book."

Ai's Killing Floor (1979) won the 1978 Lamont Poetry Selection Award for the best second book by an American poet. The poems in this collection intensify the themes of sexuality and violence introduced in Cruelty and expand Ai's cast of characters to include public figures from history and popular culture. After winning the Lamont Prize, Ai moved to New York to "actually…enter the world of poetry." Since her move, she published Sin (1986) and Fate (1991), both books of poetry. The settings of the later poems also moved from the rural, smalltown world of her first two books into the urban arena.

In Sin, which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and Fate, Ai creates the voices, the "secret souls," of public figures such as Robert and John F. Kennedy, (Sin) and Mary Jo Kopechne (Fate). Still, the voices of anonymous Americans are also heard. The persona poems in Sin and Fate are longer, detailed portraits rather than the snapshots found in her earlier volumes.

In "On Being 1/2 Japanese, 1/8 Choctaw, 1/4 Black and 1/16 Irish" (1978) and "Arrival" (1991), Ai discusses her multiracial heritage, her struggle to forge an identity, the importance of her "true" name (Ai means "love" in Japanese), and her development as a narrative poet. (Given the name Florence Anthony at birth, she has also used the names Florence Haynes and Pelorhanke Ai Ogawa; she learned from her mother in 1973 that her father's surname was Ogawa.)

Ai's passion for poetry pervades her autobiographical works. As she has explained, "I wanted to write poetry with a capital P" and she continues to do so. Her latest works, including 1999's Vice: New and Selected Poems, presents a collection of 58 monologues from four of Ai's earlier books—Cruelty, Sin, Fate, and Killing Floor—along with 17 new poems. From the past are notable contributions capturing disturbing realities in the lives and deaths of such notables as James Dean, Jimmy Hoffa, Lenny Bruce, and J. Edgar Hoover. Ai's new subjects rise from more recent news headlines (O. J. Simpson, David Koresh, Jon-Benet Ramsey, and Monica Lewinsky) and from behind the headlines, including the agony of the police officer who commits suicide before being able to accept a medal for rescuing victims of the Oklahoma City bombing. Ai's desire to examine conflicting moral values is alive and well and on display in this volume.

Successfully continuing in her quest to push the envelope of reader emotions, Ai offers yet another glimpse into worlds of human angst, edged with empathy, which moved one reviewer to observe Vice as "rewarding, but not for the squeamish." Authored by the "foremost poet of urban terror," this mini anthology reminds one of the poet's explosive earlier works and offers shades of things to come.

Other Works:

"Nothing But Color" (1981). "Ai" (1988). Greed (1993).

Bibliography:

Reference Works:

CA (1980). CLC (1975, 1980). Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995).

Other reference:

Belles Lettres (Spring 1991). Chicago Review (Spring 1979). LJ (15 Apr. 1999). Ms. (June 1974). NYTBR (17 Feb. 1974, 8 July 1979, 8 June 1986). Poetry (Jan. 1987, Nov. 1991). PW (29 Mar. 1999). Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 1991).