{"id":1459,"date":"2010-04-02T16:02:13","date_gmt":"2010-04-02T21:02:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=1459"},"modified":"2010-04-02T16:02:49","modified_gmt":"2010-04-02T21:02:49","slug":"weekly-prompt-dramatic-monologues-remembering-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2010\/04\/02\/weekly-prompt-dramatic-monologues-remembering-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"Weekly Prompt: Dramatic Monologues (remembering Ai)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Ai in 1972<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In honor of the poet Ai, who recently passed away,\u00a0this week’s prompt focuses on the dramatic monologue — a technique for which she was famous.<\/p>\n

Born Florence Anthony, she adopted the name “Ai” after discovering that she had been conceived through an affair between\u00a0her mother\u00a0and a Japanese man that she (Ai) had never met.\u00a0 The Poetry Foundation’s bio on her <\/a>describes her particular sensibilities well:<\/p>\n

Ai is a poet noted for her uncompromising poetic vision and bleak dramatic monologues which give voice to marginalized, often poor and abused speakers . . . She has said that her given name reflects a \u201cscandalous affair my mother had with a Japanese man she met at a streetcar stop\u201d and has no wish to be identified \u201cfor all eternity\u201d with a man she never knew. Ai\u2019s awareness of her own mixed race heritage\u2014she self-identifies as Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Black, Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche\u2014as well as her strong feminist bent shape her poetry, which is often brutal and direct in its subject matter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ai’s poetry practically vibrates with the force of its imagery.\u00a0 Her\u00a0lyrics leap from the page and inhabit the personas she takes on without apology.\u00a0 One of the things for which she was noted was her ability to enter the voices of those at the margins of society and infuse them with dignity and magnetic strength.<\/p>\n

To illustrate, here is the opening to her poem Salom\u00e9<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n
I scissor the stem of the red carnation<\/div>\n
and set it in a bowl of water.<\/div>\n
It floats the way your head would,<\/div>\n
if I cut it off.<\/div>\n
But what if I tore you apart<\/div>\n
for those afternoons<\/div>\n
when I was fifteen<\/div>\n
and so like a bird of paradise<\/div>\n
slaughtered for its feathers.<\/div>\n
Even my name suggested wings,<\/div>\n
wicker cages, flight.<\/div>\n
Come, sit on my lap,<\/em> you said.<\/div>\n
I felt as if I had flown there;<\/div>\n
I was weightless.<\/div>\n
You were forty and married.<\/div>\n
That she was my mother never mattered.<\/div>\n
She was a door that opened onto me.<\/div>\n
The three of us blended into a kind of somnolence<\/div>\n
and musk, the musk of Sundays. Sweat and sweetness.<\/div>\n
That dried plum and licorice taste<\/div>\n
always back of my tongue<\/div>\n
and your tongue against my teeth,<\/div>\n
then touching mine. How many times?\u2014<\/div>\n
I counted, but could never remember.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
What stands out for me in these opening lines is the unforgettable boldness and clarity of its images: the scissored red carnation becomes a severed head,\u00a0her description \u00a0of dried plum and licorice give a sickening viscerality to the complexity of the speaker’s relationship to the “you” — he is at once abuser and lover, taker of innocence, and seductor, the wielder of an invisible\u00a0tyranny in which the mother is also implicated: at the end of the poem, when a ghostly sword slices through the speaker’s throat, the mother’s dress is like that “of a grenadier,” and we are made to see how her kiss becomes an act of terrible violence disguised\u00a0as tenderness.<\/div>\n

In honor of Ai’s life, work, and legacy, here’s this week’s prompt.<\/p>\n

Prompt: Write a poem in the form of a dramatic monologue in the voice of a single speaker who is not yourself.\u00a0 Optionally, if you do not wish to write a traditional persona poem, you may imagine the speaker’s voice\u00a0as a loose projection of your own. <\/strong><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In honor of the poet Ai, who recently passed away,\u00a0this week’s prompt focuses on the dramatic monologue — a technique for which she was famous. Born Florence Anthony, she adopted the name “Ai” after discovering that she had been conceived through an affair between\u00a0her mother\u00a0and a Japanese man that she (Ai) had never met.\u00a0 The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[13],"tags":[286,288,287,72],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1459"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1459"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1482,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1459\/revisions\/1482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}