Ai (poet)
Ai | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Poet |
| Nationality | American |
| Genre | African American literature |
| Literary movement | Imagism |
| Notable works | Vice (1999) |
Florence Anthony (January 2, 1947 – March 19, 2010) was an American poet who legally changed her name to Ai.[1]
Life
Ai, who described herself as ½ Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Black, Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche, was born in Albany, Texas in 1947, and she grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Raised also in Las Vegas and San Francisco, she majored in Japanese at the University of Arizona and immersed herself in Buddhism.
Career
She received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and various universities; she also had been a frequent reader-performer of her work. Ai held an M.F.A. from the University of California at Irvine. She was the author of Dread (W. W. Norton & Co., 2003); Vice (1999), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; Greed (1993); Fate (1991); Sin (1986), which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; Killing Floor (1979), which was the 1978 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets; and Cruelty (1973). She also received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bunting Fellowship Program at Radcliffe College. She taught at Oklahoma State University and lived in Stillwater, Oklahoma until her death.
Literary views
Ai had considered herself as "simply a writer" rather than a spokesperson for any particular group [2]
Much of Ai's work was in the form of dramatic monologues. Regarding this tendency, Ai commented:
"My writing of dramatic monologues was a happy accident, because I took so much to heart the opinion of my first poetry teacher, Richard Shelton, the fact that the first person voice was always the stronger voice to use when writing. What began as an experiment in that voice became the only voice in which I wrote for about twenty years. Lately, though, I've been writing poems and short stories using the second person, without, it seems to me, any diminution in the power of my work. Still, I feel that the dramatic monologue was the form in which I was born to write and I love it as passionately, or perhaps more passionately, than I have ever loved a man."[3]
Name change
She legally changed her name to "Ai," which means "love" in Japanese. She said "Ai is the only name by which I wish, and indeed, should be known. Since I am the child of a scandalous affair my mother had with a Japanese man she met at a streetcar stop, and I was forced to live a lie for so many years, while my mother concealed my natural father's identity from me, I feel that I should not have to be identified with a man, who was only my stepfather, for all eternity."
Selected works
Poetry Collections
- Cruelty, 1973
- Killing Floor, 1979
- Sin, 1986
- Fate, 1991
- Greed, 1993
- Vice: New and Selected Poems, 1999
- Dread: Poems, 2004
- Why Can't I Leave You?
See also
References
- ^ Ai Ogawa
- ^ "Ai," American Poetry Observed, edited by Joe David Bellamy. University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 1984, pp. 1-8; quoted statement is on page 5.
- ^ http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/ai/about.htm
External links
- Academy of American Poets
- UIUC - Modern American Poetry[dead link]
- Norton Poets Online[dead link]
- Oklahoma State University Faculty pages
- Modern American Poetry