Red-Inked Retablos

The Poet Ai: An Appreciation

The Poet Ai An Appreciation When the poet Ai passed away on March 20, 2010, very few details surfaced about the circumstances of her death. Even the report of her passing moved very slowly through the social networking channels. I found out through a text from a friend who came across an unconfirmed statement made by a virtual friend on Facebook. And then silence, not so much as a follow-up from anywhere. I e-mailed, made phone calls, sent more texts, searched Twitter, Google, and the Blogosphere, and I either came across others who were searching for any snippet of information like I was, or upon entries that began, “I never read this poet before but . . .” Or even more devastatingly , “I never heard of her but . . .” Because it was the weekend I knew the University of Oklahoma (where she held a professorship) would not be posting any official statement until Monday at the earliest, I spent two days feeling pained and frustrated about the lackluster response from the poetry community at large, especially from the younger poets who were always quick to grieve for other writers, no matter what level of the dead writer’s acclaim or accomplishment. Just the previous month, we had lost Lucille Clifton, and everybody, it seemed, had some connection to the poet and/or her poems. The online tributes and cyber-celebrations collided with each other because there were so many expressions of sadness and appreciation for one of America’s most beloved poets. That’s when it hit me. The stark contrast between Ai and Lucille Clifton, two women of color, roughly ten years apart in age and who were both practitioners of the dramatic monologue, were glaringly obvious: Clifton was a public and visible figure, anyone in the field could stake a claim to a relationship with her; Ai was private, with such a small online presence that even locating her poems on the Internet produces negligible results. Clifton’s poetry, at times autobiographical, even in their darkest moments shone with light; Ai’s persona poems, even when they gestured toward 68 Studies the light, were terrifying. Encounters with the amiable Lucille Clifton (aka Mama Lucille), age seventy-three and a grandmother at the time of her death, were usually characterized as generous, she was a woman who had grown comfortable in her maternal and nurturing image. Stories about Ai, who was sixty-two, lean and elegant, single and childless, were, well, complicated. I will dispense with regurgitating other people’s experiences, those are theirs to keep or give away. I will speak instead about the Ai that I pieced together, and how it was appropriate that she leave this world with as much of the mystery and intensity that she put into it through her poetry. This is my tribute to Ai. The first time I saw Ai was around 1996, when we both lived in the college town of Tempe, Arizona. I was completing an MFA degree at Arizona State, and Ai, who taught occasionally for the writing program (though never during my tenure there), maintained her residence there because of the area’s low rent. Money matters would become a common theme whenever I heard anything in Tempe about Ai, but they were spoken less out of malice and more as a cautionary tale about the struggles of living the life of a poet. Ai had garnered some of the nation’s top literary prizes—the Guggenheim, the NEA grant (twice!), a fellowship from the Radcliffe Foundation, the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets—and here she was, trying desperately to make ends meet. All of these rumors came together when I sat in the back row to listen to Ai read at Changing Hands Bookstore on Mill Avenue. I will not lie: Ai was a terrible reader of her work. She rushed through the lines and spoke too softly, her face rarely changing expression as she delivered each piece with the same flat tone. I caught maybe every other phrase, and would have sneaked out of the room if I could, but because I was trapped there in that cramped little space, I focused instead on Ai herself—her hair pulled back dramatically, her long neck, graceful and attractive . I couldn’t exactly pinpoint her ethnicity: she looked black, but with Asian features, and she wore an elaborate display of Native American jewelry . She had changed her name, I had been told, to this Japanese...