AI?

 The Making of a Poem, the excellent Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, prints its authors' names in UPPER CASE, above the name of the poem (and why not?). Thus it was that, browsing in its pages last night, I came across a poem written by AI. AI? What? I know everyone's doing it now, but surely not in 2000, and surely not in a Norton anthology...
Indeed not: the poem was the work of a poet who styled herself 'Ai' (the Japanese for 'love', apparently). The poem, in the 'Open Forms' section of the anthology, is titled 'The German Army, Russia, 1943' –
 
For twelve days,
I drilled through Moscow ice
to reach paradise,
that while tablecloth, set with a plate
that's cracking bit by bit
like the glassy air, like me.
I know I'll fly apart soon,
the pieces of me so light they float. 
The Russians burned their crops,
rather than feed our army.
Now they strike us against each other like dry rocks
and set us on fire with a hunger
nothing can feed.
Someone calls me and I look up.
It's Hitler.
I imagine eating his terrible, luminous eyes.
Brother, he says.
I stand up, tie the rags tighter around my feet.
I hear  my footsteps running after me,
but I am already gone. 

As a stark portrait of absolute desperation, I think that is rather good... 
  Ai was born Florence Anthony (in Texas in 1947), and described herself as half Japanese, one eighth Choktaw-Chickasaw, a quarter black, a sixteenth (!) Irish, Southern Cheyenne and Comanche. Well, at least her chosen two-letter moniker simplified things. Her early years were tough and complicated, and it was an assignment at her Catholic school – write a letter from the perspective of a martyr – that first got her interested in the possibilities of writing poetry. Joining the University of California's MFA programme, she worked under, among others, the great Donald Justice. Rising through academe, publishing at intervals, winning awards and finally securing tenure as a professor at the Oklahoma State University, she had the kind of career characteristic of 20th-century American poets. As for her work, what little I've seen of it seems rather too loud and overtly political for my taste – but that poem in the Norton anthology is rather good, if grim.