Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankineis a poet, essayist, playwright and the editor of several anthologies. She is the author of five volumes of poetry, two plays and various essays. Rankine is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the Aerol Arnold Chair of English at the University of Southern California...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
CountryUnited States of America
men white-man imagination
Because white men can’t police their imaginations, black men are dying.
alone among linger stacked turn
When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows.
above feeling good lyric people personal poetry politics realm rise
A lot of people feel that the realm of poetry and the realm of the lyric is personal feeling and should rise above politics, which, in fact, good poetry has never done.
happen intimacy reader work
When you're writing, you think: How does intimacy happen in the work? You don't know who your reader is, woman, man, child, black person, Asian, who knows?
altered asked backed black change civil course demands king life lives luther martin movement rights
If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights movement made demands that altered the course of American lives and backed up those demands with the willingness to give up your life in service of your civil rights, with Black Lives Matter, a more internalized change is being asked for: recognition.
answer body female life question society value
How do you keep the black female body present, and how do you own value for something that society won't give value to? It's a question I try to answer through my own life.
money
You don't become a poet if you want to make any money.
americas brown citizen close death life loss white worlds
There are two worlds out there - two Americas out there. If you're a white person, there's one way of being a citizen in our country, and if you're a brown or a black body, there's another way of being a citizen, and that way is very close to death. It's very close to the loss of your life.
lyric people personal poet politics realm straight surprises
It always surprises me when people say that the realm of the lyric is the personal, and the personal is not political. I just don't know how we can get to 2014 and say that with a straight face. When you think of a poet like Yeats, how can you say politics is not in the poem? When you think of Milosz, how can you say politics is not in the poem?
continues earlier forgetting front lives matter movements refuses tried unlike
Unlike earlier black-power movements that tried to fight or segregate for self-preservation, Black Lives Matter aligns with the dead, continues the mourning, and refuses the forgetting in front of all of us.
although itself plays pretend sports
I think sports is one of the places where race plays itself out publicly. Although we pretend it doesn't.
imagination
The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings.
I don't write every day. I write when I want to write.
body men sign white women worn
A hoodie is worn by everybody: kids, white men, white women, black men. But it clings to the black body as a sign of criminality like nothing else.