Weeks 5–6: Claudia Rankine's "Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric"

After our pre-millennial jitters subsided and the celebrations ended, our new century got off to a jumpy start. First, there was the contested presidential election in November 2000, which was stressful enough for the nation, but that seemed inconsequential after the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, when our American way of life was changed forever.   

The 9/11 attacks are the catalyst for Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (Graywolf, 2004) — the key event that frames this ambitious book-length experiment in hybrid forms, and the present context that it's set against — but as she makes clear to us from the very beginning, it's just one of many tragedies (both private and public) that shape her perspective as she writes.  As the title suggests, Don't Let Me Be Lonely is a deeply personal book, a vulnerable and revealing narrative in which Rankine explores her struggles with depression, illness and mortality (in herself and loved ones), and injustice.  At one point in the book, she writes:

It strikes me that what the attack on the World Trade Center stole from us is our willingness to be complex.  Or what the attack on the World Trade Center revealed to us is that we were never complex.  We might want to believe that we can condemn and we can love and we can condemn because we love our country, but that's too complex (91).

and yet what makes Don't Let Me Be Lonely so compelling a read is its complexity, its intermingling of storylines large and small, and its shuffling of forms, combining prose poetry fragments with a variety of different media (photographs, television, found objects) and end notes.  Though it's an experimental construct, it's also highly readable and emotionally compelling, and for these reasons, it's one of the models for the multi-modal thematic writing you'll be doing this semester. If you enjoy this book, I wholeheartedly recommend you take a look at Rankine's latest, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), one of the most lauded books in recent memory and a strikingly haunting evocation of our nation's troubled racial milieu. 

Here’s the reading breakdown for our time with Rankine:

• Wednesday, Sept. 23: pgs 1–36
• Friday, Sept. 25: pgs 37–63
• Monday, Sept. 28: pgs 64–100
• Wednesday, Sept. 30: 101–131

(don't forget to read the end notes, which begin on pg 133, alongside each day's readings)

And here are a few supplemental links:

• PennSound's Claudia Rankine author page — where you can listen to several recordings of the poet reading from Don't Let Me Be Lonely
• "The Dead Spectator" — Alex Young's review of the book in The Brooklyn Rail
• “The Ethics of Language” — Alan Gilbert's review of the book in Boston Review
• a 2006 interview with Rankine from jubilat
• Roxanne Gay on Don't Let Me Be Lonely