It amazes me that Ai isn’t read more frequently. When I was an undergraduate, I don’t recall (m)any references being made to her work by professors or fellow students, and among my current crop of poetry cronies, her name just doesn’t come up. This only affects me positively, since, as much as I do read poetry reviews in search of new source material and try to remain neutral in doing so, no matter how the writer succeeds at swaying me one way or another, I am acutely, perhaps perversely aware of current trends. Therefore, the ’fact’ of Ai’s faint blip on the contemporary poetry radar only encourages my further exploration.
I have a suspicion that she somehow falls between the cracks of two camps: too pulpy for academics, and too plebeian for poetry true believers. Not that she isn’t ’smart’ – she obviously is – but because of the deceptive ease with which her work reads, she is underrated and underestimated. Her approachability may be misleading, yet it’s a major asset considering the dark subject matter of Ai’s poetry.
I’m basing this opinion on Vice, her 1999 new and selected (a National Book Award winner). She has only published one book since, Dread, in 2003, which follows Ai’s trend toward single-titled tomes. Some readers swear against selected editions, but even here, in an arguably limited context, one observes Ai’s development as a poet and, more than that, a poet obsessed with working out her craft almost exclusively through dramatic monologues.
The earlier poems in Vice are blunt, terse, and photographic, rife with stark images of geographical extremes – an emaciated and humid southwest, bone-dry farmlands, blizzard-blown Alaskan bars. None run longer than a page. They are also impersonal, with characters known simply as he, she, we, you; the man, your brother, my woman. Only "Cuba, 1962," bothers to name one, and she’s a corpse. Juanita’s fate is worse than death – discovered, "lying face-down in the dirt" by her farmer husband, who chops off her feet, because "what I take from the earth, I give back "– yet the poem is also cruelly poignant:
tastes something sweeter than this sugar cane;
it is grief.
If you eat too much of it, you want more,
you can never get enough.
Impersonal, but not dis-personal. A neat trick, both cleverly effective in character or execution, and precise in procedure.
With her second book and onward, the scope of Ai’s poems widens, and the work itself expands to encompass more complex narratives, stretching over many pages. "Killing Floor," the title poem of her sophomore collection, begins a long fascination with historical figures, here Leon Trotsky, elsewhere writers (Yukio Mishima), celebrities (Lenny Bruce, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean), politicians and power brokers (General Custer, the Kennedys, Joe McCarthy, Jimmy Hoffa, J. Edgar Hoover), psycho- and sociopaths (the Atlanta child murderer, the rapist of a hospital-bound comatose patient, a Gulf War vet suffering from post-traumatic stress). Suffice it to say, these are not cheery portraits or puff pieces, but eviscerations, exclamations, odes to entropy and existential crises. Ai doesn’t change style or tone so much in these poems, but I admire her craft and subtle fluctuations in voice, the unflinching way she puts a cracked mirror up to society and watches it pander and preen.
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