Skip to main content

Claudia Rankine

Visiting Poet

Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankines most recent hybrid books brilliantly interweave modes of poetry, essays, and visual art as a means of interrogating what Americans will (and won’t) say about issues of race, privilege, identity, and belonging. Her vast & multi-faceted body of work include the widely-acclaimed Just Us: An American Conversation and 2014’s Citizen: An American Lyric (both from Graywolf Press). Rankine teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry and lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Select Poems

*

As if I craved error, as if love was ahistorical,

I came to live in a country not at first my own

and here came to love a man not stopped by reticence.

And because it seemed right

love of this man would look like freedom,

the lone expanse of his back

would be found land, I turned,

as a brown field turns, suddenly grown green,

for this was the marriage waited for: the man

desiring as I, movement toward mindful and yet.

It was June, brilliant. The sun higher than God.

An excerpt of “Testimonial” from THE END OF THE ALPHABET (Grove Press, 1998)

*

 What we live

before the life is turned off

is what prevents the light from being turned off.

In the marrow, in the nerve, in nightgowned exhaustion,

to secure the heart,

hoping my intention whole, I leave nothing

behind, drag nakedness to the brisker air of the garden.

What the sweeper has not swept gathers

to delay all my striving. But here I arrive

with the first stars: the flame in each

hanging like a trophy in the lull just before

the hours, those antagonists

that haunt and confiscate

what the hardware of slumber draws below.

An excerpt of “The quotidian” from THE END OF THE ALPHABET (Grove Press, 1998)

Though a previousness, cushioned by dark, aggregates the room

(for there is no disparity),

a room is brought into existence, the activity of—

Here Liv is letting herself feel as she feels, her will yielding to

streams, the lyric field of her everyday depths.

Her presence is. It’s come along, is lost, is loss, is wallside

reconciling: can I love now please?

Or in inclusion she bursts into a hood of tenderness: the body’s

anguish and flesh and all reflected in the absorbed atmosphere

soaking her being,

then the self feels deeper the depicted insistence engaged, its

essential nest, its scape—

And always and each contiguous thought, approaching the

distance, augments. Viewed against, the mind reshapes and here

is refuge without its tent.

All that’s resolved plots against her dividing self, binding her as

if any intervening space is recess for

her grave, an equivalence overlaying presence. Can I love now

please?

From PLOT (Grove Press, 2001)

About Claudia

Photo Credit: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation


Poetry Center Reading Dates: April 2005, March 2022