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Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
written by Claudia Rankine
Studio : Graywolf Press
by Graywolf Press
Release Date : 2004-08-26
Publisher : Graywolf Press
Released : 2004-09-01
Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 9781555974077
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 6 reviews)
List Price : $14.00
Our Price : $8.11
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Product Description |
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In this powerful sequence of TV images and essay, Claudia Rankine explores the personal and political unrest of our volatile new century
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.
The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre 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 arguing that recognition of others 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, with a voice at its heart bewildered by its inadequacy in the face of race riots, terrorist attacks, medicated depression, and the antagonism of the television that won't leave us alone.
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Rankled |
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This is as good a book of poetry as I've read in the last year. Rankine uses the prose-poem format and scatters images around the book, which I find entertains and lends itself to a certain philosophy-driven format that I like. The poetic buried in the prosaic seems to be a good way to say it. Either way, this book is 130 pages, impossibly long for most books of poetry. If this were any other style, I would have tired of it quickly, but I finished it in a few days. |
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Poet's Pen: A Review of Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely |
As a literary genre still fighting for a kind of ironic legitimacy, prose poetry received a Hail Mary the length of Doug Flutie's 1986 game-winning touchdown pass when Claudia Rankine published Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric with Graywolf Press in 2004. Not since I first discovered Carolyn Forché's "The Colonel" have a felt that I understood exactly what "real" or "good" prose poetry is, until reading this book.
Unlike other prose poets--including Lyn Hejinian's seminal "My Life," which would have better served its stated purpose if broken into traditional poetic lines--Don't Let Me Be Lonely needed to be written as a mixed-genre prose poem.
Some authorities debate whether prose poetry even exists as its own legitimate form, i.e., with structural guidelines and conventions. Reading prose poems by Hejinian, Forché, and Rankine, however, can provide such a working definition. Prose poetry: a) is poetry without--or uses a deliberate minimum of--line breaks, b) uses prosaic language, often including full sentences and sentence fragments, c) relies as much or more on vivid imagery as narrative, i.e., traditional prose devices such as plot and character development are sublimated to the elevated, imagistic language of poetry, and d) while imitating the form of narrative prose, appears without its traditional sequence.
The difficult thing about prose poetry is that it straddles the fence between poetry and prose, pushing the defined boundaries of both. (Ever hear of flash fiction? James Joyce? Baudelaire? Even contemporary fiction-memoir master James Frey stole a stylistic note from prose poetry.)
Far too many people are compelled to place a work in one category or the other, but prose poetry defies such categorization. Don't Let Me Be Lonely is no exception in this regard. The book uses a mixed genre style that will likely remain a lasting legacy for future poets. Rankine's long been known for experimental multi-genre writing. She seamlessly blends the poetic lyric, the essay, and the television stills in this politically charged masterpiece. The prose form allows her to create a tumbling, strangely open form. It flows organically, intuitively between the images and different writing styles.
Reading Don't Let Me Be Lonely is like watching someone throw metaphoric carbonic acid onto a Maya Angelou or Zora Neale Huston novel: the traditional form of prose has dissolved into an imagistic stream of consciousness, which reflects the narrator's dissolving sense of self.
Writing as an introduction for Ms. Rankine at a 2005 reading at the Pratt Institute, A.L.McFadden noted that "in a lot of ways, Don't Let Me Be Lonely reads like an autobiography, but if anything, it's the autobiography of American culture and not just Rankine herself." Her, and by inference America's, self-dissolution comes arrives as a result of the constant barrage of bad news, racism, and misleading rhetoric by 'uncaring', 'elitist' politicians, combined with a growing isolation particularly afflicting urban poor/working class single persons. The book's moral and socio-political criticism is as relentless as its language is personal and touching:
"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."
Anyone who's been suicidal could write with the same pen as Rankine as she describes calling 1-800-SUICIDE in a moment of desperation:
"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."
Even those who have not cannot deny the power of her words and images. A Jamaican-American, Rankine's a storyteller in the old-fashioned sense in that her narrative is no more important than images such as "She was the kind of woman who liked to shrug; deep within her was an everlasting shrug. That didn't seem like a death." As I read the piece, I picture Rankine sitting in her dining room speaking the story of "Don't Let Me Be Lonely" to a group of her grandchildren. If I were one, I'd listen to it over and over.
Rankine's passages are frightfully alive; her cadence gorgeous. The words leap off the page into my mouth, pulling on my tongue until I speak them aloud. She seems a natural heir to the powerful African-American/Caribbean oral traditions, a kind of pre-history that can be traced back through ancestry, culture, and lineage to the beginnings of human civilization. The same spoken traditions that have given rise to modern cultural achievements such as the Black Arts literary movement, the Blues, Hip-Hop and Rap, Gospel/Soul, and Jazz, are hard at work in Claudia Rankine's unique voice. |
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A necessary book |
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This is one of the books that defines our times. Greatly humourous and pleasantly dark in that ache to release you into the way you know personally, it's a book that comes to us and makes us say "oh, yes, that's it, exactly"--Personal, political, TV culture, taking lunch with a friend, reading a book, sitting up nights with insomnia, reaching out or wanting to learn to again reach out through the divides that silence us, bar us within our American apartments, border us inside of our familiar yet often dreary patterns, make us wary of change, exception, risk, thus creating risk, enmity, division and the loneliness we are so wanting not to face. Rankine's deftly-written prose-poem-political-poetics-essay collection challenges notions of poem, of self, of genres, of culture as she embodies in these smartly written sections through her mobile pronoun use, her pop culture references, her reflections on self and other, the way we need to put out a hand and take the risk of reaching towards another even before they reach out to us: before being loved, to love. How necessary! I simply want to thank her for reminding me of this as I go back and back and back into these pages, always finding more there, deeper. |
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Don't Let Me Be Lonely is an excellent book!!! |
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This book is a wonderful example of truth in creative writing. I love how personal it is and how wonderfully the personality of the author comes through every page. I highly recommend this book to anyone, it's not like anything I've read before. |
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America in All Its Lyrical Truth |
Image and word shape a unique poetry collection that only Rankine can deliver. The shape of this book initially drew my attention. However, I was not necessarily attracted to the book's front cover. Nevertheless, the selected photographs throughout the collection fit perfectly with the political nature of some of the poems.
The book itself has no index, thus making the entire structure of the book unconventional, a word describing Rankine's vision of America in all its "darkness." I would like to believe that the author intended for readers to read all of the poems as one (considering that there is no index), thus making a linear reading mandatory. However, I read pieces of some of the poems, especially the lists, without specific care.
The photographs grabbed me by the throat. For example, the photograph accompanying the poem on page 117 shocked me. Nelson Mandela wears an "HIV Positive" shirt. The image made me think about the labels used in reference to HIV/AIDS. His smile and the two words, printed on his shirt, spoke loud.
I would like to believe that each of the poems reshapes the way we see paragraph form. The use of illustrations and lists disrupt the linear or "organized" way in reading these prose poems. As reader, I find myself conflicted by reading these poems. I am lost in a sense and I want that completion to be there in my whole/complete/unified reading. The poems on page 99 and 100, for example, create that tension. Thus, the use of dialogue, lines, prose pieces and images create a cross-flow of interventions, which I read as subversive.
I love this poetry collection because it has given me the courage to experiment more with my prose poetry. I also love it because it uses images to radically critique and, perhaps, heal. What I find most interesting is the theme that image marks memory. Almost all of our senses are called to the surface here.
I am drawn to the way in which the poems make me think about many issues buried in the psyche. For example, the poem about Princess Diana made me think about scratching the surface of (an apparent) "universal" mourning and sense of loss. The poem on page 83 made a difference in terms of the law/Law and who protects us from terror/crime. Plus, it made me think about the who in that "us" equation.
In sum, Rankine speaks from a range of mediums that speak her poetry. They speak her voice. They shape her vision. Thus, is the brilliance of this poetry collection.
This collections is ideal for courses in Women's Studies, Feminist Studies, Ethnic Studies, Literary Studies, especially Graduate Studies in Poetry.
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