Last week, the poet Ai passed away, unexpectedly. She was one of the first poets I read when I started studying poetry, and I have always admired the fierce bravery of her work.
From her poems, I learned about the poetic possibilities of the persona. I learned from the way she inhabited multiple voices with compassion and clarity, how she explored deep and often uncomfortable human truths. She did not turn away; she compelled us not to turn away.
I found out about her death, as I did Lucille Clifton’s recent passing, from a post on Facebook. But on the whole, the poetry world seems to have taken little notice.
This lack of discussion and celebration of Ai’s work is striking, especially compared to the outpouring that came after Clifton’s death.
I wonder if it has something to do with Ai’s insistence on the integrity of her multiracial identity. Identifying as Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Black, Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche, she refused to align herself with just one part of her racial identity. This put her on perpetual borderlands of identity politics, and she knew it:
“I wish I could say that race isn’t important. But it is. More than ever, it is a medium of exchange, the coin of the realm with which one buys one’s share of jobs and social position. This is a fact which I have faced and must ultimately transcend.” – (from poetryfoundation.org)
Indeed, the Asian American poetry community did not claim her as one of our own. I once came across a mimeographed collection of Asian American women’s writing printed in the Bay Area in the late 70’s or early 80’s. One article listed all the Asian American women writers active at that that time, and I remember that Ai was included on the list, but with a kind of reluctance. Because she did not specifically address Asian-American themes, there was a question as to whether or not she could be called an Asian American poet. (If I remember correctly, there was a similar discussion in the article about Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge and her work.)
I imagine that similar sorts of discussions about her work happened in the African American and Native American poetry circles during that time.
But in addition to the fact that she did not embrace a single racial identity, and therefore was not embraced by particular poetic communities of color, I wonder if the relative silence around her death has to do with the fact that her most powerful work are her persona poems.
That is, I wonder if there is a larger distance created between the poet and the reader in persona poems. Do we feel that we do not “know” the poet of a persona poem as well as we “know,” for example, someone like Lucille Clifton ??? especially if the only place we met each writer is on the page? Even if we know the “i” in Clifton’s work is not Clifton exactly, we perceive it to be some part of Clifton that we can track back to the poet-self. It’s more difficult to do that with Ai’s persona poems.
Even her name ??? the Japanese word for “love” that sounds the same as “I” ??? was a kind of persona, a kind of performance. She legally changed her name as an adult. “Ai is the only name by which I wish, and indeed, should be known,” she once wrote.
Frank Bidart has been on campus this week, and in his craft talk he commented that in writing his persona poems, he accessed a different part of his self. Persona poems like that tap into parts of one’s self that “you don’t necessarily want to be part of your social self.”
Perhaps it is this limited access to the socially acceptable self in Ai’s work that has prevented her readers from feeling the kind of personal connection that was so clearly evident in many of the tributes to Clifton and her work.
Whatever the reason, I do think the relative silence around her passing is a shame, and I hope that more is written in the next few weeks.