Ai Ogawa considered herself as "simply a writer" rather than a spokesperson for any particular group.[17] About her own poetry in an interview with Lawrence Kearney and Michael Cuddihy in 1978, she emphasized that there are no "confessional" or autobiographical elements in her work. However, in an interview with Okla Elliott in 2003 after the publication of Dread, she stated that some of the poems and characters in that book are "fictionalized versions" of her family history and that her multi-racial background and interest in history has had a strong influence on her work in this particular collection.[18]
In a 1999 interview, Ai was asked about the topics she uses in her writings, such as child abuse, necrophilia, and murder. When asked by interviewer Elizabeth Farnsworth why she chooses to write on these topics, Ai replied that “it’s really the characters, because [she] write[s] monologues” (Farnsworth).[19] She also spoke about her choice of characters that “there’s a lot more to talk about with the scoundrels” (Farnsworth).
In that same interview, Farnsworth commented on the fact that even though Ai's poetry is written in first person, she is “almost always someone else” (Farnsworth). Ai also told Farnsworth that her “first poetry teacher said that when you wrote in the first person, that your work was often stronger” (Farnsworth). Throughout her writing career, Ai eventually realized that her “poems that were written in the first person were the strongest” (Farnsworth). She also told Farnsworth that she considers herself an “actor” and that is how she is able to successfully write as other characters.
Farnsworth asked Ai about her poem about Jimmy Hoffa- “Jimmy Hoffa’s Odyssey.” Ai told Farnsworth that she got the idea from watching a The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Carson had told a joke that inspired Ai to write the poem. After she decided to write the poem, she found a biography on Hoffa and studied it before writing the piece. Ai said that she often reads biographies before writing a poem on an historical figure.
While her work often contains sex, violence, and other controversial subjects, she told Kearney and Cuddihy during that 1978 interview that she did not view her use of them as gratuitous. Concerning the poems in her first collection, Cruelty, she said: "I wanted people to see how they treated each other and themselves." She noted that the difference between the poems in Cruelty and those in Killing Floor is that they deal with her character's whole life rather than a single episode. She described her purpose for writing as "trying to integrate [her] life emotionally and spiritually."[7]
When Ai was asked why she thought her work was so “edgy and dark”, Ai stated that “violence is an integral part of American culture” (Farnsworth). She tries to deal with that in her writing, which is something she said she has been working on her whole life. She said that “she was not able to deal with violence in [her] work” early in her writing career, and that was something she intentionally set out to do.
About contemporary American poetry and her own risk-taking in her work she said: "Perhaps there's a fear of revealing too much emotion in American poetry, despite the go-ahead of a sort from confessional poetry. At any rate, I think that that is my goal—I mean I never want to say 'I have plenty of heart,' but I want to be able to say whatever I feel without fear or embarrassment."[7]
