{"id":29903,"date":"2013-03-29T18:01:39","date_gmt":"2013-03-29T18:01:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=29903"},"modified":"2015-09-05T02:23:22","modified_gmt":"2015-09-05T02:23:22","slug":"ai-means-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=29903","title":{"rendered":"Ai Means Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ai Means Love<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Kenyon Review<\/a>
\n2010-03-27<\/p>\n

Tamiko Beyer<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Last week, the poet Ai<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I found out about her death, as I did Lucille Clifton\u2019s<\/a> recent passing, from a post on Facebook. But on the whole, the poetry world seems to have taken little notice.<\/p>\n

This lack of discussion and celebration of Ai\u2019s work is striking, especially compared to the outpouring that came after Clifton\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

I wonder if it has something to do with Ai\u2019s 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:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI wish I could say that race isn\u2019t important. But it is. More than ever, it is a medium of exchange, the coin of the realm with which one buys one\u2019s share of jobs and social position. This is a fact which I have faced and must ultimately transcend.\u201d \u2013 (from poetryfoundation.org)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u2019s writing printed in the Bay Area in the late 70\u2019s or early 80\u2019s. 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.)…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ai Means Love The Kenyon Review 2010-03-27 Tamiko Beyer 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,1196,8,20,25],"tags":[12462,14207,14208,14206],"class_list":["post-29903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-women","tag-ai","tag-kenyon-review","tag-tamiko-beyer","tag-the-kenyon-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29903"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42560,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29903\/revisions\/42560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}