A Facet’s Gleam: Ai and the Believable 'I' (Part I)

From time to time Poetry features online exclusives by contributors on its Editors’ Blog. This post is part one of a two-part series by Phillip B. Williams on Ai’s use of persona. Part two can be found here. 

I got a nasty note from somebody once who said if he wanted to, he could pick some character out of the newspaper and write a monologue. I was like, go ahead. It's not that easy to make it believable. The big problem with the monologue form is you’re essentially tied to character and your character must be believable. Even today I might be writing and find something the character says or does is not believable and I have to work on that.

—Ai

I hear this question yearly: “How does the poet Ai get away with her persona poems?” as though by writing the poems she not only committed a crime but got away with it and was thereafter celebrated. The question purports that the wool has been thrown over the reader’s eyes and that such an illusion, though distasteful, leaves those who realize the farce in envy.

Within the first question lives another, “Who gets to write what?” This connects directly with what some readers consider to be the most audacious aspect of Ai’s writing: a mixed-race woman writing about everyone under the sun without retribution. This question gets us closer to what I’m most interested in: Ai’s work as an endless lesson on the persona poem and the ways in which prosody activates and expresses an interior that we may think or wish is hidden. In Ai’s case, I will discuss how she used rhetorical shifts, repetition, and structural surprise to create powerful and fascinating personae.

We should get one thing clear right away: if one writes to “get away with,” one has already committed a crime of the imagination. Reading Ai requires an understanding of monologue and persona and how they interact with one another to create convincing voices projected from the poet’s pen.

In a general sense, the monologue uses an extensive first-person voice throughout the entirety of the poem. Consider “voice” to be how a poet uses rhetorical methods to (re)create a unique personality. It can be argued that we recognize a person by how they speak, and monologue tests the limits of how much language can lend to said recognizability, can itself stand in for the missing body of the person projected onto the page. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics partially defines monologue in this way:

Monologue is less a genre than a device many genres employ. Arising from the implied circumstances that shape it, monologue has a clearly dramatic element: it characteristically defines elements of subjectivity and personality against pressures—destiny, history, other people—whose resistance gives those elements shape.   

Necessary for the monologue then is the construction of a historical background against which the speaker giving the monologue may stand in relief. By historical, I mean everything within the lifespan of the speaker that may have affected the speaker’s personality. Understanding the origin story of the speaker enhances, or perhaps makes possible, the creation of the speaker in question. We can only see what stands out from the background if the background exists in the first place. Included in the background is not just location but also desires, motivations, fears, and other aspects of a self that render a unique voice. Therefore, the monologue is expressed through the creation of a speaker, the persona that one can assume is or is not the poet herself depending on the context of the poem.

Ai did not “get away with” her personas. If we read her work carefully, we will see generous craft that offers to us the critical difference between facet and facade. A facet is a flat side of something, as in “A butcher knife has two facets.” It is also a unique distinction or particular aspect in a problem, as in “Ai looked into every facet of the murderer.” The word “facet” points to specificity, precision, and multiplicity. A facade, on the other hand, is the face or front of a building, as in “the church’s facade is browed with gargoyles.” A facade is also a misrepresentation intended to conceal something uncomfortable or unpleasant, as in “John put up a facade to hide his insecurities.” Ai is not interested in facade and therefore not interested in hiding herself from the page. Regardless of the age, gender, occupation, religion, or other unique qualities of her speakers, Ai makes sure that as she moves through her speaker’s psychology her imagination is at the front. She refuses to go for the easy idea of a situation or the expected stereotype of her chosen voice. Her personas are simply facets of herself as a multi-bladed human being.

Take, for instance, the poem “Interview with a Policeman” from the November 1987 issue of Poetry.

How does this poem work? Or, to utilize the first question, how does Ai “get away” with writing in the voice of a police officer? If we look at the first stanza, we see how Ai creates a personality for her speaker. To begin in the second person already signals that the reader is as much a part of the speaker’s creation as the historical world that made him possible; even more so, the title points toward the assumption that the reader knows what a policeman is and has some ideas as to how he operates in their own world if not in the world of the poem. In fact, it seems the point of the poet to allow space for the reader to interact with the poem vis-à-vis held assumptions or knowledge of the subject at hand.

Rhetorically, with the use of second person and the conjunction “but” in the third line acting as a contradiction of what comes before it, the reader is indicted as insincere and thus pulled into an argument. From then on, the reader is enmeshed in trying to figure out the conclusion to this argument—that the story the officer wants to tell will not be the story the reporter tells—especially since the you is ambiguous enough to be a you within the world of the poem (a reporter) and also the you of the reader. The generalization “reporters never do” further complicates the speaker’s personality, showing his beliefs as well as the unlikelihood of him having trust in the reporter, or in the reader.

What is curious about this speaker is how he determines the action of the poem purely from their point of view and through a manipulation of time. For example:

If everybody’s racist,
that means you too.
I grab your finger,
as you jab it at my chest.
So what, the mini cam caught that?
You want to know all about it, right?—
the liquor store, the black kid
who pulled his gun
at the wrong time.
You saw the dollars he fell on and bloodied.

In this section of the poem, the policeman makes sure the “you” knows that they are complicit in this interaction as well, redeeming the policeman before the need for redemption has even been made clear. What, exactly, is the situation about which the policeman is presently questioned? Because we are placed in the present (“I grab your finger / as you jab it at my chest”), getting the play-by-play of the situation from the perspective of the policeman—which is a form of power and agency—dislodges the interview from the reporter’s influence; even under interrogation, the word of the policeman is final, such that the personality of the second person—“you jab it at my chest,” “You want to know all about it, right?” “that means you too.”—is delineated for us through the policeman. We have to believe what he draws out for us, which is a reversal of how journalism typically manipulates, via editing and sometimes censoring, the words of others.

The speaker is openly and forthrightly argumentative and we discover why when he tells an anecdote of his side of the story, which ends with a dead “black kid.” The force of the policeman’s convincing personality is solidified in the second stanza, where he speaks as though transported into the deeper world of himself, his own interiority having taken over the story:

Later, I felt as if I’d left part of myself
stranded on that other side,
where anyplace you turn down,
is out for money, for drugs,
or just for something new like shoes
or sunglasses,
where your own rage
destroys everything in its wake
including you.
Especially you.

The earlier instances of “you” (“where anyplace you turn down,” and “where your own rage”) are expressions of the rhetorical “anyone,” which includes the speaker. This makes sense as a prosodic decision because the speaker’s move from the all-inclusive you to the very specific external “you,” is intensified and made more shocking by the earlier generality. “Especially you,” reporter, reader, who won’t be allowed to get away with this—but, still, what has been the crime? Ai does tremendous work here with moral ambiguity. First, she does not write the killing of the “black kid” in a way that seems anything other than what needed to be done. Of course, from the perspective of the policeman, it is exactly what needed to be done and it seems, for lack of better words, within the logic of the law to have made the decision he made. However, it is in the second stanza that we get the major turn toward the interior, where just before, at the end the first stanza, the black kid coughed a stream of blood into the policeman’s face. And like a contagion, the policeman sees himself on “that other side,” where lawlessness predicated on greed and an unmitigated desire for personal possessions takes the leash. And why not leash, when just moments later the “The ape in the gilded cage / looks too familiar,” the ape being the black kid that the policeman wants to forget and sees in the reporter, the you, the same desire to do so: to forget, to unsee, to no longer be burdened. How, then, does one juggle the story of the shooting that seems like an officer doing his job with the bigotry expressed in how the officer and, by way of the officer’s overpowering perspective, the reporter view the black kid?

What Ai accomplishes is not the easy poem that indicts the policeman for cruelty against a black kid who may have otherwise lived if he were white. Such an indictment would have broken the persona, and thereby broken the poem, forcing the latter into an unreal complacency with social standards that would not be upheld in this situation as current events dictate. Instead, allowing the policeman to tell his story gives him a kind of humanity, which is not the same as making him forgivable. That, too, would be within another desired social standard. Ai’s ambivalence toward everyone in the poem allows for a second culprit—second to the policeman, not the black kid—to arise: you as the reader, “hear[ing] the sound of gunshots / in someone else's neighborhood, / then comforted, turn[ing] over in your bed” only for the black kid to enter into a nightmare, it seems, and “take everything but his fury back.”

To be voyeur to the situation is not allowed in this poem, as the speaker, the policeman, has predicted his own persecution and, discomfortingly, pointed his finger at the watcher, the facilitator of the very oppressions that engulfed the black kid in violence. What is systemic, in a dark twist, is pointed out by a bigot to a seemingly innocent reporter whose beliefs—unveiled by the speaker almost telepathically—are also troubling. In this way, no one is off the hook, no one is allowed to “get away” with a thing, including us.