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the story behind Ai's name --------------------------------------------------- She legally changed her name to Ai, which means love in Japanese. But her name was oringinally florence.
Ai
Early life --------------------------------------------------- Ai, who described herself as half Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Black, Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche, was born in Albany, Texas in 1947, and she grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Raised also in Las Vegas and San Francisco, she majored in Oriental Studies at the University of Arizona and became a Buddhist.
Ccareer --------------------------------------------------- Ai held an M.F.A. from the University of California at Irvine. She was the author of Dread (W. W. Norton & Co., 2003); Vice (1999), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; Greed (1993); Fate (1991); Sin (1986), which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; Killing Floor (1979), which was the 1978 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets; and Cruelty (1973).
here is an example Ai's poetry --------------------------------------------------- Conversation by Ai We smile at each otherand I lean back against the wicker couch.How does it feel to be dead? I say. You touch my knees with your blue fingers. And when you open your mouth,a ball of yellow light falls to the floor and burns a hole through it. Don't tell me, I say. I don't want to hear .Did you ever, you start,wear a certain kind of dress and just by accident,so inconsequential you barely notice it,
She also received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Fellowship Program at Radcliffe College and from various universities. She was a visiting instructor at Binghamton University, State University of New York for the 1973-74 academic year. She taught at Oklahoma State University and lived in Stillwater, Oklahoma until her death.
your fingers graze that dressand you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,you see it tooand you realize how that imageis simply the extension of another image,that your own lifeis a chain of wordsthat one day will snap. Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands, and beginning to rise heavenward in their confirmation dresses, like white helium balloons, the wreathes of flowers on their heads spinning,and above all that, that's where I'm floating, and that's what it's like only ten times clearer,ten times more horrible. Could anyone alive survive it?
