Next month will mark the 40th anniversary of the publication of Cruelty, the first of eightbooks of poetry by the poet whose pen name and legal middle name was Ai and the third anniversary of her death from breast cancer at age 62. Today W.W. Norton is publishing all eight of her poetry books in one volume as The Collected Poems of Ai. In my review of the book in New York Journal of Books I note that at a time when most American poetry was autobiographical Ai wrote dramatic monologues in other people's voices.
New York Journal of Books
In his introduction to the book poet Yusef Komunyakaacompares Ai's dramatic approach to that of a method actor. Another analogy for the way Ai inhabited other people's voices and roles would be the one woman shows of Anna Deavere Smith.
Ai's poems are not to everyone's taste. If you prefer the Rolling Stones to the Beatles, Howling Wolf to Muddy Waters, the gritty realism (including graphic violence and strong sexual content) of HBO's Sunday night original series to PBS' British dramas you'll probably enjoy Ai's poetry; if not, stay with safer, tamer, less edgy poets. But even if you're fond of her poems you'll probably want to pace yourself at just a few at a time because of their frequent and brutal violence.
Ai is drawn to the shocking and perverse. She quotes the Rolling Stone's song "Gimme Shelter" in her poem"The Mortician's Twelve-Year-Old Son," a poem whose depiction of necrophilia one could imagine dramatized on HBO. In my NYJB review I quote "The Kid" as an example of graphic violence in Ai's work. In "Knockout" Mike Tyson’s rape of Desiree Washington is discussed by an inner city sex worker who has no empathy for Ms. Washington. In “Why Can’t I Leave You?” Ai addresses marriage and sexuality in the context of rural poverty from the wife's perspective.
Quite a few of Ai's poems are in the voices of villains. She lets the bad guy tell his side of the story and in so doing he incriminates himself. "The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981" is in the voice of a serial killer (see video). In "Kristallnacht," a four part six and a half page poem, the speaker is a half French half German former Nazi collaborator. The poem's final couplet is haunting: "Pretend I died for nothing/instead of living for it."
In “Life Story,” another six and a half page poem, the speaker is a Roman Catholic priest accused of sexual abuse, and in “Family Portrait, 1960” the speaker is the poet’s step-father whom her bed-ridden mother asks to supervise eleven year old Florence and her seven year old half sister Roslynn as they shower instructing them to “scrub your little pussies.”
History is a recurring theme in Ai's work with poems in the voices of Leon Trotsky, J. Robert Oppenheim, Senator Joseph McCarthy, Jimmy Hoffa, J. Edgar Hoover, Fidel Castro, Presidents Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Clinton and George W. Bush, among others as well as lesser known figures. Ezra Pound defined an epic as a "poem including history." The Collected Poems of Ai is an everyman and woman's The Cantos for the late Twentieth and early Twenty-first Centuries.
Myreview concludes with an expression of gratitude to author Jennifer Grotz for sharing her inner life and its conflicts via her mind’s eye and poet’s ear in The Needle.
It is a fortunate coincidence that today is both International Women's Day and the release date of Marge Piercy's The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems 1980-2010 by New York publisher Alfred Knopf. In my review of the latter in New York Journal of Books in addition to mentioning that Piercy is a political and feminist poet, I note, "The Hunger Moon, her second volume of selected poems, a rich selection from the last three decades, ... includes: narrative poems about her childhood in Detroit, young adulthood in Manhattan, everyday life with her husband and cats on Cape Cod where they are year round residents, among other subjects on all of which she is a terrific storyteller; nature poems that describe the fauna and flora of the Cape; love poems, some of which attest to the strength, devotion and passion of her current marriage, while others reflect the pain of less healthy previous relationships, pain that still smarts despite her current conjugal happiness; and religious poems that are popular choices for reading out loud at Jewish life cycle events, some of which are reprinted in “additional readings” anthologies meant to supplement non-Orthodox Jewish prayer books." (source: New York Journal of Books)
HUC awards Marge Piercy an honorary doctorate
margepiercy.com
Hebrew Union College awarded Piercy an honorary doctorate for her liturgical poems. Examples of her Jewish poems include:
The Chuppah
The chuppah stands on four poles. The home has its four corners. The chuppah stands on four poles. The marriage stands on four legs. Four points loose the winds that blow on the walls of the house, the south wind that brings the warm rain, the east wind that brings the cold rain, the north wind that brings the cold sun and the snow, the long west wind bringing the weather off the far plains.
Here we live open to the seasons. Here the winds caress and cuff us contrary and fierce as bears. Here the winds are caught and snarling in the pines, a cat in a net clawing breaking twigs to fight loose. Here the winds brush your face soft in the morning as feathers that float down from a dove’s breast.
Here the moon sails up out of the ocean dripping like a just washed apple. Here the sun wakes us like a baby. Therefore the chuppah has no sides.
It is not a box. It is not a coffin. It is not a dead end. Therefore the chuppah has no walls. We have made a home together open to the weather of our time. We are mills that turn in the winds of struggle converting fierce energy into bread.
The canopy is the cloth of our table where we share fruit and vegetables of our labor, where our care for the earth comes back and we take its body in ours. The canopy is the cover of our bed where our bodies open their portals wide, where we eat and drink the blood of our love, where the skin shines red as a swallowed sunrise and we burn in one furnace of joy molten as steel and the dream is flesh and flower.
O my love O my love we dance under the chuppah standing over us like an animal on its four legs, like a table on which we set our love as a feast, like a tent under which we work not safe but no longer solitary in the searing heat of our time.
Kaddish
Look around us, search above us, below, behind. We stand in a great web of being joined together. Let us praise, let us love the life we are lent passing through us in the body of Israel and our own bodies, let's say amen.
Time flows through us like water. The past and the dead speak through us. We breathe out our children's children, blessing.
Blessed is the earth from which we grow, Blessed the life we are lent, blessed the ones who teach us, blessed the ones we teach, blessed is the word that cannot say the glory that shines through us and remains to shine flowing past distant suns on the way to forever. Let's say amen.
Blessed is light, blessed is darkness, but blessed above all else is peace which bears the fruits of knowledge on strong branches, let's say amen.
Peace that bears joy into the world, peace that enables love, peace over Israel everywhere, blessed and holy is peace, let's say amen.
Each Thursday, The Arty Semite features excerpts and reviews of the best contemporary Jewish poetry. This week, Jake Marmer introduces the work of Karen Alkalay-Gut, whose first poem appeared in the Forverts when she was 10 years old.
Courtesy Karen Alkalay-Gut
A remarkable Israeli poet and professor at Tel Aviv University, Karen Alkalay-Gut is the author of numerous poetry collections, including “So Far, So Good” (2004). She writes almost exclusively in English, though her writing career began in Yiddish. When she was just 10, her poem “Mein Koter” was published here – in the Forverts.
Evenings in a small room grandma makes the bed and talks about you, our own Sir Herbert, and about Lady Samuel lighting sabbath candles in the mansion on the Mount of Olives, a wonder to behold. A first in Judea, on Shabbat Nahamu in 1920 she cried like a girl when you descended from Augusta Victoria on foot to make Zion rejoice in her sons: the soldiers of the Jewish Legion to your right and your left, a tribe of rulers. In the Hurba all as one resounded in song greeting you with great rejoicing (even Ben Yehudah stood wrapped in his talit and wept) and at the Amdursky Hotel the tables were already set and the wine uncorked, awaiting the king at his reception.
--(translated from the Hebrew by David Cooper)
Notes: Sir Herbert Samuel: British Jewish politician who served as the first High Commissioner in mandate Palestine. Shabbat Nahamu: The first sabbath after Tisha B'Av (the ninth of Av, the anniversary of the destruction of Jerusalem and the first and second Temples by the Babylonians and the Romans respectively). August Victoria: a mansion on the Mount of Olives (opposite Jerusalem's Old City) first built by Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II for his wife Augusta Victoria, which in the early years of the British mandate served as the High Commissioner's residence and is now a hospital. Jewish Legion: Jewish battalions in the British army that fought the Turks in World War I, at first in the Gallipoli campaign and later in Palestine. Hurba: The largest synagogue in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City prior to its destruction by the Jordanians in 1948. Ben Yehuda: Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the father of modern Hebrew and author of its first dictionary. Talit: a Jewish prayer shawl. Haim Be'er grew up in Jerusalem in an Orthodox family that was part of The Old Yeshuv, the Jewish community that had been in the Land of Israel for centuries when the first Zionist settlers arrived. "The High Commissioner" and other poems in his first collection are based on his grandmother's recollections of Jerusalem in the early decades of the 20th century which she told him when he was a little boy and which he remembered decades later as a young man.
Every time I google myself I find my poems on websites I didn't even know existed. For example: An Element of Perfidy and maybe not (the second poem, the one at the bottom of the page). The latter included html code to reproduce elsewhere, as I do here:
Maybe Not
By David Cooper
My sister is certain men also have hormonal cycles and
i began to see her point the morning i woke up
without a hard on and went through the day feeling i might
burst into tears at any moment grey sky sticky air
always about to rain but didn't and i carried an umbrella around
like a barrister less muddy
waters' "mannish boy" than mayakovsky's "...cloud in trousers"
Every time I google myself I find my poems on websites I didn't even know existed. For example: An Element of Perfidy and maybe not (the second poem, the one at the bottom of the page). The latter included html code to reproduce elsewhere, as I do here:
Maybe Not
By David Cooper
My sister is certain men also have hormonal cycles and
i began to see her point the morning i woke up
without a hard on and went through the day feeling i might
burst into tears at any moment grey sky sticky air
always about to rain but didn't and i carried an umbrella around
like a barrister less muddy
waters' "mannish boy" than mayakovsky's "...cloud in trousers"
This last one was a surprise. It's is from the website of "256 Shades of Grey, EAU CLAIRE WISCONSIN'S AVANT-POP LITERARY ARTS 'ZINE." I don't know how long these poems have been up there, but I'm delighted they are included. I don't even remember submitting them to the editors or ever receiving an acceptance note/email from the editors, but I'm not complaining.
When I tried googling "David Cooper, Poet" it listed my homepage.
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