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they want to put into it is a whole different thing. Some don’t really want to do the work, they just want to be famous.” Her goal to teach students the difference between good and bad writing and how to do at least a minor critique of poetry is basic to a solid liberal arts education, she says. “Teaching isn’t about making them write my way. It’s about helping them find their own voice, their own way of writing.” a VO i C e F O r m a n y
People often mistake Ai’s free-verse poetry, typically written as first-person monologues, as autobiographical. Her poetry, which vividly explores the thoughts of both victims and abusers, gives voice to people of all ages, races, professions and socioeconomic backgrounds. Characters range from children to the elderly, predatory priests to war veterans, abusive parents to pop culture icons. “Usually I just find characters I like and write about them,” says Ai, who earned a bachelor’s in Japanese from the University of Arizona and a master of fine arts in creative writing from the University of California at Irvine, where she adopted her pen name. “I feel more like a playwright. Monologues are a blend of poetry and playwriting where I can be the actor, director and producer — all the roles.”
Ai wonders if her family tree provides an innate advantage when she’s developing her character-driven monologues. Like one of her favorite writers, “My family has been mixed since at Shakespeare, she creates characters with least 1790. Maybe all these races make me fatal flaws and failures. In “The Mother’s able to get into all my fictional characters,” Tale,” a woman explains to her son why a she says. “And maybe I just have empathy husband must beat his wife, and in “The for people.” Prisoner,” a father forces his young son to Ai never knew her father or even about crawl on smashed Coke bottles and admit his existence until she was 17. to wrongdoings he didn’t do. “I’m a child of scandal. My mother had In some of Ai’s monologues, historical an affair with a Japanese man while she was figures such as J. Edgar Hoover and J. Robert married to her first husband.” When Ai’s Oppenheimer justify their actions, while other father learned about the pregnancy, he told monologues focus on iconic figures such as Ai’s mother to go home to her own family. the Kennedys, Jack Ruby, Marilyn Monroe Ai was born in 1947, two months premaand James Dean. ture, at her grandparents’ home in Albany, In her poem “Jimmy Hoffa’s Odyssey” Texas. “My grandmother, whose name was Ai reveals her dark humor, as she calls it, Margaret, put me in a shoe box and gave me when the missing mob boss describes the hot toddies — whiskey — the Irish remedy aliens who abducted him. for everything.” When Ai moved to Oklahoma, a new Ai grew up mostly in Tucson, Ariz., with world of characters began to emerge as she her mother and younger half-sister, but she explored her Native American genealogy,
“I found my gift and took it all the way.” particularly her great-grandfather’s possible link to Cheyenne and Choctaw tribes. “Oklahoma turned out to be a gold mine for me. In Oklahoma, so many people mixed together — like my family.” Ai describes herself as half Japanese as well as a combination of Choctaw-Chickasaw, African-American, Irish, Southern Cheyenne and Comanche. She originally intended to write a memoir, but the piles of archival records, correspondence and biographies — even the dead ends concerning her own ancestry — contained details too intriguing to ignore. “I couldn’t stand it,” she laughs. “I thought, ‘I’ve got all this great material, I’ve got to use it somehow.’” Much of the resulting poetry fills her eighth book, No Surrender, to be released in September by W.W. Norton & Company.
Ai’s poem “Passage” (opposite page) from her book Dread is reprinted with permission from the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company Inc.
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remembers a time when her family lived in San Francisco and her fellow fifth-graders called her a “nigger Jap.” “I looked more Japanese than I do now,” she says. “My mother said if anyone asks, tell them your grandfather is Indian.” The half-truth left Ai wondering until her mother revealed that Ai’s father was Japanese. Ai was 17 and her mother refused to speak of it again until she was 21. “I didn’t know how to confront her about it. I felt deprived. I was confused about how I looked.” Ai was 26 when her mother finally revealed her father’s last name, and Ai legally changed her name to Ai Ogawa. “I thought it might force her to tell me more,” she says, although it didn’t. “I thought, ‘It’s my name.’ I was young and mad at her. I thought she deserved it.” Ai’s first poem, written at age 12, was the result of her Catholic school assignment to write a mass before being fed to the lions. “The nuns made me read it out loud. I didn’t realize until later it was because it was good.” (continues on page 30}