Spotlight on … Claudia Rankine Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004)

 

‘Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric  is a book-length prose poem filled with photographs and a few non-photographic images. It toggles between meditation and anger on a wide range of subjects, including death, cancer, depression (and anti-depressants), suicide, rape, 9/11, racism, history, politics, and literature, but the central trope is the ubiquitous television set. A repeated image of a static-filled television screen serves to separate the segments of the poem, signalling that Rankine is about to change the channel on us. The book’s epigraph from Aime Cesaire is an admonition to not be a spectator: “And most of all beware, even in thought, of assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator,for life is not a spectacle, a sea of grief is not a proscenium, a man who wails is not a dancing bear…” In Rankine’s poem, the television is so much a symbol for the media, it’s simply the biggest source of bad news and despair. In one section, with the controversial vote count over the reelection of George W. Bush as the backdrop, Rankine writes: “I stop watching the news. I want to continue, watching, charting, and discussing the counts, the recounts, the hand counts, but I cannot. I lose hope.”

‘As the title implies, this is a very personal poem sequence, with a narrator who faces family deaths, takes an ever-changing menu of anti-depressants, and speaks directly to the reader. Whether this narrator bears any relationship to Rankine, though, is both unclear and irrelevant, because, in a very real sense, this narrator is narrating our own lives back to us. At first, I thought Rankine’s rather routine mixture of snapshots and media images imagery was rather mundane. But on closer inspection, it strikes me that her choice and use of imagery is crucial to the book’s tone. She often encloses photographs within her standard frame of a television set, which, in an odd way, makes them feel more familiar. Televised images are immediately, even if inadequately, contextualized. Collectively, the images tilt the book toward an informality, as if someone were talking to us while the television set drones in the background and we flip the pages of a newspaper. These are the images we are confronted with daily – images of politicians, press conferences, crime victims, celebrities – a relentless tide of insults and tragedies and deaths that threatens to benumb us. But however much the narrator might like to turn off the television and shut out the world, much of the impact of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely comes from the way in which we come to understand the persistent underlying interconnection of the personal, the social, the civic, and the economic.

‘One of these images, however, has haunted me for days. It’s one of the most arresting and enigmatic uses of embedded imagery that I’ve yet to run across. The image is located in the midst of a brief reference to the 1998 murder of James Byrd, Jr., an African American man who was beaten by three white men in Jasper, Texas, chained to the back of a pickup truck, and then dragged for miles until his body was literally torn to pieces. The narrator notes that President George W. Bush could not correctly recall the facts of the story. “You don’t remember because you don’t care,” the narrator pointedly tells Bush via the television screen. The unidentified image may or may not have anything to do with the murder or with Bush, it simply shows four sets of legs (from the knees down) standing around a shiny spot on a hard, paved surface of some kind. It’s not clear who the people represent, although a woman wearing a skirt either has black skin or very dark stockings. Does the shiny surface represent blood? Are the four figures all looking at the ground or is only the photographer fixated on the spot surrounded by their feet where the reflected heads of the figures seem to blend into each other? Are we to think of these people as connected with President Bush or with the victim or with one of his murderers? Each of these little puzzles and possibilities passed through my mind more or less simultaneously, making each of them equally plausible. It’s an inspired choice of image.

‘Don’t Let Me Be Lonely feels more like a dirge than a lyric. It is a powerful book about the struggle to find and maintain a moral position, to stave off loneliness and hopelessness, to not fall prey to the blind and blinding “American optimism” (she’s quoting Cornel West here). Only at the very end does Rankine’s narrator begin to address the ability of poetry to bridge the chasm between one person and another. On the penultimate page, Rankine writes this:

Or Paul Celan said that the poem was no different from a handshake. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem – is how Rosemary Waldrop translated his German. The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handshaking over (here) a self to another. Hence the poem is that – Here. I am here. This conflation of the solidity of presence with the offering of this same presence perhaps has everything to do with being alive.

‘The poem then ends with these lines:

In order for something to be handed over a hand must extend and a hand must receive. We must both be here in this world in this life in this place indicating the presence of.

— Vertigo

 

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Further

Claudia Rankine Site
Claudia Rankine @ Poetry Foundation
Claudia Rankine, The Art of Poetry No. 102 @ The Paris Review
Podcast: How Can I Say This So We Can Stay in This Car Together?
‘We Have No Practice Talking About Race in This Country.’
Claudia Rankine @ goodreads
Podcast: Understand Systems Of Oppression By Interrogating Whiteness
THE HISTORY BEHIND THE FEELING: A CONVERSATION WITH CLAUDIA RANKINE
“I Think We Need to Be Frightened”
Black Bodies In White Words, Or: Why We Need Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine on using art to see bias in the arts
INTERVIEW WITH CLAUDIA RANKINE @ The White Review
Racism’s Metre and Rhyme: Kayombo Chingonyi on Claudia Rankine
Podcast: What Happened When Claudia Rankine Talked to White Men About Privilege
Towards a Poetics of Racial Trauma: Lyric Hybridity in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen
HOW TO WRITE LIKE CLAUDIA RANKINE
Claudia Rankine’s poetic reflections on “invisible racism”
One side or the other of that ‘you’
A Conversation With Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine on Black Glamour
Claudia Rankine by ​Lauren Berlant​

 

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Facsimile pages

 

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Extras

Claudia Rankine with Saskia Hamilton, Conversation, 6 May 2015

Claudia Rankine: The Blaney Lecture, 2017

Claudia Rankine: On Whiteness—Friday, March 24, 2017

Claudia Rankine at The Poetry Project, 2014

 

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Interview
from Poets.org

 

Although you identify more or less as a poet, your work is notorious for its tackling of multiple genres—I’m thinking of the way you incorporate photography in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, or, more recently, with the genre-bending work of The Provenance of Beauty. A guided bus tour through the Bronx, combining pre-recorded and live elements, this piece is presented as a “poetic travelogue,” though it also seems part-radioplay, part-happening, part-sightseeing tour. How does one genre inform another in your work?

Claudia Rankine: I’m beginning to think less in terms of genre and just in terms of writing in general. My background, my education, has been in poetry, so I feel that many of the layers in whatever I’m doing are coming out of a world of allusions that are located in poets. So, no matter what I’m working on, I like to call it poetic in some way, because the poets that I’ve read and that I love, their work tends to infuse it.

For instance, we had a line in the play that referred to “getting and spending,” (it was in an earlier draft of the play—it’s no longer there). I wanted it there because it sort of worked against the industrialization of the landscape, and for me, it was a sort of private joke, to throw in that phrase. The director, Melanie Joseph, said, “What is reminding me of college from this?” I said, it must be “getting and spending.” And it was; she remembered the Wordsworth. For me, that is sort of my private cache. But when I’m writing, I just feel like I’m writing. I don’t really think that I’m writing in this genre or that genre. That might be a problem, but it seems very integrated to me.

Very early in the play, the narrator says: “Are you wondering why we’re here? Where we’re going? When we get there will you think, This is nice. This is new. This is old. This is urban. These are the real people. These are the other people.” What is your relationship with the South Bronx, and, more generally, how do you feel geography, setting, space informs your writing?

Rankine: I grew up in the Bronx, so [the director and I] went and checked out different neighborhoods in the Bronx, and we ended up, for many reasons, in the south Bronx.

I believe that where we are, how we are allowed to live, is determined by the politics of the land—the big politics and the little politics. And it varies depending on where you’re located. I’m very interested in the landscape in general as the site of living, of a place created out of lives, and those lives having a kind of politics and a kind of being that is consciously and unconsciously shaped. Decisions are made that allow us to do certain things, that give us certain freedoms and ‘unfreedoms.’

Another statement early in the play: “Identity is time passing. Every moment of what we call life is life in the shadow of choice.” Do you consciously resist assumed notions of identity and identity politics? If so, what value is gained or lost in such resistance?

Rankine: Well, I don’t know if it’s resistance, but I do think that the more we are conscious of the limits that are put on us or that we put on each other and the ways in which we try to code the existence of others—the more we understand that—the more we are able to work with it, to make conscious choices about how we live.

You know—I do it, you do it, I’m sure we all do it, and it’s a kind of shortcut to living. And I think if we can sort of back up from that at least and begin to see people as individuals and to not take the mechanisms that society has handed us to get past people very quickly. If we can just slow down a bit, I think we would begin to treat each other a little better. I really feel that way.

What do you consider the role of collaboration in poetry? Particularly in theatre, this is often an obligatory part of the medium. To what extent do you consider a completely singular work possible or attractive? What does the collaborator gain or lose in that sort of a project?

Rankine: I know that the making of the play is tremendously collaborative, and I have been living it for the past two years. But still, in the end, the writing you do on your own. You still are writing at your desk by yourself. What is more collaborative, perhaps, is the editing process. In some ways, things can go faster, because you have many eyes responding and looking and feeling, and the actress being in the language, and if it doesn’t hold, everybody sees that very quickly.

I have learned to be very clear about what’s not ‘just language,’—things that I am very committed to and that cannot be edited out just because somebody doesn’t like the feel of that. I’d be willing to revise maybe syntactically the way something happens, but I’m not willing to cut certain things that are part of what I feel is the meaning of the piece. And so the process is a good one in that you have to lay claim to your commitments early on, or else somebody else’s view gets laid over yours. And, you know, that might be okay. But for me, it’s not okay most of the time. And so you have to be very willing to articulate why things are necessary and to convince a number of people that that’s the case. And that’s been a great process to be involved in. It’s like the ideal marriage—where you’re constantly negotiating, but you win many of the battles.

With Juliana Spahr, you co-edited the anthology American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language. Can you tell us how the two of you worked together? Did you struggle with the idea of defining a contemporary moment in American poetry? And how did disagreements and compromise shape the collection?

Rankine: The reason I wanted to work with Juliana on that was: her training was very different from mine. She had studied with a lot of the language poets and what is in a sense the next generation. And I had worked more with lyric-based poets—people like Louise Glück and Bob Hass. And I admired Juliana’s work so much. I love her work. And I also loved her vision—sort of the politics of her work, the connectedness that she advocates in her critical work and that is demonstrated in her creative work. And so I wanted that approach to help shape the book. So I don’t think there was any conflict per se in the collaboration with the collection, because I so admired what she had done both critically and poetically that I could stay hungry for her point of view.

What about conflicts with yourself?

Rankine: In terms of deciding on the poets—that’s tough. Because for everyone you include, there’s another you’re not including who you should be including. So in a way you come up with these rules, and you make rules only to narrow the field, not to judge, not to create a hierarchical structure at all, only because you have to narrow the field, so you do that. But luckily we are now in the process of making volume two, so a lot of the people who should’ve been in volume one, like C. D. Wright, Leslie Scalapino, Laura Mullen—many, many people are now going to be in volume two, so that is incredibly satisfying. And this volume I’m co-editing with Lisa Sewell. She’s writing the introduction as we speak.

Glancing quickly at the extensive notes for Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, the sources include Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Lear, the television show Murder, She Wrote, and pharmaceutical pamphlets, to name a few. What is your process for collecting and seeking out these materials—were they gathered over the years and selected when the writing called for them, or did you actively seek them out for the book?

Rankine: They’re not even gathered, they’re just lived, and when you need them they come to you. But I think somebody like John Ashbery gives you permission to pull from everywhere. From all the bits of your life, when you need it—and before him Eliot, obviously, and the Modernists. But there’s no conscious sense that I’m engaging in this because I will use it later. You’re just living it. You just happened to see it on television, you just happened to see it in the paper, and you just happened to have read that book and loved it. And I think, on some level, all of those things must have touched me in some way, because they did come back to me. So, on some level, I connect with everything that I end up using.

Are certain subjects more conducive to poetry than others?

Rankine: One way of thinking about it is—something like ecopoetics. When somebody like Gary Snyder is very interested in engagement with the landscape as it exists rather than in a romantic way, that speaks to me. That’s a sensibility that I understand. At a certain level, all poetry seeks something, is looking, is in conversation with something. I just think there are certain poets that speak to me more because they are engaged in the world in a way that I am engaged in the world.

But it’s not even a linguistic thing, it’s a bodily thing. And so I feel very close to Yeats, partly because I think Yeats—even though I don’t agree with his politics—was very interested in the politics of the world he was living in. He was affected by it; he had to address it. And that’s something I feel like I understand. I also feel very moved by the work of Emily Dickinson, for the same reason, though the work is very different.

Can you give us any insight into the notion of a book as unit of writing, as opposed to a collection of singular poems?

Rankine: Somebody once said to me: you’re not a magazine poet, because you don’t write single poems, you write in whole books. I think it was Richard Howard who told me that actually—after he rejected one of my poems from the Paris Review. But I think he’s right. I tend to be interested in a subject and the world around that, so once I get started on something, I can go years circling it.

I definitely start with the idea of something, and then I begin to investigate it. I really see it as an investigation, an interrogation that goes on on the page for me, for a long time, until something gets resolved. Not that questions get answers. I think that after a while, I come to an end, because I come to an end. I’ve always admired, but never understood, the ability to write a single poem and then be done with it.

Your collections Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Plot feature personae that are at once intensely personal and noticeably distanced. More recently, in The Provenance of Beauty, there is an insistent, though disembodied, first-person speaker, that guides the trip. In what ways do you identify with these voices? What is your relationship to autobiography in your writing?

Rankine: I think a lot of people assume that Don’t Let Me Be Lonely was autobiographical because of the “I,” the use of the first-person. It’s not—and it is. I feel that when I’m working on something, I will take from anywhere I know to get at the place that I’m going. Anything I know about you is mine now. And everything I know about me is also mine now. And I will use whatever I can to investigate whatever it is that I’m investigating.

Should I be worried?

Rankine: No, you shouldn’t be worried—you’d never notice. For me, those lines are not hard and fast. But I’m not writing nonfiction. Until I say I’m writing nonfiction, I’m not writing nonfiction. I feel like I should be responsible textually. And I am. That’s why notes are in the back of Lonely and will be in the back of any other text that I write, but I don’t feel any commitment to any external idea of the truth. I feel like the making of the thing is the truth, will make its own truth. And I do really feel like what I know through living is material for the making of whatever it is that I’m making.

How do you think one project leads into the next? Can you tell us, are there connections between your play and what you’ve previously published—and to what you’ll publish next?

Rankine: Definitely. I think it’s organic. I think life’s organic. And I don’t think I would have been commissioned to do the play had I not written Lonely. And I don’t think I would have been prepared for the play had I not done the films that I had been doing, with my husband, John Lucas, recently. I definitely see my life unfolding in a very organic fashion. Each time it’s a little more difficult, it’s a little bit more collaborative, because it becomes a little bit more unbanded, but I do feel that I’m being prepared each time for the next thing.

You should feel lucky.

Rankine: I do.

 

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Book

Claudia Rankine Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
Graywolf Press

‘Award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multi-genre writing, fuses the lyric, the essay, and the visual in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America. With wit and intelligence, Rankine strives toward an unprecedented clarity-of thought, imagination, and sentence-making-while always arguing that complex thinking is the only salvation for ourselves, our art, and our government.

‘Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is an important new confrontation with our culture right now, with a voice at its heart bewildered by the anxieties of race riots, terrorist attacks, medicated depression, and the antagonism of the television that won’t leave us alone.’ — Graywolf Press

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Excerpts

There was a time I could say no one I knew well had died. This is not to suggest no one died. When I was eight my mother became pregnant. She went to the hospital to give birth and returned without the baby. Where’s the baby? we asked. Did she shrug? She was the kind of woman who liked to shrug; deep within her was an everlasting shrug. That didn’t seem like a death. The years went by and people only died on television—if they weren’t Black, they were wearing black or were terminally ill. Then I returned home from school one day and saw my father sitting on the steps of our home. He had a look that was unfamiliar; it was flooded, so leaking. I climbed the steps as far away from him as I could get. He was breaking or broken. Or, to be more precise, he looked to me like someone understanding his aloneness. Loneliness. His mother was dead. I’d never met her. It meant a trip back home for him. When he returned he spoke neither about the airplane nor the funeral.

Every movie I saw while in the third grade compelled me to ask, Is he dead? Is she dead? Because the characters often live against all odds it is the actors whose mortality concerned me. If it were an old, black-and-white film, whoever was around would answer yes. Months later the actor would show up on some latenight talk show to promote his latest efforts. I would turn and say—one always turns to say—You said he was dead. And the misinformed would claim, I never said he was dead. Yes, you did. No, I didn’t. Inevitably we get older; whoever is still with us says, Stop asking me that.

Or one begins asking oneself that same question differently. Am I dead? Though this question at no time explicitly translates into Should I be dead, eventually the suicide hotline is called. You are, as usual, watching television, the eight-o’clock movie, when a number flashes on the screen: I-800-SUICIDE. You dial the number. Do you feel like killing yourself? the man on the other end of the receiver asks. You tell him, I feel like I am already dead. When he makes no response you add, I am in death’s position. He finally says, Don’t believe what you are thinking and feeling. Then he asks, Where do you live?

Fifteen minutes later the doorbell rings. You explain to the ambulance attendant that you had a momentary lapse of happily. The noun, happiness, is a static state of some Platonic ideal you know better than to pursue. Your modifying process had happily or unhappily experienced a momentary pause. This kind of thing happens, perhaps is still happening. He shrugs and in turn explains that you need to come quietly or he will have to restrain you. If he is forced to restrain you, he will have to report that he is forced to restrain you. It is this simple: Resistance will only make matters more difficult. Any resistance will only make matters worse. By law, I will have to restrain you. His tone suggests that you should try to understand the difficulty in which he finds himself. This is further disorienting. I am fine! Can’t you see that! You climb into the ambulance unassisted.

 

*

On the bus two women argue about whether Rudy Giuliani had to kneel before the Queen of England when he was knighted. One says she is sure he had to. They all had to, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Mick Jagger. They all had to. The other one says that if Giuliani did they would have seen it on television. We would have seen him do it. I am telling you we would have seen it happen.

When my stop arrives I am still considering Giuliani as nobility. It is difficult to separate him out from the extremes connected to the city over the years of his mayorship. Still, a day after the attack on the World Trade Center a reporter asked him to estimate the number of dead. His reply—More than we can bear—caused me to turn and look at him as if for the first time. It is true that we carry the idea of us along with us. And then there are three thousand of us dead and it is incomprehensible and ungraspable. Physically and emotionally we cannot bear it, should in fact never have this capacity. So when the number is released it is a sieve that cannot hold the loss of us, the loss Giuliani recognized and answered for.

Wallace Stevens wrote that “the peculiarity of the imagination is nobility . . . nobility which is our spiritual height and depth; and while I know how difficult it is to express it, nevertheless I am bound to give a sense of it. Nothing could be more evasive and inaccessible. Nothing distorts itself and seeks disguise more quickly. There is a shame of disclosing it and in its definite presentation a horror of it. But there it is.”

Sir Giuliani kneeling. It was apparently not something to be seen on television, but rather a moment to be heard and experienced; a moment that allowed his imagination’s encounter with death to kneel under the weight of the real.

 

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Cornel West makes the point that hope is different from American optimism. After the initial presidential election results come in, I stop watching the news. I want to continue watching, charting, and discussing the counts, the recounts, the hand counts, but I cannot. I lose hope. However Bush came to have won, he would still be winning ten days later and we would still be in the throes of our American optimism. All the non-reporting is a distraction from Bush himself, the same Bush who can’t remember if two or three people were convicted for dragging a black man to his death in his home state of Texas.

You don’t remember because you don’t care. Sometimes my mother’s voice swells and fills my forehead. Mostly I resist the flooding, but in Bush’s case I find myself talking to the television screen: You don’t remember because you don’t care.

Then, like all things impassioned, this voice takes on a life of its own: You don’t know because you don’t fucking care. Fuck you.

I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive inside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. I don’t know, I just find when the news comes on I switch the channel. This new tendency might be indicative of a deepening personality flaw: IMH, The Inability to Maintain Hope, which translates into no innate trust in the supreme laws that govern us. Cornel West says this is what is wrong with black people today—too nihilistic. Too scarred by hope to hope, too experienced to experience, too close to dead is what I think.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. The writer Chris Kelso whose ‘Dregs Trilogy’ triple novel was featured here in the most recent ‘4 books I read & …’ post has written a beautiful piece about Diarmuid Hester’s WRONG if you’re interested. Here ** David Ehrenstein, Jean-Pierre. As always, what films get in the Days depends on what films have clips online. I’ll hunt hard for signs of the early ones you mentioned. Okay, your list of things you have available to sell is too massive to cut and paste here so I’ll direct people to yesterday’s comments. That ManWhore thing can’t not be a parody, and yet, yeah, nothing seems too extremely far fetched to become believable in the US of A. Everyone, Mr. Ehrenstein has created a humongous list of books, CDs, etc. that he has on offer in his ever more legendary house/yard fire sale. Lots of primo stuff at bargain prices. The list is far too gigantic to paste here, but go back a day, i.e. here and you’ll see it in the comments. Then, if you see a goodie you need, whether you’re near to David’s locale or far, contact him at [email protected], ideally this weekend. Thank you. ** _Black_Acrylic, Nice album cover there, obviously. I look forward to my audio introduction via you next week! ** G, Hi, G! Relaxation is kind of like a golden treasure these days, so it’s cool the post pried open that aspect of you. Chris’s piece is really nice, yeah. I’m honoured by it. I’m happy you’re going to start getting out to exhibitions. Having them up and running here is a huge help to the mind and even kind of the soul. Nothing like a heavy rain. Well, heavy snowfall is pretty ace too, but that phenom seems to be going the way of the dinosaur sadly. A Friday of total excellence to you! ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff! Welcome back to unciviliation and to my blog little portion of it too. That residency sounds so, so nice. If I was less curious/ stressed I would black out every form of media until after your election. Obviously I’m thrilled you made productive headway on the novel and feel that great combo of jazzed and level headed about it. Yeah, I was happy to finally be able to do a Pat O’Neill Day after years of wanting to. I haven’t seen the Other Music doc yet. It’s high on my agenda though. My ears will be trained on your bandcamp tomorrow, or, wait, today? Great! I’m good. Glad August is over. It was kind of boring. I’m mainly working on the reinvention of the TV series script into a film script, and I’m actually quite excited by how that’s going, and I’m off to Rennes tomorrow for a day to help Gisele with her Robert Walser theater piece. And some prose fiddling. Not bad. Again, excellent to see you! ** JM, Hi. Thanks for the happiness about my related stuff. I do know the Dead C, yes. Sweet spot. Oh, wow, very soon for ‘Circles’. I understand about the one-man operation. Little Caesar was a solo act too. I’ll be patient for the package and just hope the US’s and Frances’s P.O.s cooperate with one another. You aren’t going to do a Zoom launch thing or anything like that, I guess? Thanks for feeding here with you, much appreciated. And carry on, sir. ** Bill, Thanks, B. Me too, re: the Marseilles event. Marseilles, like Paris, is a ‘red zone’ meaning where the cases are especially up. But the French are hugely dutiful about the protocols, so I think it’ll be fine, socially distanced, the usual. I’m so looking forward to just the travelling/getting out of town aspect. Very tired of being stuck here. Zac’s and my plans to go to Germany any minute to hit our favourite theme park Phantasialand just got trounced because Germany just decided that travellers from Paris to their country require a two week quarantine. Ugh. Did I turn you on to Sauna Youth? Quite possible. I didn’t know they have a newbie, so thanks a lot for that tip. Fun day? Fun day! ** Okay. Before Claudia Rankine’s work went viral with her book ‘Citizen’, she wrote a few books that are more adventurous formally and visually and that I like even more, and the book I’ve spotlit today is my favourite of all of hers. Know it? Get to know it? See you tomorrow.