70. Die Dichterin Ai

So ließ sie sich gern nennen: „the Poet Ai“. Sie stammte aus Texas und gab sich vor dem Gesetz den Namen Ai, was auf Japanisch „Liebe“ heißt. In der Zeitschrift Cimarron lese ich, daß sie im März diesen Jahres gestorben ist. Aus dem Nachruf von Dagoberto Gilb:

I love writers because I worship words and lines of them. Writers are far more important to me than presidents, premiers, comandantes, colonels or generals, kings, queens, super hottie movie stars or underwear models, rockers, directors, ballplayers (excluding track!), even touched by God, evangelical rightwing TV commentators—this is how fringie dangerous I am. Most of the writers I praise are no more than names, mantra-like syllables, on indefinably meaningful books. Or were. For a good half of my adult life—when I was officially allowed to be a member—I have been privileged to meet a few. Some I’ve come to know even.

So many are boring. I don’t mean boring as lifestyle, as in which store decor in their home, the pro- or anti-fashion of their hair or the hip-hop quotient of their slang, not even as in a measure of distance on any form of pedometer. What matters to me…hard to describe. A glint of eye, as faintly seen as a distant star, on an otherwise dismissed object in a busy room? A distraction of speech either too fast or too slow? The will to risk with no acted out rebellion in it? A mute, even embarrassed awareness of the mystery being alive is, or the contrary, an inability to fathom anyone unconscious of its thrill or terror? The storytellers and poets who are any of the above are not bores. Yet most, lots, who have the titlewriter or poet seem no more haunted by daemons than a geologist. They make such good choices in careers, mates, clever plots and touching images, that even their parents sound just right. Hard for those of us raised with dysfunction to bitch about those without it. Could be it’s me and I should stick to watching sitcoms. Whatever, I don’t hang much. I’ve never done much to appear on the society page of the living writer.

(…)

What I’d read of her work was raw, fearless, driven, smart, good. She wrote unnostalgically about the poor and the outcaste, openly about sex and violence but without cliché or stereotypes or in a simplistic binary politic—so that her poetry was not only about holy victims or folkloric heroes, nothing that made her people better than your people, only about inside each and every. Her work even seems to question whether cultural or racial identity can continue to exist, even as her most riveting characters were black. Cruelty was a stunning collection, as was The Killing Floor. When she won the National Book Award for Vice, it was like, It’s about time.

Im Netz frei zugänglich außer dem Nachruf ein ihr gewidmetes Gedicht von Marilyn Chin, darin die Zeile: „I wipe off my kohl eye shadow and plum lip gloss“.