Ai's Vice

Sometimes I tire of critiquing poetry. Sometimes I don’t want to know what the poet is trying to say, or the craft s/he is using to say it: internal rhymes, line breaks, syntax. Sometimes I just want to feel the poem and close the book with nothing more than my own nostalgia on my mind.

Good poets can do this. They can use all the elements of craft to create a poem that is better left felt than critiqued. Ai is one of these poets. As I read her poems, I think of my own experiences, and I am inspired to write about them using the beauty of the language and the power of memory. As a poet, I think any topic can be powerful, as long as it’s powerful to the poet. And sometimes, on occasion, I want nothing to do with form or craft, I only want the reader to feel something. That’s not to say that craft is left out, because it never can be, but it can definitely take a back seat while the story is initially being told.

Now, Ai is not craftless, nor is she unaware of the technicalities of writing – quite the opposite in fact. She is so good at everything technical that her poems seem painless in their construction. In “She Didn’t Even Wave,” she takes the death of a mother and celebrates the beauty in it:

She was walking toward the barn

when it struck her. I didn’t move;

I just stood at the screen door.

Her whole body was light.

I’d never seen anything so beautiful (30).

This language is accessible. I can go into specifics. I can discuss the “o” sound in these few lines and how the repetition of it ads to the “awe” of the poem, the tragic memory of the speaker, the moment where life changed and the only thing the child could do was watch with her mouth open. I can point out the simplicity of the language and how it is working on two levels of this poem: accessibility and the memory from a child. And I guess I just did discuss both points of craft, but I only did it to get to this point: the craft is so exact that it is really the story that the reader is left with. And this story is tragic and beautiful and tragic again. It makes you want to cry from sadness and joy simultaneously.

Ai’s uses of the seemingly simple lines – lines like “I can break your heart” (37), and “I mean to live” (26) – have me crawling across the floor, looking for an appropriate place to hyperventilate. I don’t want to know why she wrote it, I only want to be left with the feeling of having read it.