25 January 2004
Within formal poetry, each form has its own unique pitfalls: with sestinas and pantoums, it is the danger of repeated phrases becoming stale and therefore easy to overlook; with metered lines, it is that recurring rhythms may become too trite, sing-songey, distracting the reader and lending an air of frivolity (or sense of the archaic) to the poem. The dramatic monolog, or persona poem, has its own set of problems, some of which are brought to mind by a reading of Ai’s new and selected poems in Vice. These problems include the authenticity of voice and diction to the speaker and the familiarity of the reader with the historical figure being represented in the poem, if such specificity is appropriate. How much does the writer trust the reader to “get” the poem even if he is unfamiliar with the historical facts reported or alluded to in the work? How does a poet convey the actions and thoughts and history of the character to the reader without being too explicit, in the event that the persona is a historical figure she hopes to truly portray? Through a reading of the poems in Vice, it is clear that even experienced and “successful” poets like Ai must still contend with these issues in the monolog form. For the most part she handles them with the gusto of an artist and the skill of a craftsman.
In a monolog whose speaker is fictional, one of the ways in which the reader gets a sense of the character is through that character’s speech; word choice, word order, and level of formality all contribute to our understanding of the speaker’s education, position, and attitude in a poem. When the subject of a monolog is an actual historical figure, we may already be familiar with some of these qualities through study or popular reference. In this case, it becomes increasingly important for the poet to accurately simulate the speaker’s “voice,” so that the character is believable to us when we read the poem. A college English professor, for example, might be likely to use literary allusions and standard English language, while a high-school educated construction worker might be more inclined toward slang and popular-culture references. (These are stereotypes, of course; there are highly literate blue-collar workers as well as pop-culture obsessed PhDs. I believe the point is still valid – the former associations are more common in our culture).
Ai is extremely accomplished at the task of fitting the speech to the speaker even when the subject is a very well known historical figure. For example, in “Two Brothers” (47), John F. Kennedy speaks to his brother Robert – after his own death – about his life and death, addressing Robert Kennedy as “Bobby” and referring to himself by his nickname, “Jack.” In the language of this poem, we can almost hear JFK’s pronounced Massachusetts accent, with its distinctive “a”s, as in the description of dying in lines 6-7: “Death, Bobby, hit me / like the flat of a hand.” It is simple and direct, as Northeasterners tend to be, and as we might imagine two brothers to be when speaking in absolute privacy. And in “James Dean” (113), we get another taste of the facility with which Ai puts words in the mouths of celebrity figures:
until I drove the road
like the back of a black panther,
speckled with the gold
of the cold and distant stars
and the slam, bang, bam
of metal jammed against metal. (lines 4-9)
How appropriate this is, the subtle positioning of the speaker, the late James Dean, at a height from which the road seems like a panther’s back. And then comes the reminder of his youth – the onomatopoeic words he uses to describe the fatal car crash: slam, bang, bam. Like a boy. We understand that with death has come a new perspective, but we also see that not everything has changed with the transition. And we get this all from his language, which is never too polished, but filled with attitude, almost brash, like the rebel we commonly associate with Dean’s teenaged persona. “…if anybody’d let me, / I’d have proved” he brags in lines 23-4, and “I didn’t give a Quaker’s shit, man, / I gave performances. / I even peed on the set of Giant – “ in lines 61-3. Vice is filled with examples equally as fitting, all of which lend both depth and believability to the characters of their poems.
Another area of concern that is particularly important with monologs containing famous subjects is that of trust: how much faith does the writer place in her audience to “get” the poem’s nuance? The answer, as it usually applies to Ai, seems to be, “Very much.” Although in general it seems that she trusts us more when the details of the subject’s life or situation are more well known, and less when the figure is somewhat obscure, there are a few notable exceptions, one of which stand out as noteworthy. In “Hoover, Edgar J.,” from the 1993 book Greed, the first twenty or so lines are highly rhythmic, with lots of internal- as well as end-rhymes, as in lines 18-24:
just to aggravate me,
but my strength is truth.
I have the proof
of every kind of infidelity
and that makes me the one free man
in a country of prisoners
of lust, greed, hatred, need[.]
After about the midway point of the first section, however, the language becomes less rhythmic, the rhymes less frequent. And although the rhyming picks back up later in the poem, in section 2, the musicality remains stifled, the meter irregular enough to subdue the strong rhymes “rooms/perfume” and “proclaimed/name.” It is as if Hoover starts out as a young black man, then morphs into a suburban white man (lines 25-34), then fades back and forth for the middle section of the poem until finally settling on the latter arrangement in the final twenty or so lines.
The uncertainty of voice here is disconcerting, at least initially, but the next poem in the collection helps clear up some of the mystery; “Hoover Trismegistus” finds Hoover considering the possibility that he might be part black: “Was I a throwback to some buck / who sat hunched over in the hull / of a ship, / while the whip lashed his back?” (lines 8-11). But in this poem, Hoover speaks in a voice the reader is more likely to recognize, a tough, “G-Man” kind of verbiage that refers to the man’s historically-correct attitude, as in this passage: “When they called Joe McCarthy’s bluff, / he grabbed his nuts and ran” (26-7). If “Hoover, Edgar J.” were positioned after “Hoover Trismegistus,” we might feel that we had learned enough from the first poem to understand the resistance to, but fascination with, ethnic language in the second. However, in Vice the reader is asked to accept the rap-music style of “Hoover, Edgar J.” as belonging to Hoover before the explanatory “Trismegistus.” In effect, Ai is placing too much trust in our hands; we are expected to believe the alternative version of Hoover that is presented through speech, without any hints in the content as to why. One of the problems inherent in the dramatic monolog is that the reader must know enough — or be able to glean enough — information about the central character to envision the style of speech as indicative of the speaker’s real self, whether or not the speech is that normally associated with the figure.
If, as Bin Ramke says, “The first duty of the poem is to teach us how to read it” (Meek 40), this poem has failed in this duty. And upon consideration, I do believe Ramke’s statement is true, at least, or should I say, in particular, regarding monolog poems, where the character must be recognizable at least as to type, from pretty near the beginning in most cases. It is difficult to find much fault, however, when the problem lies in the author’s placing too much trust in us as readers. As it turns out, in an interview with Tomas Q. Morin in a recent issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, Ai explains this new ethnic spin on the former FBI director: “It came out of a biography I was reading; I always read the biographies of historical figures I want to write a poem about. In the biography there was talk that Hoover might have had black blood. So I thought, whoa, this is a whole new direction” (Morin 8). Without this explanation, even the potential groundwork of “Hoover Trismegistus” seems like a pretty long stretch to a reader who has never read this rather arcane fact.
Yet a third aspect of the monolog that bears study is the difficulty in conveyance of circumstance peculiar to the speaker. How does the author suggest prior action or situations in with specificity, without making direct statement of blindingly obvious fact? As it turns out, this problem is almost identical to the same issue in other types of poetry. Whether the speaker is actually placed in the poem, in the first-person reference, or is non-apparent or omniscient, the task remains the same: express the situation with enough detail to allow the reader to understand, while still letting him feel as though he is participating in the work of the poem. As Ai’s poem “Conversation” clearly demonstrates, sometimes the reader need not understand exactly the references included in the lines in order to find familiarity in the words. This poem, sub-headed “For Robert Lowell,” almost certainly contains several references to Lowell’s own poetry; I recognized one. Still, I got a strong sense of the direction of the poem and detected a style that I found comparable to Lowell’s 1977 “Epilogue,” with its references to light and sound.
Yet there are also poems in which the reader does easily understand what has gone on, despite the lack of direct reference to an incident. In “Charisma” (199), for example, the speaker is never named, yet the implication is clear; David Koresh speaks here, post-1993. Another instance of this indirect directness is “The Mother’s Tale” (67), in which the mother of a young bridegroom gives instruction to her son, relating how he must handle his new wife:
You must beat Rosita often.
She must know the weight of a man’s hand,
the bruises that are like the wounds of Christ.
Her blood that is black at the heart
must flow until it is as red and pure as His. (lines 26-30)
Although we are told very little explicitly about the history of this woman, we know much about her. She has been beaten, certainly, for she defends the beatings like a victim of Stockholm syndrome; to deal with her own plight, she must rationalize the treatment she has received. Also, she knows the risk associated with unchecked passions in a woman, for she relates an incident from her own past in which she cut her husband’s face with a knife in a fit of jealousy. And, she is deeply religious, indicating her faith in Jesus in the above lines probably both as part of her cultural heritage and upbringing, and as a way to deal with the oppression and abuse she has suffered. Again, we need not know the exact details of her life to understand her situation and probable relationship circumstance.
In reading the poems in Vice, I was struck by how well Ai seems to understand the thoughts of people whose thoughts must be so alien to her, and how boldly she uses the voice of her characters to portray, right or wrong, their decisiveness in action. And possibly because she herself is so adept at pretending herself into someone else’s position, she also trusts her readers to step into the arena of the poem. While occasionally this trust extends a bit too far, this condition seems preferable to the alternative of blindingly obvious statement. These poems are filled with subtlety and strength, allowing the reader to both experience the intended impact and participate in the works through the exercise of interpretation. This book is not only engaging and enjoyable; it is also a valuable study tool for would-be monologists.
Works Cited
Ai. Vice: New and Selected Poems. New York: Norton, 1999. Print.
Meek, Sandra. “Making and Meaning: An Interview with Bin Ramke.” The Writer’s Chronicle. 36.4 (Feb. 2004). 32+. Print.
Morin, Tomas. “An Interview with Ai.” The Writer’s Chronicle. 36.3 (Dec. 2003). 4+. Print.
