Word: ai
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Suffolk University is celebrating China Week. In the lobby of the Donahue Building at 41 Temple St., Beacon Hill, there's an exhibit of Chinese crafts, calligraphy and painting, and today at 1 p.m. there's a lecture demostration on Chinese painting and T'ai Chi Chuan, with Chinese food served...
...AI'S CRUELTY., on the other hand, leaves very little to the suggestiveness of poetry. Its titles speak for the poetry's overbearing directness: "Forty-Three Year Old Woman, Masturbating," "The Corpse Hauler's Elegy," "The Cripple," "The Suicide," "Child Beater," "Starvation." Ai's purpose seems to be to attack the reader, lash out at the finer sensibilities. Her poems are description of desperate people or small narratives laced with hate and anger. There isn't even any self-pity in her characters--in "The Rivals," an old woman screams out at her cold husband...
...Ai's world there are no redeeming experiences, with one exception, death. There is a stoicism here, an unexplainable will to live. Only her last poem, "New Crops for a Free Man," hints vaguely of some kind of earthly salvation...
There's no excess baggage in Cruelty's lines. If anything, there's a lack of finesse--subtlty could get across some of Ai's scenarios even more powerfully than the raw, hard-hitting stuff that leaves you numb and bewildered...
...When Ai came to Harvard last fall for a reading at the Advocate she said as a preface to her new book that you have to go through hell before you can reach heaven, you have to experience pain and hate before you can truly enjoy pleasure or love. Whatever her plans for the future may be, it's certain that at the present time Ai has not yet transcended into that state of higher being. This lady is living in hell...