The poetry of politics

“The lyric has always enjoyed one of the most extreme contradictions in all of writing — a beguiling ability to simultaneously create both distance and proximity. The “I” speaker of the lyric poem goes inward like no other, but, ironically, no literary genre can feel more abstract, more disconnected, more alienating. How often do we really understand a Keats poem or an Eliot poem or a Dickinson poem? So when Rankine lets readers know that Citizen is “an American lyric,” she is telling us her book is 1) personal but 2) potentially distancing and ultimately impersonal. One of the most remarkable feats of Citizen is how Rankine is able to enact the former without succumbing to the latter. She channels the personal impulse of the lyric — the lyric’s basic primal individual voice — but catalyzes it with prose’s readability and expansive clarity.

Add in some images, a couple of essays, and you have a formally hybrid text that is ready to connect but also ready to confront. Citizen is a book that utilizes the relative virtues of its various forms in order to get at the multifaceted problem of race in America. In other words, race in America is so mulivalenced, only a book whose structure is equally valenced will have the best chance of excavating, examining, and piecing together what has been buried, ignored, or repressed. In fact, I would argue that Citizen’s content demands its form.

For better or worse, the design, syntax, and diction of the traditional lyric is, despite its beauty, a language of potential exclusion. Part of the lyric’s appeal lies in its inclusiveness, but with its perceived heavy symbolism, its perceived preciousness, and its perceived emphasis on the the self, the lyric poem can come of as stuffy, effete, and inconsequential. Prose, though, disarms. It is the genre of easy communication. It is the genre of declaration. This is why manifestos, proclamations, and treatises, despite their ceremonial nature, opt for prose. Citizendistinguishes itself from much poetry before it through what we might call a discourse of declaration. By that I mean a form of communication that privileges statement over suggestion, that documents rather than defers.

Consider these excerpts:

When a woman you work with calls you by the name of another woman you work with, it is too much of a cliché not to laugh out loud with the friend beside you who says, oh no she didn’t. Still, in the end, so what, who cares? She had a 50-50 chance of getting it right.

The world is wrong. You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really just say that?

At the end of a brief phone conversation, you tell the manager you are speaking with that you will come by his office to sign the form. When you arrive and announce yourself, he blurts out, I didn’t know you were black!

If this were a class, I would ask my students what makes these lines “poetry.” I might point to the first block of text and ask a student to show me, precisely, where the poetry occurs. All of the conventional markers we expend to find in a “poem” are pretty much absent here, especially when pulled out of context like this. And yet, I find these fabulously compelling and wholly poetic (if more on a macro scale than micro).

In his excellent book, Documentary Expression and Thirties America, William Stott argues that the documentary photographs of people like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans were effective because they advanced “social documentary.” According to Stott, social documentary “educates one’s feelings” about “conditions neither permanent nor necessary, conditions of a certain time and place: racial discrimination, police brutality, unemployment, the depression . . .” In essence, social documentary informs emotions about societal conditions that we as people have the power to change and improve.