Poems by Ai, Dickey and Bidart/ Analysis of Ai's James Dean

The Sheep Child - JAMES L. DICKEY

Young boys curious to explore and discover anything (even couple with!) , elements of nature; museum in Atlanta with this half creature that isn't quite a sheep. creepy turn in the poem where the boys themselves might be sheeps; relics of memories, like the sheep. Are they safe, are the sheep? The sheep is anthropomorphized and starts talking: about his mother who carries him inspired from another world, she experiences love. The sheep's eyes are more than human, he is like a portal between the natural world and the world of men;he is half sheep half man. He eats milk and dies. Though he is now dead and preserved in his dusty father's house, his presence and memory lives on in boys' memories; is he incarnation of wisdom, of suffering of life until they marry.

"In Dickey’s case, examining the dirty side of sexuality reveals that the deep root of all such encounters is the urge to connect and create, and that earthly immortality will always have a necessary hitch in its inexorable gait."

Almost Human reading: This is a poem in woodcuts, American Sign language loosely based on James Dickey's "Sheep Child". The half-human/half-sheep speaks of its conception,birth, ecstatic vision and death.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB1-JOBcxF4

Ellen West - Frank Bidart

Ellen loves sweets, but wants to be the typical thin elegant woman. The docs tell her it's impossible but she doesn't care. Her husband married her " as meat". Scornful tone in that. She says that being a girl is torture because of the beauty implications. Now she's 32 and anorexic, using laxatives, looks like a skeleton. Different scene to where the woman is at a restaurant alone (she's alienated herself from other people because of the food). She sees a man and woman; the woman is very pretty, the image she wants to be, and the man is also very handsome. She feels disgust as she realizes they're a couple; probably from jealousy of the relationship and also from their physique. Also horror at the fact that they're feeding each other. Another scene where she wants to "defeat" Nature; aging, weight. In the hospital where she gets treated she writes poems to forget, but eve that fails. She becomes friend with thin female patient (longing to be what she isn't). Then we skip to Callas, a singer who had  a loud strong voice and big body; how she deteriorated, lost weight and lost her voice. (tapeworm of her soul). Narrator muses on why Callas decided to lose weight and changer her voice;to better her art? To avoid society's demands? Patient is discharged from hospital. She knows her fear of food os childish but she is a prisoner of her hunger. Odd scene on the train where the man sees her looking down at the orange peel but not taking it. Embodiment of temptation? She scorns how everyone on the train is hiding their flaws despite "normal" bodies. Mentions how she disappointed husband by not killing an ideal in her suicide letter. She's like the example of people at the height of their prime before dying. She kills herself.

Herbert White

 crazy man who killed a little girl and regularly goes out into the woods to piss and masturbate on her. When he killed her, he remembers how funny it was, hitting her. Yet in retrospect, just like the pissing and jacking off, he thinks somebody else must have done it. Flashback to when he visited father at a motel; insight into separation/divorce of parents; then Herbert describes seeing the little girl, picking her up in his truck and killing her, then raping her dead body. He buried her in the motel garden. He explains how he wants to feel things, he believes in fate. Believes that the motel was there for him. Then there is a flash of lucidity as he refers to "the bastard that hurt a little girl". Childhood reminiscence of intercourse with a goat, as he orgasms the goat dies, and the next day, he comes back again to masturbate on the corpse. Very bitter resentment towards father as he hangs around with young wife's kids, and it inspires crazy Herbert to drive away and pick up a girl he sees walking out of the movies. The end of the poem drives in the narrator's realization that HE is the one who really did kill and rape the girl. He hopes he goes to hell, for he can't stand seeing who he is anymore.....

The Abjection of James Dean: Mixed Race/Mixed Media Performances in Ai’s “James Dean” - Catherine Irwin

Ai bio: she constructed an identity out of herself; was considered black yet wasn't and she rejected/was rejected by/in that group. She constructed herself a Japanese ID, hence the name. In monologue about James Dean she toys with media identity about this dead white hetero man; how different portrayals of the identity can abjectify a person. Critical mimesis: where other cultures imitate deliberately the white hetero-normative culture. "In other words, technology’s role in the development of an identity can be revealed by exposing through art what has been made abject by a systematic or mediated mode of enframing." In her monologue about James Dean she uses vivid cinematic language to describe his body, his death and how the media keep on wanting to film him after death. Allegoric body in ruins: description of James Dean as a lover, yet is decapitated; castration symbolism, perhaps of the white hetero-normative identity? Different identities explored here: straight James Dean, a bisexual James Dean, and a mixed race James Dean." She abjectifies image of white male as being desirable and by extension the white female as being sexually desirable as well. Disidentification in order to discover herself and avoid the 1990s media blitz of hiding mixed race. "reversed ventriloquism".  Ai's method is like “the stage” to be “a laboratory in which to construct new, nongendered identities." BUT Ai seems aware that because of the nature of the stage (must always keep up the act), and the nature of people, this disidentification she attirubtes to James Dean won't make people more open-minded overnight.

Ai poems

Nothing But Color: slicing open Etsuko ; memories of loving someone, and eating a bit of flesh (masochism?). Failed suicide attempt. Nothing really mattered; false but consuming passion of love and death. Yukio Mishima killed himself; Ai immortalized the moment.

Lesson Lesson: about this little boy who is more perceptive than he should be (sun isn't green in drawings). Very blatant allusion to wood and erection; out in the field like his daddy, with wood in his pants and wanting to drive it home.

Jericho: Girl is pregnant. Lover puts on black mask. She starts eating peppermint he brings; obviously a sexual side to it. SHe adresses her lover like he is afraid of something, apologetic of something and that's why he brings the sweets. SHe tells him to dare to make it to the top.

The Mortician's Twelve Year old son: twelve year old fantasizing about this woman in a long green dress whose breasts were covered. When she dies, he sees her corpse under the sheets and he executes his fantasy --> touching/kissing her nipples. Necrophilia in a way.

The German Army Russia, 1943: peasant talks about the hunger that no one can feed; about drilling his way to a goal, although he knows he probably won't make it. He talks about the Russians burning their crops instead of feeding their army. Hitler beckons him but he is gone.

Talking to his reflection in a Shallow Pond: Narrator lives on chrysanthemum and nightshade; envies the other that can breathe. He wanted himself to die, then he wanted himself to suffer. He drops a rock into his reflection and wishes he would sink. He starts to rescue himself, then pulls back. Then he realizes that they're the same and he likes it, likes that he can die without dying. Sadomasochism.

Go: Narrator talks about lover/killer (Ted Kennedy). he survived as she drowned and bears no trace of her.Everyone wants to defend him, and the narrator wants recognition of her role in the scheme. He dove for a woman the media misinterpreted and didn't recognize freedom when it stared him in the face. Narrator talks about lover realizing he's wasted his life, sometimes recognizing it, sometimes not. She taunts him in the end of poem: if he'd died, he'd have garnered fame along with other 2 brothers. She puts him on stage with a strip-tease with his "jelly rolls". 


The Resurrection of Elvis Presley: Elvis talks about how he used to practice dance movies, lube his hair like a Black, and aspire to be Tony Curtis . He describes how he goes through life and goes through everyone's hands until the Colonel grabs him and he follows like a dog. He lets him win because he promised resurrection. Conflict between what the Colonel wants and Papa wants. Colonel wants him to be quiet and Papa wants him to enjoy life while it's there. Elvis wants to listen to the Colonel but he remembers that in the end he is a country boy who likes singing, and dancing in the dark.

Last Seen: Alfred Hitcock doesn't die. He is locked out of Paradise. Narrator talks irreverentially about him ; how he was boring and all that mattered to him was the next scene, the next film and publicity. Creation likened to depiction of necrophilia.  Ends on questioning note.