Ai Essay Research Paper AiAi commentsAi is

Ai Essay, Research Paper

Ai

Ai comments:

Ai is the only name by which I wish, 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 have to be identified with a man, who

was only my stepfather, for all eternity.

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’ve 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.A. Robert Lee

Born in Tucson, Arizona, the poet AI, pseudonym of Florence

Anthony, looks to a complex American multicultural ancestry–a Japanese father and a

mother part black, Choctaw, and Irish. Raised also in Las Vegas and San Francisco, she

majored in Japanese at the University of Arizona and immersed herself in Buddhism.

Currently based in Tempe, she has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the

National Endowment for the Arts, and various universities; she has also been a frequent

reader-performer of her work.

So eclectic, not to say peaceable, an upbringing makes a striking contrast with the

kind of poetry that has won her ongoing attention. Her particular forte has been to adapt

Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue to her own purposes, poems whose different voices

speak of fracture, violence, revenge, sexual hunger, as if to emphasize the human disorder

both beneath (and often enough at the surface of) society.

Cruelty (1973) offers a run of soliloquies, dealing with, among other things,

suicide, abortion, female masturbation, hanging, child-beating, and the unpredictability

of desire. AI’s style of poetic utterance has from the outset rarely been other than

tough-edged, in the words of an early critic, "as if she made her poem(s) with a

knife." Little wonder that the title poem in Cruelty begins with an image of a

dead wildcat. In Killing Floor (1978), a poem like "The Kid" assumes the

voice of a boy-murderer, a natural-born killer, who methodically and pathologically

destroys his entire family only to emerge sweet-faced and apparently unperturbed.

Sin (1986) attempts yet more complex personae–ruminations, for the most part, of

men of power, Joe McCarthy to the Kennedy brothers. In "The Testament of J. Robert

Oppenheimer" the note is transcendental, millennial, that of the Manhattan Project

leader eventually troubled by the possibilities of nuclear mass-destruction. In ‘The

Good Shepherd," however, the voice, more locally but no less chillingly, belongs to

the anonymous mass-murderer of Atlanta’s black youth. "Saturn. . . devours its

children," says the killer. Fate: New Poems (1991) offers a further gallery,

equally dark, a speaking dead that includes General George Custer, Mary Jo Kopechne (now

the bitter, retrospective party-girl), Elvis Presley, Lenny Bruce, and President Lyndon

Johnson.

AI opens her fifth collection, Greed (1993), with "Riot Act, April 29,

1992," a poem spoken as if by an unnamed black rioter taken into police custody in

South Central Los Angeles, who ruefully construes the looting and fires in the aftermath

of Rodney King’s beating as "the day the wealth finally trickled down." A

similar bittersweet note runs through "Self Defense." Washington, D.C.’s mayor

Marion Barry, sentenced for crack possession after an FBI setup, is forced to conclude,

‘That is how you hold the nigger down." In "Hoover, Edgar J.," law

enforcement as paranoia has its say, the meanness at once racist, homophobic,

class-loaded. The diatribe ends boastingly and bullyingly: "J. Edgar Hoover

rules." Other monologue-poems equally offer markers for the times–whether in the

voice of Jack Ruby, or of a witness to the Marcos regime in Manila, or of a street girl

contemplating Mike Tyson and the Desiree Washington rape.

As always this amounts to a slightly stylized ventriloquy, creating an effect of

distance, things seen at one remove. All has not by any means been praise; critics have on

occasion thought the poetry monotone, close to mannerism, too determinedly dour or

black-humored. But AI is not to be denied her own kind of verse Gothic, an America, a

world, seen as though through disembodied witness and nothi

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