Claudia Rankine

• Born: September 4, 1963
• Place of Birth: Kingston, Jamaica

Overview

Claudia Rankine is a poet who is fascinated with language’s hidden meanings and writes to get at what is underneath the simple spoken word. Often cited as a post-confessional poet, Rankine realizes that the self is never a coherent, stable entity, and her poetry explores this fragmented self as a means to address social issues such as race and identity. She explores how poetics, in its constant questioning of what it is to be human, can help people attend their social responsibilities by asking them to forgo easy categorization of others and recognize that inner lives are vastly more complex than the everyday language used to describe people. Known for her intimate and thoughtful lyric poems, Rankine does the difficult work of charting open-ended and constantly shifting inner lives as they struggle to find voice and place in a media-saturated and disjointed world.

Other literary forms

Although Claudia Rankine is best known for her poetry, she has also collaborated with Melanie Joseph, the artistic director of New York’s Foundry Theater, to create a play called The Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue (pr., pb. 2009). This performance piece was researched and written through a grant from the New Play Development Program of the National Endowment for the Arts and was developed from interviews conducted throughout the New York City borough. As a hybrid and mobile piece, the play has audience members board a bus that takes them through the South Bronx. In transit, playgoers witness live “happenings” and listen on headphones to actors performing Rankine’s narrative. She also cowrote the play Existing Conditions (2010) with Casey Llewellyn. In addition to playwriting, Rankine has worked on screenplays for collaborative film essays with her husband, photographer John Lucas.

Achievements

Regarded as a principal lyric poet of the twenty-first century, Claudia Rankine has pushed the limits of genre by combining traditional poetic forms with prose, dialogue, and visual imagery. Critics and fellow poets have pointed out that in each of her four published collections, Rankine’s poems do not exist independently from one another; instead, she is known for writing complete, stunningly intricate books that are broken into single poems. Her first collection, Nothing in Nature Is Private, won the Cleveland Poetry Center’s International Poetry Competition, and her critically acclaimed book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is regarded as one of the most impressive and intrepid prose poems of the twenty-first century. In 2005, Rankine received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a stipend designed to provide support for an established poet. She was also shortlisted for the 2005 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. Her New York Times Bestseller collection Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) was a finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the NAACP Image Award, winner of the 2016 Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the PEN Center USA Poetry Award, and the Forward poetry prize. She received the Guggenheim Fellowship grant in 2017, and in 2021, she was one of twelve authors elected to the Royal Society of Literature as an International Writer.

Rankine’s work has been published in the Boston Review, Jubilat, TriQuarterly, and Poetry Project Newsletter. Her poems have also been featured in several anthologies, including American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (2009), Great American Prose Poems (2003), Hammer and Blaze (2002), Best American Poetry 2001 (2001), Step into a World (2000), and The New Young American Poets (2000). Her further works include The White Card: A Play (2019) and Just Us: An American Conversation (2020), a hybrid collection of essays and poetry.

Biography

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1963, Claudia Rankine moved to New York City in the late 1960s with her family. She grew up in the Eastchester neighborhood of the Bronx, a largely Jamaican community, and attended Cardinal Spellman High School. After earning a bachelor’s degree in English from Williams College, she completed an M.F.A. in poetry at Columbia University. She has taught at Case Western Reserve University, Barnard College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the University of Houston. In 2006, she became the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College.

Nothing in Nature Is Private

Rankine’s first collection of poems, the award-winning Nothing in Nature Is Private, is the most outward evidence of the poet’s social and political consciousness. Rankine developed the book while at Columbia University. She admits that the writing process was much more audience-oriented than she had expected and that the work’s dramatic situations sound a bit contrived. The result is a book that grew from Rankine’s interests but one that she claims she may have preferred not to write. Even so, Nothing in Nature Is Private is frank in its social concerns, and critics have picked up on its political transparency. The verse showcases Rankine’s lyrical investigation of social disparities in the United States by piecing together the experience of a middle-class Black woman, not wholly unlike Rankine herself. As different personas move between her parents’ homeland, Jamaica, and the United States, Jamaican dialect is mixed with established poetic forms in a constant attempt to explore the small moments that make up the fragmented, racially “other” individual. While the collection does concern itself with the social consequences of living within categories such as race, class, and gender, its probing and complex language moves beyond such categories to show the deep, inner selves of its personas, forecasting the highly internal content of her next two collections.

The End of the Alphabet

Aesthetically different and more difficult than Nothing in Nature Is Private, The End of the Alphabet traces the psyche of its speaker, Jane, as she attempts to engage the emotional pain of a miscarriage. Rankine considers this extended monologue to be her first book, and like the others, it can be read as a single poem despite the page and section breaks. Written in a sequence of twelve poems, the book uses constant metaphor, broken syntax, and erratic mechanics and punctuation to show what happens when the outer rules governing the private self have broken down. What remains is the speaker’s struggle to find language and the ability to speak so that she can piece herself together after a wrenching loss. In this collection, Rankine’s rich language and imagery attempt to show individual, fragmented moments of emotional pain, rather than providing a linear narrative that leads up to the grief. The work, then, deeply mines the darkest spots of Jane’s soul as she attempts, as she states, “To locate the self salvaged.” This search, however, is complicated by multiple voices that infiltrate this internal self-examination as the speaker struggles to differentiate between her public and private selves. Readers and reviewers have noted that the collection works through mental states such as hysteria, aphasia (loss of the ability to speak), and schizophrenia but never pretends that the ending will come to an agreeable resolution. For Rankine, some pain will always remain. She subtly suggests that one cannot truly break out of a traumatized psyche but can move toward finding the language to heal.

PLOT

Although Rankine’s third book, PLOT, was not as well received as her other collections, its experiments with form and language are no less intricate. The poems spiral around the nine-month story of a couple, Liv and Erland, who are expecting their first child, Ersatz. Because Rankine is particularly interested in the idea of pregnancy, that one life could exist and come out of another, she experiments with the parallel idea of words existing in other words. For instance, the word “lock” can be found in the word “clock,” and mining the relationship between the lexically related terms yields interesting notions about being trapped in a moment of time. Some reviewers, however, seem disappointed that the book is not as tightly controlled as The End of the Alphabet. A Publishers Weekly review pointed to the line “the damaged image absorbed to appear, the exemplar seen and felt as one, having grown thick in the interior, opens on to surface and is the surface reflecting its source” as potentially designed to mimic the growth of an embryo, but at the same time, it critiques its obscure syntax. Thematically, PLOT borrows from Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s films, especially Wild Strawberries (1957) and Scenes from a Marriage (1973), and explores how parental anxieties, especially the fear that one might accidentally bring the pain of one’s own life into the life of one’s child, may not be completely rational. The book comes around to an opposite view: that the child may bring new possibilities to the parents’ lives. Critics have also noted that the child, Ersatz, can be read as a metaphor for created art, the result of an artist’s labor.

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely

Classified by Graywolf Press as lyric essay/poetry, Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely situates itself as a troubled, confrontational, yet elegant hybrid work grappling with the breakdown of selfhood in a politically charged and media-driven century. The prose poetry, verse, and simulated documentary discourse of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely are easier to access than the poetry of her earlier volumes, and photographs, graphics, bits of dialogue, media snippets, and endnotes round out the work. This does not mean that Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is less experimental. On the contrary, Rankine has taken the prose poem structure and fashioned it into an unidentifiable yet appropriate form. Although the collection is socially engaged, the speaker is frozen by her solitude and inability to act independently and honestly in a media-saturated environment. As the poems move between personal tragedies and public calamities, such as the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the brutal 1998 lynching of James Byrd, Jr., in Texas, Rankine explores what it means to be dead, both physically and historically, and wrestles with the notion that living in twenty-first century America is the same as being alive. The speaker gets much of her information through the television in her bedroom, an inescapable void that is never turned off. She sometimes speaks to it, calling attention to the loneliness of modern existence. In this work, loneliness becomes “what we can’t do for each other,” and Rankine’s often repetitive and passive sentences contribute to the crippling sense of the speaker’s inability to change. To do so, she would have to learn compassion and gain human connection in a society that privileges individuation and separatism. By attempting to “fit language into the shape of usefulness,” the speaker struggles not to become whole but to reach out and be reached by another person. For Rankine, embracing the messiness of one’s self and one’s culture and attempting to express that through language constitute the most honest means of living.

Citizen: An American Lyric

Citizen, Rankine's multiple-award-winning 2014 collection, focuses on race issues in the United States, discussing both microaggressions that the poet has experienced in her daily life and larger issues such as the police shootings of unarmed Black men, New York's stop-and-frisk policy (which has been criticized for encouraging racial profiling), and the government response to Hurricane Katrina. The book is broken into seven chapters and illustrates the poems with paintings, drawings, photographs, and screenshots.

Bibliography

Barresi, Dorothy. “Baby Boom Poetry and the New Zeitgeist.” Prairie Schooner, vol. 83, no. 6, 2009, pp. 175–193.

Bass, Holly. Review of Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine. The New York Times, 24 Dec. 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/books/review/claudia-rankines-citizen.html. Accessed 9 Aug. 2024.

Bell, Kevin. “Unheard Writing in the Climate of Spectacular Noise: Claudia Rankine on TV.” The Global South 3, no. 1, 2009, pp. 93–107.

"Books." Claudia Rankine, claudiarankine.com/books. Accessed 10 Aug. 2024.

Morris, Mervin. “The American Light: Two Jamaican Poets in the USA.” Mississippi Review, vol. 24, no. 3, 1996, pp. 36–48.

Rankine, Claudia. “Claudia Rankine.” Interview. In The Verse Book of Interviews: Twenty-seven Poets on Language, Craft, and Culture, edited by Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki. Verse Press, 2005.