Ai, a Steadfast Poetic Channel of Hard Lives, Dies at 62

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Ai, a Steadfast Poetic Channel of Hard Lives, Dies at 62

By MARGALIT FOX
Published: March 27, 2010

The prominent American poet Ai, whose work — known for its raw power, jagged edges and unflinching examination of violence and despair — stood as a damning indictment of American society, died on March 20 in Stillwater, Okla. She was 62 and lived in Stillwater.
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Oklahoma State University

Ai, a poet and professor.

The cause was pneumonia, a complication of previously undiagnosed cancer, said Carol Moder, head of the English department at Oklahoma State University, where Ai had taught since 1999.

Born Florence Anthony, the poet legally changed her name to Ai, which means love in Japanese, as a young woman. She received a National Book Award in 1999 for “Vice: New and Selected Poems,” published that year by W. W. Norton & Company.

Her other books include “Sin” (1986), “Fate” (1991), “Greed” (1993) and “Dread” (2003). A posthumous volume, “No Surrender,” is to be published by Norton in September.

Ai’s poems, which have been widely anthologized, are nearly always dramatic monologues, a form closely associated with the 19th-century English poet Robert Browning. To this form, she brought a flinty, distinctly 20th-century American sensibility.

“Imagine a Browning monologue rewritten in the terse manner of Sam Shepard,” the poet David Wojahn wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1986, “and you have a good idea of what an Ai poem sounds like.”

Though Ai’s work was determinedly not autobiographical, its concern with disenfranchised people was informed, she often said, by her own fractional heritage. Many poems could be read as biting dissertations “On Being 1/2 Japanese, 1/8 Choctaw, 1/4 Black, and 1/16 Irish,” as the title of a 1978 essay she wrote in Ms. magazine put it. (The proportions are telling, too, for not quite adding up to a complete person.)

The narrators of Ai’s poems are male and female, young and old, famous and unsung. Many are profoundly unlikable, some genuinely evil. They do terrible things. In the worlds they inhabit, families are shattered, lovers abandoned, children abused.

In her early work, characters tend to be people on the margins of society, poor, anonymous, festering in small towns. Their relationships are defined by sexual yearning, but also by neglect, betrayal and violence. Her poem “Salomé” opens:

I scissor the stem of the red carnation

and set it in a bowl of water.

It floats the way your head would,

if I cut it off.

But what if I tore you apart

for those afternoons

when I was fifteen

and so like a bird of paradise

slaughtered for its feathers.

Even my name suggested wings,

wicker cages, flight.

Come, sit on my lap, you said.

I felt as if I had flown there;

I was weightless.

You were forty and married.

That she was my mother never mattered.

She was a door that opened onto me.

Ai’s later poems are often narrated by historical figures, as if the famous dead — be they villainous or venerated — had been given one last chance to speak. These narrators include Jimmy Hoffa, Marilyn Monroe, Lenny Bruce, Joseph R. McCarthy, Ferdinand Marcos and Elvis Presley.

Florence Anthony was born in 1947 in Albany, Tex., and reared mostly in Arizona by her mother and stepfather. For years her biological father’s identity was kept from her. She later learned, as she wrote in an autobiographical essay in the reference work Contemporary Poets, that “I am the child of a scandalous affair my mother had with a Japanese man she met at a streetcar stop.”

In 1969 Ms. Anthony received a bachelor’s degree in Oriental studies, with a concentration in Japanese, from the University of Arizona. She earned a master of fine arts in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine, in 1971. Her first collection of poems, “Cruelty,” was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1973.

A half-sister, Roslynn O’Carroll, is her only immediate survivor.

Over the years, some reviewers criticized Ai’s poetry as sensationalist, formally repetitive and unremittingly bleak. Others, however, praised it for its steadfast candor and for its diverse array of characters. Writing in The Times Book Review in 1976, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louis Simpson described her work this way:

“What separates poets from mere versifiers is a quality of feeling based in experience. This is why the poems of Ai, for example, make the poems of most of her contemporaries seem like kid stuff.”