Ai Essay Research Paper AiAi commentsAi is

black-humored. But AI is not to be denied her own kind of verse Gothic, an America, a

world, seen as though through disembodied witness and nothing if not at one with her

slightly maverick status in contemporary African American poetry.

From The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Copyright ? Oxford

University Press.

Rachel Hadas

All Ai’s work is stark, harsh, and dramatic in style. But as her preoccupations move

from personal violence to historic atrocity, her imagination opens out into the public

arena; the domestic turns political. Throughout her poetry, a stripped-down diction

conveys an underlying, almost biblical indignation–not, at times, without compassion–at

human misuses of power and the corrupting energies of various human appetites.

Although virtually all the poems present themselves as spoken by a particular

character, Ai makes little attempt to capture individual styles of diction, personal

vocabularies; the result, if monotonous, is also striking. A Mexican revolutionary, an old

woman with a young lover, the dead Robert Kennedy, a Vietnam veteran–all speak with a

sullen, deadpan passion that galvanizes our attention through the voice’s intensity rather

than by the accumulation of realistic detail. The foreshortened, nearly parodic vividness

of Ai’s characters makes them closer to types than to historical portraits.

From The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English. Copyright ?

1994 by Oxford University Press.

Claudia Ingram

Several contemporary writers challenge neatly drawn, "naturalized" cultural

categories by ernphasizing their own mixed ancestry and the multiplicity of their

identifications. . . .

The poet Ai refuses to reduce her identifications to a single ethnicity and thereby

calls cultural boundaries into question. Disturbance of boundaries–though by no means

only ethnic boundaries–also characterizes Ai’s poetic practice and makes of that practice

a powerful cultural critique.

Although reviewers occasionally refer to Ai as a black poet, she does not consider

herself to be a black writer. As she pointed out in a 1988 interview, her poetry does not

deal primarily with black life and experience. While she characterizes herself as

"Japanese and black, or black and Japanese," in this interview she also

mentioned Irish, Choctaw, and German forebears and a sense of affinity with the Hopi,

Navajo, and Pima people of the American Southwest, where she grew up. Though Ai denies

none of these as influences, she calls each of them into question as the category

that furnishes her a stable and essential identity. If one cannot escape cultural

definition, she implies, one can at least use the very multiplicity of one’s

identifications to destabilize culture’s categories of definition.

Ai’s poems have the indirect effect of calling cultural definitions of all kinds into

question. A dramatic monologuist, she invents voices for those whose entrapment in their

cultural definition is most apparent. The speakers of her poems include the obscure and

despised who are usually presumed to have no voice at all and those public figures who

have become sheer icon, whose cultural meaning subsumes anything they can be imagined

saying. In the crucible of her work, their unbearable identities seem always at the point

of being shattered and remade, or simply shattered. The poems’ speakers by no means

transcend cultural definition, but they speak in such a way as to profoundly unsettle the

very positions from which they speak.

The poems achieve these effects by a variety of devices. As Bulgarian literary theorist

Julia Kristeva argues, ambiguous image–images that obscure or transgress boundaries–tend

to disturb the sense of settled identity. The speakers of Ai’s poems often describe

themselves breaking the body’s boundary through violence, by transgressing laws and gender

roles, or by crossing from the world of the ordinary into surreal, dreamlike experiences.

The poems contain horrifying and unsettling images of the bodily remnants and effluvia

that disturb because they seem neither human nor inhuman, as well as characters who

disturb by their ambiguity, seeming both innocent and evil. The reader is both deeply

engaged and deeply unsettled by the poems’ speakers; none of the positions constructed by

the poems invites comfortable identification. Thus, the poems have the effect of

destabilizing the reader’s position as well as the positions of their own speakers. By

means of these destabilizations, Ai’s work performs a radical critique of the identities

constructed by contemporary culture.

From The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States.

Copyright ? 1995 by Oxford University Press.