Ai Poetry: American Poets Analysis
Ai is a narrative poet who writes short, dramatic monologues, a form that allows her to get into the minds of her characters and speak with their voices. Her narrators are disenfranchised, spiritually bereft outsiders, often the voiceless members of society. She places them in a variety of settings and situations and uses direct, hard-hitting language to convey the essences of people who have no illusions. They do not have pretty lives, but they endure. They are from all races, reflecting America’s multiracial, multicultural society. These people assert their wills, understand pain, and want to make an impact. Their messages are gut-wrenching.
In the 1970’s, some feminists were so offended by Ai’s graphic, violent, and almost pornographic tales about spouse and child abuse, rape, and abortion that they found it hard to appreciate the technical aspects of her early works. They failed to see that she was portraying women as strong survivors. Ai’s women suffer from isolation, from being considered chattel by men. They are poverty-stricken. Although Ai purports not to have a political agenda, she does believe that she is recording the United States as it is. She sees Americans as a violent people, in thought and deed.
Ai’s poetry reflects the underbelly of the human condition, the thoughts too horrible to express verbally. The urge to kill becomes the need to kill. Passing anger does not pass; rather it leads to unspeakable, depraved actions, showing what monsters ordinary people are capable of becoming. Grim tales fill the newspapers every day, but readers, while stunned, go about their lives thinking that such things happen to other people.
Ai does not celebrate violence, but rather uses it to explore the possibility of achieving a state of grace, a transcendence of the self. She sees the cruelty that is inherent in intimacy. Her characters are both the victims and the victimizers.
Cruelty
Ai’s first collection of poetry, Cruelty, created a stir with its vivid details of abominations: mothers and fathers who do unspeakable things to their children, including a mother who feels satisfaction from devising new ways of inflicting pain on her two-year-old; children who enjoy killing; and religious leaders who do not lift up but instead destroy with base instincts that become baser when those who know of the abuses remain silent. Some of the details of physical abuse are too horrifying to give voice to, but Ai’s symphonic prose makes the specifics more palatable. It is the eloquence of her poetry, the beautifully expressed concept, the apt word, the melody she creates, the pleasing assonance, the unexpected interior rhyme, the simple language, and uncomplicated form that draw readers to her and allow them to glimpse the dark corners of their psyches.
Ai sees the essentials of life as love and hate, birth and death. Birth is a recurring theme, always matter-of-fact, if not deadly. She does not wonder at the miracle of new life; instead, in “The Country Midwife: A Day,” she describes the “scraggly, red child” and the “stink of birth.” In another poem, a husband sees his pregnant wife as a “brown walnut waiting to crack open and release her white meat”—no sentimentality here. Sex is always violent and base. In “Prostitute,” a woman kills her husband, searches through his pockets, puts on his boots, and holsters his guns, hoping to attract more clients, and then gratifies herself with his dead hand. Other titles attest to the general unpleasantness of Ai’s subject matter: “Tired Old Whore” and “A Forty-Three-Year-Old Woman Masturbating.” Writer Alice Walker said that this volume was not for those who want nice poetry...
(This entire section contains 1506 words.)
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Killing Floor
Killing Floor expands on the themes of violence and sexuality in Cruelty; in this volume, Ai creates a wider vision and pushes her poetry toward a more universal view of life and death. She gives snapshot glimpses of the lives of Leon Trotsky, Marilyn Monroe, and Emiliano Zapata. She also creates a German homosexual in Buchenwald, a half-mad Indian bride, a murderous fourteen-year-old boy. “Nothing But Color” is about cannibalistic, homosexual love and suicide.
Fate
Ai alleviates a little of the pain by identifying some of her monologues in Fate as “a fiction.” She even plays with history, using the facts of important people’s lives but altering them in strange ways. Readers can recognize the alterations but still feel the lives and deaths being examined. They can explore the motivating forces behind misdeeds.
In her introduction to Fate, Ai says that it is “about eroticism, politics/ religion and show business/ as tragicomedy/ performed by women and men/ banished to the bare stage of their obsessions.” This nicely stated theme certainly covers her treatment of notables. “Go,” dedicated to Edward Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne, begins in a familiar way, echoing the opening of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” “Once upon a midnight dreary.” In this retelling of the Chappaquiddick incident, she begins with “Once upon a Massachusetts midnight,” and gives voice to the dead woman who calls herself unloved and identifies Kennedy as both her lover and her killer. She observes that he carries no traces of her. She thinks of telling her side of the story, of “marching in” to the music of Satchmo (Louis Armstrong), the great trumpeter, who will “blow the walls of this Jericho of lies down.” The narrator observes that “Women are always the receivers of what is given without love or permission.”
In this collection, readers ride with screen idol James Dean to his death and hear his voice from beyond the grave, saying that he had “devised a way/ of living between/ the rules that other people make.” They walk with labor leader Jimmy Hoffa through the parking lot where he was last seen alive. They watch Elvis Presley practice his moves in front of a mirror.
Greed
Greed is about greed in multiple areas: money, power, sex, and love. It deals with consumers gobbling up the images created by advertising executives and wanting more and more. “Riot Act, April 29, 1992” is spoken by a black writer in police custody in South Central Los Angeles, who calls the looting and fires spawned by the acquittal of the police officers in the beating of Rodney King “the day [when] the wealth finally trickled down to the rest of us.” In the same poem, he talks about the Reeboks and Nikes that will enable him to fly through the air like basketball players Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson.
In “Self-Defense,” Marion Berry, mayor of Washington, D.C., who was arrested and convicted of drug-related charges after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) filmed him inhaling from a crack cocaine pipe, concludes “that is how you hold the nigger down.” He asks, “You think you can chew me up? . . . Reading rights won’t make a difference/ if the verdict is already in.” Berry claimed that the charges against him were politically motivated and that he had been set up.
Ai enters the worlds of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, Oswald’s assassin Jack Ruby, and a priest-pedophile, all outsiders, out of sync with social and ethical norms. Ai reinvents these people after their deaths and tells more about the American psyche than she does about the real figures.
The poem “Respect” is titled ironically because it details the lack of respect afforded women. A husband/ father comes home from work, grumbling about his hard-earned wages going for milk and diapers. He turns on his Aretha Franklin album, counting on her for the understanding he cannot get from other “goddamn women.” She represents a life of wine chilled on ice and of chills up the spine. Mainly, she does not talk back.
“Family Portrait” paints an ugly picture of home life, with a wife asking her husband to teach their two girls, ages seven and eleven, how to clean between their legs. He goes through the drill but uses inappropriate language.
Vice
Vice presents a collection of fifty-eight monologues from four earlier books—Cruelty, Killing Floor, Sin, and Fate—and seventeen new poems. The older selections resurrect Dean, Hoffa, Hoover, and Lenny Bruce, as well as multiple perpetrators of violence toward women and children. The new poems deal with O. J. Simpson, religious cult leader David Koresh, JonBenét Ramsey, Monica Lewinsky, and the police officer who made dramatic rescues after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building and then killed himself because he felt undeserving of an award. In one poem, a mother matter-of-factly tutors her daughter on how to seduce her father. In another, an aide rapes a comatose patient.
These new poems do not reflect any changes in Ai’s subject matter or attitude. In some ways, they display greater anger and greater horror at prevailing social attitudes. However, her technical skills still shine and her ability to seize attention and keep it continue to compel readers and critics. The National Book Award in Poetry gave Ai widespread recognition and acceptance.