March 25, 2010

RIP: Ai

by

Ai (1947-2010)Ai, the National Book Award winning poet who was born Florence Anthony but changed her name to the Japanese word for “love,” has died of natural causes at the age of 62, according to a Los Angeles Times report by Carolyn Kellogg. The poet, who won the National Book Award in 1999 for the collection Vice, had a new book due out from Norton in the fall.

Kellogg points us to this bio note about the poet — who was “of mixed racial heritage … said to include Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, African-American, Irish, Southern Cheyenne and Comanche” — at the Poetry Foundation:

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.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.

  • molly

    A close friend gave me Ai’s book “Sin” (1986) years ago and now, hearing of her untimely death, I’m shocked to realize that she wasn’t even 40 when she wrote those searing, wise poems. Like a latter-day Browning, Ai writes a lot of poems that are dramatic monologues — often from the interior of some truly unexpected or downright terrifying people. Just a glimpse of her penetration of character and sensibility:

    From “The Testimony of Robert Oppenheimer”:

    To me, the ideological high wire
    is for fools to blance on with their illusions.
    It is better to leap into the void.
    Isn’t that what we all want anyway? –
    to eliminate all pretense
    till like the oppressed who in the end
    identifies with the oppressor,
    we accept the worst in ourselves
    and are set free.

    It is terrible that it’s Ai’s death that prompts me to return to her poems after so long. But I’m reading her again and I hope others will too.

    Ai’s words on the insistence on racial identity and identification resonate deeply. Read her poems which embrace the particular and also go far beyond it.

  • molly

    A close friend gave me Ai’s book “Sin” (1986) years ago and now, hearing of her untimely death, I’m shocked to realize that she wasn’t even 40 when she wrote those searing, wise poems. Like a latter-day Browning, Ai writes a lot of poems that are dramatic monologues — often from the interior of some truly unexpected or downright terrifying people. Just a glimpse of her penetration of character and sensibility:

    From “The Testimony of Robert Oppenheimer”:

    To me, the ideological high wire
    is for fools to blance on with their illusions.
    It is better to leap into the void.
    Isn’t that what we all want anyway? –
    to eliminate all pretense
    till like the oppressed who in the end
    identifies with the oppressor,
    we accept the worst in ourselves
    and are set free.

    It is terrible that it’s Ai’s death that prompts me to return to her poems after so long. But I’m reading her again and I hope others will too.

    Ai’s words on the insistence on racial identity and identification resonate deeply. Read her poems which embrace the particular and also go far beyond it.

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