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'That's not poetry; it's sociology!' – in defence of Claudia Rankine's Citizen
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/oct/23/claudia-rankine-citizen-poetry-defence"At a recent reception following a poetry reading by elder, experimental poets, an academic critic – of decidedly avant-garde tastes – overheard that I had been teaching Claudia Rankine’s Citizen for the last four semesters. I knew, in fact, that this scholar’s life’s work centered around championing unsung postwar US poets such as Clark Coolidge and Susan Howe, who were difficult, acquired tastes (that I shared). Howe, for example, is known to publish textual sculptures often quite literally illegible. Who better, I thought, to appreciate my teaching of a complex poem like Citizen than this brainy, patient scholar. Yet quickly he fired off: “That’s not poetry; it’s sociology!” My spirits sank.
The shortlisting of the Jamaican-born, California-based poet this week for the TS Eliot prize – in addition to her Forward prize win last month – brings these questions into sharper focus. Granted, much of Citizen’s content foregrounds various “micro-aggressions,” retelling mundane scenes (some experienced by the author; the rest from friends that she informally interviewed) of mostly middle-class life, where the intrusion of racism is felt in the exchange of the wrong words, uncontrollable glances and stuttering pauses. Yet the book’s flat tone and protean forms are hardly that of an academic textbook or clinical research.
Made up of mostly short prose, photographs and reproduced artworks as well as a chapter-long essay on Serena Williams – Citizen is separated by numbered sections without titles that persistently defy genre. Admittedly, she isn’t the first of contemporary poets to radically combine texts with images, to blur the borders between prose and lyric. One thinks of other cult-favorite 21st-century works such as Anne Carson’s Nox or Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. Yet unlike those, Rankine’s new book rarely sounds “lyrical”. Its sentences are plain, its syntax normative, its vocabulary mostly workday, vernacular English.
When described in this way, it’s fair to question whether or not Citizen is, at its essence, a book-length poem. Maybe it’s better labeled as a graphic novel like Art Spiegelman’s Maus or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, or creative nonfiction closer to the feel and flow of a David Foster Wallace essay? Two weeks ago at a poetry reading I attended, Rankine was even asked on stage to explain whether or not her book was poetry or “something else” by an enthusiastic student. She responded that Citizen was undoubtedly a hybrid work, but that she also had wanted to provoke those very questions. Dozens of reviews, many quite perceptive, have greeted this work over the last year. Yet few have lingered over the fact that the book’s subtitle is “An American Lyric” (a subtitle also used for her previous multimedia work, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely), that it was published as a book of poetry.
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A good read about a great book.
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