Regarding Ai

Ai, author of Cruelty, Killing Floor, Sin, Fate, and other collections, died Sunday at the age of 62.

I first came across her work in a seminar on contemporary American poetry. The poems were shocking. A couple lines in and you were inhabiting the consciousness of a suicide, a masturbator, a serial killer, a child-beating parent, a kid (in “The Kid”) who calmly, almost sweetly, murders his family. I'm haunted to this day by "The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981," in which, after disposing of the body of the boy he's just murdered, the speaker sits down to a nice cup of cocoa:

After the last sweet mouthful of chocolate
burns its way down my throat,
I open the library book,
the one on mythology,
and begin to read.
Saturn, it says, devours his children.
Yes, it's true, I know it.
An ordinary man, though, a man like me
eats and is full.
Only God is never satisfied.

At public readings and on recordings, Ai read in an exaggerated chant, an aural iambic that elongated almost every second syllable and that, with the scenes she set, the characters she created, created intense estrangement effects.

We spent a lot of time in that seminar on the fact of Ai’s complicated ancestry (her father was Japanese and her mother was of African American and Native American descent), though as I reread the poems now I’m not sure why. The poems are not about the poet’s ancestry, not, really, about the poet herself, at least in the immediate ways we’ve come, during the long reign of first-person, free-verse autobiographism in American poetry, to expect. The real fascination in these poems is with power – the power of the desired over the one who desires, of the one who is willing to undertake violence over those who hesitate, of our compulsions over our compassion.

Sin is especially interested in power, and perhaps the dominant sin in the book is the pride that drives such speakers as the Kennedys, Joseph McCarthy, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. For this reason, among others, it stands out for me as a favorite among Ai’s seven collections.

Here’s the thing, though. There’s been, and there will continue to be, a lot of ink and bytes thrown around about the voices of outsiders and the politics of outrage in Ai’s work (partly because there will be a lot of talk, as in that seminar, about who she was, and partly because there will be a lot of talk about her activism around Native American identity), and while these are not insignificant aspects of the life or the poems, the focus on them will mean a lot of readers miss what might be the real point of Ai's work. “I feel,” Ai has been recorded as saying, “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.”

The dramatic monologue. Remember that fusty old thing, relic of Victorianism, first envied then dissed and dismissed by Pound in his experiments with personae, reduced in our time to a couple of Browning poems in anthologies? Ah, but Ai, along with Frank Bidart, renovated that generic furniture in ways that not only brought the monologue back to life but also showed how interesting we’d forgotten it to be. Both Bidart and Ai built their poems around some sick speakers, but do you remember what Browning’s characters get up to?! (Hint: the speaker in "Porphyria's Lover" strangles his beloved with her hair and then enjoys a cozy moment recumbent besider her on the couch.)

Like Browning, Bidart and Ai offer characters in extremis. But also like Browning, and maybe more important for poetry and poetics than the sick and the criminal who inhabit the poems, they use these outsider consciousnesses to say something about poetry itself. I can't read "Porphyria's Lover" without seeing it as calling our attention to the necrophilia inherent in a certain ambition for literary immortality (the ambition we see at the end of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 -- "So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.") by literalizing its metaphors (I'll make the living woman into something that will be lasting and unchanging). There is, in Ai's best poems, a similarly searching critique of creative ambition, an examination of the ethics of doing things with words. Here she is on "Immortality":

I dreamed I was digging a grave
that kept filling with water.
The next day, you died.
I dressed you in a wool skirt
and jacket,
because you were always cold
and I had promised to do tha much for you.
Then I took a potato to eat, went outside,
and started to dig.

It goes on, and gets even creepier, and that's right, I think, for a poem about how the breath of the living is captured and stilled in the interest of defeating sluttish time, achieving stasis over mutability. And this is why it seems to me such a loss, this week's silencing of a voice that kept changing and kept breathing change.