The Will to Transcendence in Contemporary American Poet, Ai

The Willto Transcendencein Contemporary AmericanPoet, Ai Rob Wz"lson I came not to astonish But to destroy you. Your Jug of cool water? Your Hanker after wings? Your Lech for transcendence'? -Galway Kinnell, "The Supper After the Last" Thereisa famous dialectical analysis of the American "lech for transcendence" byKenneth Burke called "I, Eye, Ay-Concerning Emerson's Early Essay on·Nature' and the Machinery of Transcendence." Bu~ke'simpacted pun of atitle suggests the way sublime-hungry Emerson's ego, his first-person I, is changedthrough the self-transcending vision of the imaginative eyeball, his eye,into a sustained cry of cosmic affirmation, an ay .1 The suggestivepen-name of contemporary American poet Florence Ogawa Anthony,Ai, argues the analogous American concern of her whole poetic project:the attempt to transcend her ego, her I, through some act of vision whichallowsthe assuming of a masked identity, another's I and eyes, and yet affirmsthe power of her own identity over the world of death. Who is Ai under the myriad masks of her poetry? If one were to add to Burke's Emersonian formula for poetic identity the "aiee" of sexual ecstasy, as well asthat of the Japanese word "ai" which signifies love, one would begin to havesome sense of the range and personae of voice in the poet called Ai; and ofthe dangers her symbolic quest to transcend mere personality entails. Byway of the scant biographical information now available, we know that Aiwas born in Tucson, Arizona in 1947; her father was Japanese and her mother "a Black, Choctaw Indian, Irish and German woman from Texas." Deepening the roots of this mixed identity, Ai went on to receive her B.A. in Oriental Studies from the University of Arizona and an M.F.A. in Creative Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 17, Number 4, Winter 1986,437-448 438 Rob Wilson Writing from the University of California at Irvine. She is married to thepoet Lawrence Kearney, and iswell known for her powerful and flamboyant readings on the U.S. poetry circuit. Cruelty, Ai's first book (1973), was acclaimed for a striking array of poetic masks expressed in a terse, highly charged language of emotive force: she allowsdwarfs, sharecroppers, prostitutes, crazed and jilted lovers, childbeaters warriors and ordinary persons in various _statesof ecstasy and grief to hav~ their ungenteel say. For example, a truckstop prostitute in "Everything: Eloy, Arizona, 1956" offers her body as the altar of her self-defense: He's keys, tires, a fire lit in his belly in the diner up the road. I'm red toenails, tight blue halter, black slip. He's mine tonight. I don't know him. He can only hurt me a piece at a time. (p. 144) And in "Hangman," the fields of Kansas are illuminated by the seemingly sacred act of public execution: He places his foot on the step going down and nearby, a scarecrow explodes, sending tiny slivers of straw into his eyes. (p. 124) "The siloes open their mouths" to receive the bloodshed of this full moral harvest of American violence which is performed in the name (the Lebanese worker thinks) of an ideal cause of "brotherhood." In her second collection, Killing Floor (1979), which won the prestigious Lamont Prize in 1978, her cast of masked characters becomes more upscale and allusive, full of literary, mystical, political and historical figures. Aigives voice to a cast of romantic visionaries like Mishima and Trotsky, heroes at political poles of fascist and revolutionary, yet sharing the same lurch to storm a way into eternity. Both books have been declared works of poetic empathy, transactions of a protean negative capability by which the ordinary identity of Ai is seemingly transcended and she enters another self, if only through the time and the symbolic agency of the poem. Ai (and I) becomes a kind of eloquent nothing, and yet she sees beyond the body's confines, as Emerson had urged upon the imperial ego of the poet on his errand of spiritual transformation in the American wilds. As the voice of the crazed colonialist Lope de Aguirre announces in "The Gilded Man," searching for some idealist El Dorado in the...