AA POET BIO; Ai

"Ai is the only name by which I wish, and indeed, should be known." - Ai

Ai – a word meaning “love” in Japanese – became the pen name for Florence Anthony. Born on October 21, 1947, in Albany, Texas, she also lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles as a child. “There were good times, but they were always eclipsed by bad times,” Ai recounts for she was impoverished in San Francisco. Ai’s multicultural background – a Japanese father and a Choctaw, Cheyenne, African American, Dutch and Scots-Irish mother – is what keeps her life interesting and is an inspiration for her work. At the age of fourteen Ai began writing poetry to enter a poetry contest, but her family moved back to Tucson before she could submit her entry. Even though she didn’t enter the contest because she had to move, Ai realized that she had skill with the pen. She graduated from the University of Arizona with a bachelor degree in Japanese, and also has a M.F.A from UC-Irvine.   She writes about things that come to her through real life happenings as described by the media or personal experience.  For example, she can be listening to the radio or watching the news and she hears a particular lyric or newscast that catches her interest.

I decided to choose Ai and her poetry book "Vice" for many reasons. The very first aspect of her that pulled me was her ethnicity, with her background there are vast cultural stories that I can be exposed to and i really like to experience different cultures. The next was her style of writing. She writes about "off-the-wall" and unusual topics that are "hard" to talk about; including sex, rape, etc. this dark side is what i like to read about because it's so different than my real life livings, yet i can relate and it comforts me to know that another person feels the same way i do. After these realizations, i researched and came across some of her poems, and i was hooked onto the mysterious and ambiguous words.

There are several poems that i'm thinking about using, yet i still have yet to pick only three. they are called "The Prisoner", "Talking to His Reflection in a Shallow Pond", and "Blue Suede Shoes", "More", and "Elegy." The first prisoner deals with being interrogated as a terrorist and how much freedom means to a person that has been a PRISONER for so long. The next poem of course has to deal with identity and the cultural struggle with finding that identity balance in America. Next, im not very sure if i understood this poem correctly, but the way i see it, Ai is basically touching upon what a "REAL AMERICAN" is and looks like. what personality and what type of job they are obligated to. next, "More" has to deal with WANTING america, and wanting that American dream as someone who is a minority who cannot achieve the full "american experience." lastly, "Elegy" describes a city undergoing a war.