The Collected Poems of Ai by Ai (review)

Admirers of Ai’s work will welcome the arrival of these Collected Poems, which chronicle the career of one of the most distinctive voices (and Ai’s poems give us many voices) of her generation. A mere glance at her book titles— Cruelty (1973), Killing Floor (1979), Sin (1986), Fate (1991), Greed (1993), Vice (1999), Dread (2003), and the posthumously published No Surrender (2010)—alerts readers to the fact that this poet is going to take us to the dark side of the street. Those seeking celebration, transcendence, affirmation, escape, or easy comfort had better look elsewhere. And yet, there is something about the poems that draws us in despite ourselves.

I first discovered Ai’s work in The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets sometime in the mid-seventies. Her poems stood out immediately as being unlike anything else in that particular anthology—or any other anthology I had ever seen. The speakers in the few poems included—and in the first three collections from which they were chosen—assert themselves with a kind of desperate self-assurance that forces us to acknowledge the existence of people and situations we might prefer to deny or ignore. The poems are raw and disturbing, even shocking—but entirely convincing. As Yusef Komunyakaa says in his introduction to the Collected Poems, “We believe Ai’s various speakers even when we don’t wish to.”

To a large extent, Ai’s poetic strategies remain consistent throughout her career. The dramatic monologue/persona poem predominates, as does the first person, the present tense—and violence, always violence—on the domestic, national, and global level. David Wojahn, in a 1986 New York Times Book Review article, proposed that we “imagine a Browning monologue written in the terse manner of Sam Shepard and you have a good idea of what Ai sounds like.” While the poems are definitely “monologues,” her characters often say things we would not expect anyone to actually say out loud in any play, movie, or real-life situation—giving us a blow-by-blow description of their actions, even as they’re being performed. For instance, take this passage from “Finished” (from Greed):

You force me to touchthe black, rubber flaps of the garbage disposalthat is open like a mouth saying, ah.You tell me it’s the last thing I’ll feelbefore I go numb.

There’s as much “stage direction” here as “dialogue.” The female speaker may be revealing a bit of her inner thoughts and feelings, but she is also telling the husband she is addressing what she is doing and what he is doing, even as their mutual actions unfold. In the hands of a lesser poet, this kind of artifice might seem awkward, but in Ai’s work, it often adds to the disturbing power of the poems. Both the “I” and the “you” in this scene are unstoppable. Pain is their default mode; the violence is happening and it is going to happen.

While there is an undeniable consistency of subject matter and technique throughout Ai’s work, these Collected Poems reveal how her poems evolved over the course of her career. In her first book, Cruelty, the poems tend to be short— usually less than a page each—and written in short, often end-stopped lines and clipped declarative sentences. The speakers, frequently identified in straightforward titles that function almost like labels—“The Country Midwife,” “The Color Thief,” “The Tenant Farmer,” “The Child Beater,” “The Dwarf,” and so on—reside in a no-man-or-woman’s land that seems to exist both in and out of time. Details suggest a rural, possibly southern, setting (lots of porches and fields and dirt, beat-up pickup trucks and wagons), though primal desperation is the true locale these characters inhabit.

In the second book, Killing Floor, the poems begin to get longer, the sentences more expansive. There’s a greater use of enjambment. Several poems are written in the voices of noted historical figures, such as Leon Trotsky, Yukio Mishima...