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
past tomorrow blunt
The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.
men white-man imagination
Because white men can’t police their imaginations, black men are dying.
money
You don't become a poet if you want to make any money.
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.
browns certain citizenship loose michael played shot understanding
As African-Americans, that's what's being played fast and loose with, our citizenship. When you have the Trayvon Martins and the Michael Browns being shot and killed, it's because, on a certain level, there is a kind of mutability in the understanding of citizenship around the black body.
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.
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?
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.
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.
both creates goes love saves
I love language because when it succeeds, for me, it doesn't just tell me something. It enacts something. It creates something. And it goes both ways. Sometimes it's violent. Sometimes it hurts you. And sometimes it saves you.
The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you.