Ai: A Tribute and Remembrance

Ai October 21, 1947 – March 20, 2010

Photograph by LaVerne Harrell Clark. The University of Arizona Poetry Center © 2008

She worked language in genius ways—Florence Anthony, the poet we came to know as Ai.

When I read a Facebook post about Ai's passing, I didn't believe it. I called Cyrus who called Chip who confirmed the news. The poets' drums were working, beating out a slow cadence for a woman whose poetry illuminated the darkest places in the American psyche, whose sustained critique of the corrupt, vile, and violent housed in social and political institutions makes for lively, yet difficult reading. The dramatic monologue or a persona poem in Ai's hand was a grenade thrown against the walls of greed, hypocrisy, and suffering. Re-reading "The Greenwood Cycle" from Dread and all of the poems in Greed was terrifying. Lord that woman could tell the devil his story. Sixty-two years is young in America. She left too soon.

March Post

On March 21, I posted the following: "a Sunday morning the second day of spring and I am in tears. The poet, Ai Ogawa has passed on March 20. We just lived through a soul killing winter, and many people did not make it to Friday's glorious vernal equinox. Joy Harjo said there was snow in Albuquerque. There was sun sun sun here."

Ai was not a mentor or teacher. She was a friend, one of the wonderful people I got to know in my short time living in Boston. She was a brilliant poet, and I remember buying Cruelty in the 1970s and seeing her picture and thinking what a beautiful and incredibly insightful woman. Her persona poems are contemporary classics. She was able to go deep into her subjects—she really could roam the shadow world; she understood the consequences, the brutality of absolute power whether wielded by dictators or some poor woman's husband.

I loved her occasional obsessions like The Wooster Group, especially Willem Dafoe and Ron Vawter who showed off their Johnsons when they performed a hula. Yes, those guys were sans culottes! She was incredibly bawdy and stylish and occasionally imperious, totally eccentric and witty. I wonder if her cats are okay. I talked with her earlier this year sharing a bit of my troubles, but mostly we ranked on some poets (lots of laughter), talked about Obama, and hoped each other well.

Literary Light & Complicated Connections

Ai's connections and disconnections to African Americans were frayed, to say the least—ironically since identity issues are the focus of several of her major poems. But, then again, she described herself as half Japanese, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Black Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche. Her obsession with being an indigenous person led to her quest for enrollment as a Native American, but she was never added to any tribal rolls.

To be so mixed and to acknowledge it was both brave and difficult for Ai. She demanded acceptance of who she was on her own terms and in many ways fostered the dialogues that now go on within our community about the mixed race, bi-racial, and ethnic complexity of those who decades past would have been seen as "negro" or better yet African American. But, more importantly, she was able to maintain a strong connection to the Black cultural community because of her enormous talent and her deep knowledge and powerful critiques of American racism. Her readership is deep and wide.

And we are reading her books for the extraordinary phrasemaking and sustained psychological portraits that Ai could achieve in dramatic monologues and persona poems. In addition to Dread, Greed, and the forthcoming No Surrender, her book titles Fate, Sin, Cruelty, The Killing Floor, and Vice serve as truth in packaging devices. Her seven published books written between 1973 and 2004 are one of the marvels of late-twentieth- and early-twentyfirst-century poetics, especially since she used that staple of Victorian poetry, the dramatic monologue. Ai's genius was to find the complexity in language and vernacular...