‘Filmmaker, author, and actor Melvin Van Peebles was born on August 21, 1932, in Chicago, Illinois. Growing up during World War II, he spent his adolescence with his father, a tailor. Van Peebles graduated from Township High School in Phoenix, Illinois, in 1949 and spent a year at West Virginia State College before transferring to Ohio Wesleyan University where he earned his B.A. degree in English literature in 1953.

‘During the late 1950s, Van Peebles served three and a half years as a flight navigator in the United States Air Force. After the military, he lived briefly in Mexico and San Francisco where he wrote his first book, The Big Heart, which was about the life of San Francisco’s cable cars and their drivers. Moving to the Netherlands, he studied at the Dutch National Theatre before moving to France in the early 1960s.

‘During this time, Van Peebles wrote several published novels in French, including La Permission in 1967. He filmed this story under the title, The Story of the Three-Day Pass, and it was selected as the French entry in the 1968 San Francisco Film Festival. It earned critical acclaim, which helped him obtain a studio contract with Columbia Pictures. In 1969, Van Peebles returned to the U.S. to direct and score his first Hollywood film Watermelon Man. The film was released in 1970, followed by his independent feature Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, probably his best known work. Some of his other films include Don’t Play Us Cheap in 1973, Identity Crisis in 1989, Gang in Blue in 1996 and Le Conte du ventre plein in 2000.

‘As a playwright and composer, Van Peebles wrote two Broadway hit plays: Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death in 1971 and Don’t Play Us Cheap in 1972, for which he earned a Tony Award nomination. As an actor, Van Peebles has appeared in several films including Robert Altman’s O.C. and Stiggs in 1987 and Mario Van Peebles’ Panther in 1995, which he also wrote and co-produced.

‘In 2005, Van Peebles was the subject of a documentary entitled How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It). He has been honored with numerous awards, including a Grammy and a Drama Desk Award. He received the Children’s Live-Action Humanitas Prize for The Day They Came to Arrest the Book in 1987, and in 1999, he was awarded the Chicago Underground Film Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award.’ — collaged

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Melvin Van Peebles @ IMDb
MVP @ instagram
6 Filmmaking Tips from Melvin Van Peebles
Melvin Van Peebles’s Bold Debut
It’s a wonder there aren’t statues in honor of Melvin van Peebles.
Trading Stories With Melvin Van Peebles
The Film Comment Podcast: The Maverick Movies of Melvin Van Peebles
Melvin Van Peebles and the Uncanny Score for Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Melvin Van Peebles Gone Fishing
ORIGINAL GANGSTA
Van Peebles Speaks Candidly On Honors, Criticism
HOW MELVIN VAN PEEBLES CHANGED BLACK CINEMA
The place was like a weird-ass museum.
7 years ago outside of Paris – Meeting Melvin Van Peebles
The ‘Story’ of Van Peebles
How Melvin Van Peebles Lit The Blaxploitation Fire

 

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Extras

Classified X (1998) | Narrated by Melvin Van Peebles

Melvin Van Peebles- Interview (Sweet SweetBack…) 1971

Melvin Van Peebles and Mario Van Peebles interview (1995)

Melvin Van Peebles: “I Said No At First” (2014)

 

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Interview

 

Melvin Van Peebles I try not to be so heavy with these interview things. I try to loosen up because the thing I’m most known for Sweetback, which started the whole thing.

Lee Ann Norman Yeah. I think that is what most people know about you, but when I was preparing for our conversation I was surprised to learn all of these other things about you, like that you studied literature in school and you’ve published novels, stories, and plays, and you make music and art—all of these things. But you started out as a writer, correct?

MVP No. (laughter)

LAN Okay, so tell me your arts story. How did you get into making stuff?

MVP I actually started out as a business boy at ten. I was on the South Side of Chicago. We lived on 58th Street, which was the toughest street in America at the time. We were between Calumet and Prairie. My dad had a tailor shop in the basement of our building right next to the train (but there’s not a train there anymore). By the time I was ten, I’d seen nine people killed right there in the street. It was tough! The neighborhood was run by a cop called Two Gun Pete, and he’d shoot you if you blinked! (laughter) That was just the world. So we moved to the suburbs. I walked to this big high school—about a mile and a half walk. In the winter—I laugh now about this sometimes because the winters were so bad—I could ice skate to school. (laughter)

LAN Winter in Chicago is no joke!

MVP Right! There were fifty-three black kids out of the 2,800 kids or something.

LAN What school?

MVP We were near Harvey, Illinois, the little part right outside it that was called Phoenix. The other black kids there had parents with big-time jobs working at the post office. That was big for us then in the ’40s. (laughter)

I basically lived two lives. There was this white community at school, and even the black kids were like whites, but me—I had to get on the train every day and go to work back on 58th street. It was a whole different world, but I didn’t know that.

LAN It’s just what you did.

MVP Right. That’s just what I did. I was small, and I’ve haven’t grown that much since, (laughter) but I ran my dad’s shop. He got a Coca-Cola box for me to stand on so I could reach the cash register. Then he could go out and make deliveries. To the workers there, I was the boss. They called me “Pee Wee.” When my dad would leave, I’d say, “Alright. Get everything done before Dad comes back.” They were good about doing their work, except when ladies would wander in. They’d go back in the clothes racks to do the funky monkey. Sometimes they would say, “Hey Pee Wee, come over here,” then they’d take my hand and you know … (laughter)

LAN Oh my gosh! They were trying to get you in trouble. (laughter)

MVP I wasn’t nothin’ but eleven years old. (laughter) I was waaaaay ahead of my time. Instead of paying me, my dad started giving me clothes that people didn’t pick up from the shop, and I’d sell them on 58th Street. I look back and think that it’s hilarious now, but back then, it was just my life.

LAN So how did you come to painting after being a little business man?

MVP One day we went to the Art Institute on a school field trip, and the guide was showing us one of the paintings. He asked us if we knew what it was called, and I did—me, the little black kid. I got a scholarship for painting in a summer program right there on the spot. Being the size that I was, I didn’t go outside and play with the other kids. I was always reading. That’s how I knew the answer. I was a living in the hood, hood, hood of the hood, but I learned how to handl as they say in Yiddish.

LAN That’s interesting. I feel like so much of what you’ve done in your career has been in that spirit. You wanted to do something, so you just figured out what you needed to do and did it. How did you find your way into filmmaking?

MVP Oh no, that has nothing to do with film shit.

LAN So how did you get end up making movies?

MVP Okay, I’ll just explain to you what happened. When I finished grade school, I was ten, but my mother wouldn’t let me go to the high school because I was so young. She thought I was too young, and she didn’t let me go until a couple years later. So I started high school when I was twelve, and I graduated when I was fifteen and that’s still—young. I went to one college for a year, and said to my mom that I wasn’t going back there. She said to me that it was because I was around too many white people, so she wanted to send me to a real school, a colored university. Down in West Virginia or something like that. She’d never been to college. Nobody in my family had gone to college.

LAN So how did she choose that one for you?

MVP Because it was colored. That’s it.

LAN (laughter) Okay, so it didn’t matter which one, just that it was black.

MVP Yeah. But the kids were kids, and I wasn’t a kid. I was a grown midget. (laughter) So I did the things you do, I joined a fraternity, and got kicked out—well, no, I walked out about a week later. You know, the way you learn: they paddle you, and I was like, “Fuck this shit.”

LAN Yeah. That’s why I never did it. I didn’t understand why I should let someone beat me up to be my friend. (laughter)

MVP Yeah, homey don’t play that shit. (laughter) I was a loner down there, and they didn’t have the best equipment or textbooks. I’d come from one of the best high schools in the nation, so I was way ahead of everyone else, but to them, I was just this midget coward. One of the teachers that I would talk to said to me once that I didn’t have to go all the way back across campus after class, but I could stay with him. He wanted to do the funky monkey, and I was like: get the fuck outta here. (laughter).

LAN You do seem to keep yourself busy. What are some of the things you’re working on right now that you’re excited about?

MVP Well, at the moment, I’m thinking of doing a couple of plays. Of course, everything I usually have to do it myself. Someone will say: he can’t do that, and I have to prove them wrong. (laughter) I’m writing a bunch of books about this and that, and I have a couple of musical offers.

LAN I mentioned before that I see a lot of these themes in your life and work: make yourself, do it yourself, don’t let other people put you in a box. Just by looking at a few pages of the play you’ve shown me, it makes me wonder if you ever think of yourself in a political way. For some people, living one’s life in a way that goes against what society might say you are supposed to be or how you’re supposed to behave is radical. It’s brave to do your own thing. You probably don’t think that you have an agenda or political perspective about the way you live your life, but I wonder, where does that feeling come from?

MVP When you’re out there pulling a wagon with clothes trying to sell them, it changes you.

LAN It makes me think of that saying: when life hands you lemons, make lemonade. I feel like that’s so you. Is it about survival?

MVP No. It’s not survival. Fuck that, no. I’m just tryin’ to get shit done.

 

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10 of Melvin Van Peebles’s 17 films

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The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1968)
‘Living as an ex-pat in Paris in the late 1950s, Melvin Van Peebles taught himself the language and wrote five books in French. The fifth, 1967’s “La Permission,” became the basis for his 1968 feature-film debut, “The Story of a Three-Day Pass.” A commentary on France’s contradictory attitudes about race, it’s an exploration of an interracial relationship between a Black American GI stationed in France (Turner, played by Harry Baird) and a white Parisian woman (Miriam, played by Nicole Berger).

‘With “Three-Day Pass,” Peebles didn’t set out to make a radical film. It’s a boy-meets-girl with a twist: the romance is interracial, which was very much a screen taboo at the time of its release — one year after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia. “Three-Day Pass” also subverted Hollywood interracial love stories like “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” a year prior, starring Sidney Poitier. Unlike the insufferably tame “Dinner,” Turner and Miriam dance intimately, drink, frolic on the beach, and even have sex. In 1968 America, that was gutsy filmmaking.

‘Before “Three-Day Pass,” there hadn’t been quite a film like it made by a Black filmmaker, with such freewheeling spontaneity. The few studio films that featured Black characters were often based on white liberal fantasies that fulfilled notions about what a “good Negro” should be. The Black lead was typically male and neutered — figuratively, of course. Van Peebles shattered that illusion with films like “Three-Day Pass” and the incendiary “Sweet Sweetback” three years later. It became a reference point for radical, subversive Black cinema at a time when Black Americans were primed for it, post-Civil Rights movement.’ — Tambay Obenson

Trailer

THE STORY OF A THREE DAY PASS – Virtual Q&A with Mario Van Peebles & Ashley Clark

 

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Watermelon Man (1970)
‘Melvin Van Peebles’s 1970 film Watermelon Man exemplifies both traditional methods of representing blacks, as well as the ways black independent filmmakers negated these representations. This Hollywood studio film tells the story of Jefferson Gerber, a white, bigoted insurance agent and his overnight transformation into a black man. Gerber endures several instances of discrimination from his family, co-workers, and neighbors, and he desperately attempts to regain his whiteness. However, each of his efforts fail, and by the end of the film, Gerber comes to claim his new identity as a black man and becomes a militant advocate for black civil rights.’ — WUSTL Digital Gateway

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971)
‘”This film is dedicated to all the Brothers and Sisters who had enough of the Man,” declare the opening titles of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. When it was released, 50 years ago this month, that was a lot of them. Melvin Van Peebles’s landmark movie arrived at a time when the civil rights movement had barely translated into tangible progress, and was even in danger of being rolled back, what with the recent assassinations of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and so many others. The Brothers and Sisters had also had enough of the Man’s movies: the only African American representation Hollywood permitted were characters who were either subservient to white folks or super-exemplary, such as Sidney Poitier.

‘Sweetback is often credited as the first “blaxploitation” movie but it doesn’t really fit the description. It paved the way: legend has it that Shaft (released the same year, by a mainstream studio) changed its hero from white to black as a result of it. And it could certainly be seen as exploitative – of children (13-year-old Mario played the young Sweetback in a sex scene that the BFI reissue of the film had to censor under the Protection of Children Act) and women (most of whom appear naked and in awe of Sweetback’s sexual prowess). But it put artistic and commercial power in the hands of black film-makers for the first time, which is the opposite of exploitation.

‘Van Peebles preferred to call it “the first Black Power movie”. He opened the door for not only black cinema (Spike Lee would follow in his DIY footsteps with She’s Gotta Have It), but independent cinema in general. Despite its lo-fi scrappiness, Sweetback remains radical. It really did stick it to the Man.’ — Steve Rose

Trailer

the entirety

 

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Don’t Play Us Cheap (1972)
‘At the time Melvin Van Peebles came up with the story for Don’t Play Us Cheap, he was living in Paris, but had gotten a summer job in New York City making a documentary. Along with the job, Van Peebles was given an apartment in a posh neighborhood on the lower east side of Manhattan. On a very hot day, Van Peebles was lounging out in front of the apartment, and an old black lady came down the street and told Van Peebles that she wanted some water and to use the bathroom. The woman thanked Van Peebles, and a few days later, Van Peebles received a telephone call from her inviting him to a party she was throwing for her niece. When he returned to France, he thought of what would happen if these wonderful, kind, open people were invaded by imps from hell bent on destroying their party. The story became the basis for a novel, Harlem Party, and later a French-language musical play, which Van Peebles later translated into English, and made as a film in 1973.’ — collaged

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Identity Crisis (1989)
‘A rapper finds himself possessed by the soul of a dead fashion designer; frequently switching personalities. The problem with this one is a way more convoluted than necessary screenplay. Melvin Van Peebles pops up onscreen every once in a while as the narrator speaking directly to the audience and at one point he must’ve gotten the sense that the plot was getting out of control because he straight up says to the audience at one point “If you can’t follow what’s going on, don’t worry about it, just make like me and fake it and you’ll soon catch on” (or something to that effect) If the director of the movie has to straight up tell his viewers not to stress because they can’t follow what’s going on in the story, that’s a clue right there that the narrative got away from him!’ — mattstechel

Trailer

 

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w/ Mario Van Peebles Gang in Blue (1996)
‘Gang In Blue is based on the real life investigations of several US police forces for racism and corruption. This production focuses on one of these police forces where Michael Rhoades is a new recruit who discovers much to his horror, a band of little Hitlers known as the ‘Phantoms’. They let Rhoades know almost straight away that he is not wanted there and when he discovers corruption is rife he finds he is the target of a vicious campaign to set him up.’ — Scott Dawson

Trailer

 

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Le Conte du ventre plein (1999)
‘A closed-minded conservative couple masquerade as liberal do-gooders in late 60’s France. With orders piling up at their bistro, The Full Belly, Loretta and Henri, self-described “pillars of the community,” hire Diamantine as a waitress in order to give a poor black orphan a break. At home, they tell their trusting, new live-in employee that she’s “one of the family,” yet in town they encourage widespread disapproval of her. When they convince her to carry an extended joke to full term – pretending she’s pregnant – Diamantine, and a slightly shady friend of the couple, Jan, become entangled in an elaborate charade.’ — IMDb

Trailer

 

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The Real Deal (2002)
‘A documentary short about the making of the cult movie Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Son.’ — IMDb

the entirety

 

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Confessions of a Ex-Doofus-Itchy Footed Mutha (2008)
‘It’s grand that a physical, mindful force of 1960s American alternative cinema like Melvin Van Peebles can tell a story at the age of 75 about being an anti-Hollywood “maverick” with an epochal success like 1971’s “Sweet Sweetback’s Badassss Song.” With “Confessions of A Ex-Doofus-Itchy Footed Mutha,” the grand old man and inveterate trickster figure becomes an unregenerate youth forever on the run. Based on his 1982 Broadway production, “Waltz of the Stork,” this partly musical semi-autobiographical fantasia uses the lower rungs of digital-video imagery to compile Van Peeble’s imagination from boyhood to middle age to mixed result. “Ex-Doofus-Itchy” is a mass of hardly digested material about twentieth-century African-American cultural experience that rings both true and deadly. Peebles looks tired. He’s lived a life. Then he made this movie.’ — Ray Pride

Melvin Van Peebles on Confessions of a Ex-Doofus-Itchy Footed Mutha

 

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Lilly Done the Zampoughi Every Time I Pulled Her Coattail (2012)
‘Music video for at the time unreleased new Melvin Van Peebles album titled “Nahh… Nahh Mofo”. Features Van Peebles performing his 1970 song in 2012 with his band wid Laxative in New York City while he is haunted by visions of Lilly.’ — IMDb

the entirety

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Niko, Hi, Niko. Cool, I’m happy that you’ve found ‘God Jr.’ to be of help to you. The last section of that novel is my favorite thing I’ve ever written. In theory, and in my head, your premise/plan to use the prose to have your current consciousness haunt your younger body sounds inspired. And your description of how you foresee it working is really gorgeous. Wow. I’m so on board, for whatever that’s worth. Yes, I’d be very happy to read the translation of your first novel and confer about it when you like and if that would be helpful. Do you have my email address? I forget. If not, let me know. Forge on, sir. ** _Black_Acrylic, It’s true, there’s a proto-punk quality to her poetry. I read an essay about her work in those terms years ago, but I don’t remember where. In print. That’s very, very excellent news that you qualify for that med Siponimod! Even if it keeps you stuck in Leeds a little longer, as much as I’m sure that’s really disappointing. Have a great day, tough guy. ** Misanthrope, Well, tentative very good ness about David’s therapy move, but forgive me if I delay the celebratory fireworks for a while. ** Bill, Hi. No, your first attempt didn’t lodge it. God, this blog is a quirky mess. Ah, my brain meets your brain and … zeitgeist! Don’t think I’ve seen ‘Days’, or have I? Good to know. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I’m happy you liked her poems, maestro. They’re tough cookies. Most people I know here in Paris got through the second shot pretty scott free, so hopefully you’ll be fine by the law of averages. I think I’m almost back to normal now, but the effects of our hot weather at the moment makes self-diagnosing a bit confusing. Ha ha, yes, re: the … spaciousness. Megan Boyle! Nice! Love screwing my head off like the lid of a jar, carefully extracting my hatred of hot weather, and screwing it back on, G. ** Jack Skelley, Hey, Jack, you mutha! You’ve got two Ai poems that you’ve probably already read now in your assignment for Saturday, so you’re a little more free! I can’t find anything on my desk that’s older than a day or two, basically. Someone said it looks like those friendly monsters in ‘Where the Wild Things Are’. See you fairly pronto! ** David Ehrenstein, Speaking of, you probably saw that Alan Midgett died yesterday, RIP. ** Brian, Hey, Brian! Really glad the poems hit home. Thank you for the co-sign of the opinion that you characterised much more cogently than I. Here’s Luther Price Day. It’s an odd Day. Oh, okay, I thought maybe you would chaperone your brother or something. I don’t know what I was thinking. My high school prom was just an excuse to sneak outside and do drugs under the football bleachers. My school somehow got a band that was very big at the time, Loggins and Messina — later to birth the irksome, short-term 80s rock star Kenny Loggins — to play the prom. And they did sucketh. Did you find awesome or relatively awesome things to do since we last spoke? Not me, but it’s still morning here, and I seem to have most of my marbles back, so … watch out! ** Okay. Please spend the local portion of your day with the films of Melvin Van Peebles, won’t you? What do you say? See you tomorrow.

 

‘Several contemporary writers challenge neatly drawn, “naturalized” cultural categories by ernphasizing their own mixed ancestry and the multiplicity of their identifications. . . .

‘The poet Ai refuses to reduce her identifications to a single ethnicity and thereby calls cultural boundaries into question. Disturbance of boundaries–though by no means only ethnic boundaries–also characterizes Ai’s poetic practice and makes of that practice a powerful cultural critique.

‘Ai’s poems have the indirect effect of calling cultural definitions of all kinds into question. A dramatic monologuist, she invents voices for those whose entrapment in their cultural definition is most apparent. The speakers of her poems include the obscure and despised who are usually presumed to have no voice at all and those public figures who have become sheer icon, whose cultural meaning subsumes anything they can be imagined saying. In the crucible of her work, their unbearable identities seem always at the point of being shattered and remade, or simply shattered. The poems’ speakers by no means transcend cultural definition, but they speak in such a way as to profoundly unsettle the very positions from which they speak.

‘The poems achieve these effects by a variety of devices. As Bulgarian literary theorist Julia Kristeva argues, ambiguous image–images that obscure or transgress boundaries–tend to disturb the sense of settled identity. The speakers of Ai’s poems often describe themselves breaking the body’s boundary through violence, by transgressing laws and gender roles, or by crossing from the world of the ordinary into surreal, dreamlike experiences. The poems contain horrifying and unsettling images of the bodily remnants and effluvia that disturb because they seem neither human nor inhuman, as well as characters who disturb by their ambiguity, seeming both innocent and evil. The reader is both deeply engaged and deeply unsettled by the poems’ speakers; none of the positions constructed by the poems invites comfortable identification. Thus, the poems have the effect of destabilizing the reader’s position as well as the positions of their own speakers. By means of these destabilizations, Ai’s work performs a radical critique of the identities constructed by contemporary culture.

‘All Ai’s work is stark, harsh, and dramatic in style. But as her preoccupations move from personal violence to historic atrocity, her imagination opens out into the public arena; the domestic turns political. Throughout her poetry, a stripped-down diction conveys an underlying, almost biblical indignation–not, at times, without compassion–at human misuses of power and the corrupting energies of various human appetites.

‘Although virtually all the poems present themselves as spoken by a particular character, Ai makes little attempt to capture individual styles of diction, personal vocabularies; the result, if monotonous, is also striking. A Mexican revolutionary, an old woman with a young lover, the dead Robert Kennedy, a Vietnam veteran–all speak with a sullen, deadpan passion that galvanizes our attention through the voice’s intensity rather than by the accumulation of realistic detail. The foreshortened, nearly parodic vividness of Ai’s characters makes them closer to types than to historical portraits.’ — collaged

 

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Further

Ai @ Poetry Foundation
Ai @ Modern American Poetry
‘Cruelty’ @ goodreads
Ai, a Steadfast Poetic Channel of Hard Lives, Dies at 62
Ai, an Indigenous Poet You Should Know
A 1999 PBS Interview with Ai
Tribute to the poet Ai
Carolyne Wright Remembers Poet Ai
A Conversation with Ai
You write largely “persona” poems.
Ai 1947 – 2010
Assuming the Mask: Persona and Identity in Ai’s Poetry
Ai Ogawa’s Poetry and Being Incomplete
Walking, bleeding, breathing on the page: A tribute to Ai Ogawa
Write the Body Bloody: Violence, Gender & Identity in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath & Ai
Buy ‘Cruelty’

 

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Extras

“The Good Shepherd” by Ai

Marilyn Chin spoke about Ai Ogawa

 

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Interview

 

Michael Cuddihy: Would you like to tell us something about your childhood—what forces, conflicts, or events led you to poetry?

Ai: Well, when I was fourteen we lived in L.A. and I went to Mount Vernon Junior High. One day I saw an ad up on the board that said “Poetry Contest.” The poem had to be about a historical figure. But before I could enter the contest we moved back to Tucson. But I’d discovered that I could write poetry, and I’ve just continued from the age of fourteen, though there wasn’t much in my family life that encouraged it.

I remember I’d written once before, when I was twelve, at this Catholic school in L.A. The nuns said we had to write a letter in which we were a Christian martyr who was going to die the next day. They told us to go home and pretend this was our last letter. But, as I’ve said, I didn’t really start writing until two years later. It was a rather unconscious thing—as I grew older I realized that poetry offered a way to express things that I couldn’t do otherwise.

Lawrence Kearney: Some of the poems in Cruelty have that quality of “last letters” for me.

Ai: Maybe they do, I don’t know. Sometimes I can’t even remember the poems in Cruelty. I guess I don’t care about them as much anymore.

Kearney: I’d like to ask you about Cruelty while we’re on the subject.

Ai: Sure, I’ve got it right here—in case I need to refresh my memory. (Laughter)

Kearney: Which poems in the book do you feel closest to?

Ai: The only one I really feel close to at all is “Cuba, 1962.” For me, that’s the beginning of my new work, my new interest.

Kearney: In what sense?

Ai: The character speaking in “Cuba” seems to me a character with “heart,” a character larger than life, no matter how insignificant his own life is. . . . That’s what I think has happened in the new book, Killing Floor—the characters have moved beyond their own lives into another world.

Kearney: How would you characterize that other world? Or is there a way to?

Ai: I don’t know. It’s not so much a world as—what’s that science fiction term?—”dimension.” That other dimension, rather than inspiring fright (as it did when I was a kid and watched The Outer Limits) is simply an expanded consciousness.

Kearney: A sense of oneness with life? That kind of consciousness?

Ai: Not so much a oneness as a not being separate.

Kearney: An interesting distinction. . . . Sticking with Cruelty: many reviewers, although it seems to be missing the point, accuse the book of being obsessed with sex-and-violence. But to me, the poems are about loss. I remember you said once that Cruelty was a book of love poems.

Ai: I don’t remember when that was. The distinction between my “sex-and-violence” poems and others you might read is that in mine the characters love each other. The poems are not hate poems. A lot of women’s poetry approaches the theme of trouble between men and women in terms of hatred, I think, or “giving it to the man” in the same way that men have given it to women—and I never wrote from that point of view. Loss is very important to all the characters in Cruelty—even if they don’t identify it as loss—it’s something they can’t get or can’t get back. And so, there’s quite a bit of desperation in it, and I’ve used violence and sex as a way to express that desperation. . . . What I wanted—I did have a “grand reason” for the poems (at least after I’d finished the book)—I wanted people to see how they treated each other and themselves, and that’s why I accepted the title Cruelty for the book.

Kearney: What was your original title?

Ai: It was Wheel in a Ditch. It symbolized the wheels of the chariot in Ezekiel’s vision. Wheel as the circle, of course, and as the spirit of man trapped, stuck and not able to pull himself out.

Kearney: In a recent interview, Norman Dubie says something to the effect that the characters that speak in his poems are “contexts” for his own voice, rather than personalities separate from himself. Do you feel that way about the people who speak in your work?

Ai: No. I think that might be the fundamental difference between Dubie’s work and mine, or at least the way we approach our work. I know from the new book, Killing Floor, where I’m dealing with some historical figures, there will be people who will see similarities. But my characters are just who they are—they’re not, you know, vehicles for my own voice that much. My characters aren’t me; some are archetypes, some are people I knew, most are made up. I used to preface my readings with a statement that I hadn’t been pregnant and had never had an abortion—because people tended to believe all those things in Cruelty had happened to me. Which seems pretty naive.

Kearney: They couldn’t believe you could write those poems without an autobiographical intent.

Ai: Yes. It’s the tyranny of confessional poetry—the notion that everything one writes has to be taken from the self. Which for me isn’t true. If anything, my poems come from the unconscious—I’m irrevocably tied to the lives of all people, both in and out of time.

Kearney: Okay, but I’ve heard you talk at poetry readings about some episode from childhood or whatever that gave rise to a poem. I guess what I’m trying to get a handle on is where is Florence Ogawa then, in your poems? If it isn’t you speaking, then what kind of continuity of sensibility do you feel in your work? A continuity that would be “you” in the poems.

Ai: Hmmmm . . . Sorrowful? That life is sad, or is most of the time. In Cruelty you just see that side of it. As a child, there were good times, but they were always eclipsed by bad times. It’s like I haven’t been able to accept that I’m an adult, that the bogeyman isn’t just around the corner. Of course, that’s something one goes to therapy to deal with. When I was a child in San Francisco we never had enough money, and my stepfather would go down to the street and borrow some. He’d buy a hamburger and cut it in half for my sister and me for supper. Sometimes he’d spend the whole day borrowing money and by the next morning he’d have gotten some polish sausage and grits and we’d have milk and maybe even fried potatoes. But most of the time we just had S.0.S.—shit on a shingle. To this day I hate biscuits, because they were always the shingle. Bad times just around the corner.

Kearney: In reviewing The American Poetry Anthology, Louis Simpson says something to the effect that your work makes the work of your contemporaries look juvenile. Do you agree?

Ai: I don’t feel very comfortable assessing my own work. And I don’t feel very knowledgeable about contemporary American poetry. My tastes run to older poets’ work, poets like Galway, Kinnell and Phil Levine. Randall Jarrell. I love Cesare Pavese’s poetry. I loved The Lice by Merwin when it first came out. I like Gerald Stern’s work, and of course, Louis Simpson’s. Honestly, there are very few of my contemporaries whose work I admire or feel inspired by—I really like Steve Orien’s poetry and Jon Anderson’s and Norman Dubie’s. There is an obvious kinship, I believe, between Dubie’s work and mine. . . . My favorite poet for a long time has been Jean Follain, whose work is totally different from mine. The list goes on and on.

Cuddihy: I’m aware of your wide reading, particularly in Spanish and Japanese literature. Could you name any writers or poets among this group who may have influenced you?

Ai: I don’t believe my work is influenced by anybody. People may not believe that, but the hell with them. I am inspired though, by other writers. Miguel Hernandez, and Vallejo, when I was younger. I really love Hemandez’s work. I recognize Neruda as a master, though I don’t particularly care for his work. A Chilean poet, Enrique Lihn, his early work is very inspiring. My greatest inspiration comes from fiction, especially Latin American. Some Russian work, also. Juan Rolfo. Asturias’s Men of Maize. And, of course, Marquez—whom I really love. “Cuba, 1962” was inspired by reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, though I wrote it months later. Also, “The Woman Who Knew Too Much,” which I wrote a first draft of about the same time, which is in Killing Floor. Even then—this was the summer and fall of 1972—I was moving away from the poems in Cruelty. The bulk of the poems in Cruelty were written between March and July, 1972, when I was twenty-four. It’s always interested me about myself; an incredible maturity on one hand, and an incredible immaturity on the other. (Laughter) So, I was still able to put all those poems in Cruelty, and, at the same time, had already moved away from them.

Kearney: An obligatory question about craft. How do poems happen for you?

Ai: The way it does for most writers, I suppose. I might hear a tune, or see something, or read something, and that sets me off. . . . The other day I was reading the first chapter of Serenade by James M. Cain, a mystery writer of the ’30s. I’ve been working on a great poem (or at least what I hope is a great poem)—and I happened to start reading Serenade. They have a way, Cain and Raymond Chandler, of suspending you—of holding your breath while their characters talk. And you don’t breathe till they’re finished—whether it’s a chapter or a paragraph. I was sitting there in a local shopping mall and when I’d finished I said, “Boy, that’s great!” and I let out my breath and took out my notebook and just started writing.

There’s also another way I tend to write: everything I want to say is filed in my head. I work out the first stanza or first part or whatever in my head first. Before I write anything down, it’s planned—”planned” is the wrong word, it makes it sound like planned parenthood. I’ve got to have my character. I’ve got to know what kind of person he or she is. What are they doing? What would they wear? What colors do they like? Everything. What I’m doing, really, is painting—I’ve got to picture them before I can write. Like the poem “Childbeater” in Cruelty—I have to be that person.

Cuddihy: In a related area, how do you answer the criticism of some that too many of your poems are written from the male point of view?

Ai: Whoever wants to speak in my poems is allowed to speak, regardless of sex, race, creed, or color.

Cuddihy: You have been criticized by some black and feminist spokespersons for not identifying yourself sufficiently with either group. Is this because of your ethnically mixed background, or because, as a writer, you simply wish to be treated as an individual instead of being classified according to race or sex?

Ai: I’m simply a writer. I don’t want to be catalogued and my characters don’t want to be catalogued and my poems don’t want to be catalogued. If a poet’s work isn’t universal, then what good is it? Who the hell wants to read it.

Also, I don’t feel black. I can’t be more honest than that. I was telling Lawrence the other night that my mother was a maid and my grandmother was a maid; most of the black women I know were maids. I certainly relate to “the black experience” on that level, the human level of having to be a maid all your life. That means a hell of a lot more to me than an educated black person using a bunch of “dems” and “dats” when he writes poetry, even though he doesn’t talk like that himself. It’s pretentious. My experience is not “the black experience”—it’s simply the experience of having lived as a poor person.

 

___
Book

Ai Cruelty
Thunder’s Mouth Press

‘When Cruelty was published in 1973, I read the collection repeatedly, transported by the mystery in the poems and by the politics of gender on almost every page. The way the first poem in the collection, “Twenty-Year Marriage,” opens is a clue to this poet’s psychology: “You keep me waiting in a truck / with its one good wheel stuck in a ditch, / while you piss against the south side of a tree. / Hurry. I’ve got nothing on under my skirt tonight.” The speaker’s insinuation is calculated. The intentional, invented tension breathes on the page. She has our attention. But Ai knows—like any great actor—that language and pace are also crucial. Sometimes a poem may seem like personalized folklore, a feeling culled from the imagination. The characters hurt each other out of a fear of being hurt, and often they are doubly hurt. Do we believe her characters because they seem to evolve from some uncharted place beyond us but also inside us? They are of the soil, as if they’ve always been here; but they also reside on borders—spiritually, psychologically, existentially, and emotionally—as if only half-initiated into the muscular terror of ordinary lives. All the contradictions of so-called democracy live in her speakers. Most of the characters in Ai’s poetry are distinctly rural, charged in mind and belly with folkloric signification, always one step or one trope from homespun violence and blasphemy. What first deeply touched me in Cruelty is this: Ai’s images—tinctured by an unknown folklore—seemed to arise from some deep, unsayable place, translated from a pre-language of knowing or dreaming with one’s eyes open, as if something from long ago still beckoned to be put into words.’ — Yusef Komunyaka

___
Excerpts

Child Beater

Outside, the rain, pinafore of gray water, dresses the town
and I stroke the leather belt,
as she sits in the rocking chair,
holding a crushed paper cup to her lips.
I yell at her, but she keeps rocking;
back, her eyes open, forward, they close.
Her body, somehow fat, though I feed her only once a day,
reminds me of my own just after she was born.
It’s been seven years, but I still can’t forget how I felt.
How heavy it feels to look at her.
I lay the belt on a chair
and get her dinner bowl.
I hit the spoon against it, set it down
and watch her crawl to it,
pausing after each forward thrust of the legs
and when she takes her first bite,
I grab the belt and beat her across the back
until her tears, beads of salt-filled glass, falling,
shatter on the floor.

I move off, let her eat,
while I get my dog’s chain leash from the closet.
I whirl it around my head.
O daughter, so far, you’ve only had a taste of icing,
are you ready now for some cake?

 

The Hitchhiker

The Arizona wind dries out my nostrils
and the heat of the sidewalk burns my shoes,
as a woman drives up slowly.
I get in, grinning at a face I do not like,
but I slide my arm across the top of the seat
and rest it lightly against her shoulder.
We turn off into the desert,
then I reach inside my pocket and touch the switchblade.
.
We stop, and as she moves closer to me, my hands ache,
but somehow, I get the blade into her chest.
I think a song: “Everybody needs somebody,
everybody needs somebody to love,”
as the black numerals 35 roll out of her right eye
inside one small tear.
Laughing, I snap my fingers. Rape, murder, I got you
in the sight of my gun.
.
I move off toward the street.
My feet press down in it,
familiar with the hot, soft asphalt
that caresses them.
The sun slips down into its cradle behind the mountains
and it is hot, hotter than ever
and I like it.

 

The Kid

My sister rubs the doll’s face in mud,
then climbs through the truck window.
She ignores me as I walk around it,
hitting the flat tires with an iron rod.
The old man yells for me to help hitch the team,
but I keep walking around the truck, hitting harder,
until my mother calls.
I pick up a rock and throw it at the kitchen window,
but it falls short.
The old man’s voice bounces off the air like a ball
I can’t lift my leg over.

I stand beside him, waiting, but he doesn’t look up
and I squeeze the rod, raise it, his skull splits open.
Mother runs toward us. I stand still,
get her across the spine as she bends over him.
I drop the rod and take the rifle from the house.
Roses are red, violets are blue,
one bullet for the black horse, two for the brown.
They’re down quick. I spit, my tongue’s bloody;
I’ve bitten it. I laugh, remember the one out back.
I catch her climbing from the truck, shoot.
The doll lands on the ground with her.
I pick it up, rock it in my arms.
Yeah. I’m Jack, Hogarth’s son.
I’m nimble, I’m quick.
In the house, I put on the old man’s best suit
and his patent leather shoes.
I pack my mother’s satin nightgown
and my sister’s doll in the suitcase.
Then I go outside and cross the fields to the highway.
I’m fourteen. I’m a wind from nowhere.
I can break your heart.

 

Cuba, 1962

When the rooster jumps up on the windowsill and spreads his red-gold wings,
I wake, thinking it is the sun
and call Juanita, hearing her answer,

but only in my mind.
I know she is already outside,
breaking the cane off at ground level,
using only her big hands.
I get the machete and walk among the cane, until I see her, lying face-down in the dirt.

Juanita, dead in the morning like this.
I raise the machete—
what I take from the earth, I give back— and cut off her feet.

I lift the body and carry it to the wagon,
where I load the cane to sell in the village. Whoever tastes my woman in his candy, his cake, tastes something sweeter than this sugar cane;
it is grief.
If you eat too much of it, you want more,
you can never get enough.

 

Grandfather Says

“Sit in my hand.” I’m ten.
I can’t see him,
but I hear him breathing

in the dark.
It’s after dinner playtime.
We’re outside,
hidden by trees and shrubbery.
He calls it hide-and-seek,
but only my little sister seeks us
as we hide
and she can’t find us,
as grandfather picks me up
and rubs his hands between my legs.
I only feel a vague stirring
at the edge of my consciousness.
I don’t know what it is,
but I like it.
It gives me pleasure
that I can’t identify.
It’s not like eating candy,
but it’s just as bad,
because I had to lie to grandmother
when she asked,
“What do you do out there?” “Where?” I answered.
Then I said, “Oh, play hide-and-seek.” She looked hard at me,
then she said, “That was the last time.
I’m stopping that game.”
So it ended and I forgot.
Ten years passed, thirtyfive,
when I began to reconstruct the past.
When I asked myself
why I was attracted to men who disgusted me
I traveled back through time
to the dark and heavy breathing part of my life
I thought was gone,
but it had only sunk from view

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Niko, Hi, Niko. Yeah, bummer indeed. It’s hard to describe how the maze would have worked without showing you diagrams and things, and I’m not sure where they are at the moment. Basically, vaguely, there was a front part of the maze that was a replica of an abandoned and rather disorientingly laid-out hotel with lobby, hallways, doors to the rooms, some of which could be entered, etc., and you eventually entered a destroyed kind of employees only/behind the scenes space where the maze became very constricted and was threatening to collapse upon you and where you discovered something that explained everything you had experienced thus far. There was to be a very complicated sound and lighting design that would — as you said — be prerecorded and designed to confuse/attract. It would have been pretty incredible and quite a feat to pull off, but also prohibitively expensive, it turned out and alas. Wow, I have to say the novel you’re working on sounds really incredible! I don’t know if you’ve read my novel ‘The Marbled Swarm’, but it does some of the things you’re doing, albeit in a surely different way. I love the sound of that a lot! I passionately urge you to keep at it and not give up or worry about it failing. I would kill to read it, let’s say. That’s very exciting. Please feel free to share whatever is of interest to you to share as you build it. Thanks! ** Misanthrope, Good, good. I hope your today fell in line. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Ah, so glad you’re feeling right again. I’m bettering too, but it’s a weirdly slow recovery. What a strange effect. Oh, well, if he looks like twinkletwinkle then I think he and can work something out for sure. To be that loved, sigh, I’ll take it, ha ha. Love that is as accommodating to your every whim and wish as TheHeavenlyHellBoy’s butt, G. ** Sypha, Okay, gotcha. ** Steve Erickson, Yes, not a bad batch yesterday, I agree. And some new angles even. I’m assuming they’re comparing the new one to ‘Love’ because they mean it’s less flashy, more laborious, and badly written? ** David Ehrenstein, Wow, I haven’t seen Gerard in ages. He got old, just like the rest of us. No clue as to why I’m slightly surprised by that. ** Brian, Hi, Brian. Yeah, I had a soft spot for Hardcorestreetboy, ha ha. I think the problem is what people want ‘depth’ to mean. They usually mean psychological or emotional depth, but there are all kinds and varieties of depths, obviously. The prioritisation of exhuming emotional/ psychological trauma as art’s optimal goals is a big reason why most films, for instances, are so crap, if you ask me. Dumb example: even in disaster movies where all one wants is a visceral charge, there always has to be an estranged father/child or couple or whoever whose journey to mutual love/etc. is laced throughout and poisoning the fun because it’s set in stone that otherwise the film will be just a ride, but all that badly layered in phoney ‘human’ stuff does is just ruin the ride. Depth can be just fun or intellectual or whatever and still be fully deep, you know? Anyway … I’m better but it’s a slow, slow thing. Everyone I know who had this says it is, so I’m just waiting and trying to be patient. But I’m okay. I did book the US tickets, yes! I can’t believe it! ‘Sodom’, yeah, great. Luther Price’s stuff is very cool. I did a post about him. I don’t know if you saw it. Hm, tough call on that tricky trip to Light Industry. Especially solo. I’d probably end up with a ‘nah’, but I’m not so into going to the movies solo for some reason. You might go to a prom instead? I don’t know why that sounds so much more fun — my light fever might be to blame — but it does. Mostly yesterday was figuring out the US trip. It’s complicated because Zac and I want to stopover in Orlando for a few days on our way to LA to hit the theme parks, but we managed to sort it. Crazy! It’s been so long. And the producer of Zac’s and my new film is coming Paris this week, so I’ll get to meet with him and get updates on where we are in the fund-raising, which is info that Zac and I sorely need. So it was okay. It’s boiling hot here today, and I’m not expecting a miracle. How was Wednesday chez vous? ** Dalton, Hi, Dalton. My own personal theory is that the more destructive or self-destructive the stated desires or offers are, the more they’re likely to be just guys fantasising aloud and having an online circle jerk. Otherwise the sites where I find the escorts and slaves would have been shut down years ago. Simple logic, I guess. Yes, Portland does seem to be the hottest of the US hot spots for rebellion and resistance in recent months, wait, years. Interesting. Oh, man, I’m so sorry you’re in a downward swing inside and health-wise. Maybe the reopening is weirdly exaggerating things? I know that a lot of my friends are not feeling the bliss-out I do at the world returning in its familiar form. I hope you feel infinitely better as instantly as possible. They don’t show ‘The Great British Baking Show’ over here — well, not officially — but I saw some episodes the last time I was in the States, and, yeah, I ate ’em up, as it were. A bit of minor genius, that show, no? Yes, come visit France. I swear it’s really nice here. I’ll even show you the insider Paris scoop stuff. Take care, man. ** Okay. When I was just post-teen I was really, really into the book I’m spotlighting today. Recently I decided to go back and find out of Ai’s poems are still as blunt and powerful as I used to think they were. And I think they still are. Hence, the spotlight. See you tomorrow.