Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: The Trans-Corporeal Ethics of Claudia Rankine’s Investigative Poetics

For a majority of Americans, the events of 9/11, the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the continuing conflicts in the Middle East were and are experienced via cable news networks, viral videos, and print/online news articles. These events are not experienced as material reality but rather as abstract intangibles constructed through words and images. Such media representations present violence, suffering, and other catastrophic events as singular incidents frozen in time and disconnected from the myriad of complex relations that contribute to the ongoing flux of existence. Furthermore, the bombardment of information via television, radio, the Internet, and social media outlets—not to mention the quick ease with which we switch from one to the other—may not allow ample time to analyze and discern what might exist beyond the camera’s frame; even the most raw and uncensored forms of journalism often do not communicate the complex relationships shaping particular political and cultural figurations. Most devastatingly, the intangible nature of mass media often suppresses both the material facticity of the human body and material interchanges between bodies.

As Joan Retallack expresses in The Poethical Wager (2003), mass culture (as promoted by mass media) strives for simplistic, naïve, and fantastical representations of reality, as opposed to “imaginative engagement with [realistic] material complexity” (26). For Retallack, innovative writing is one way “to stay warm and active and realistically messy” while disrupting the “shiny freeze-frames” (5) of mass culture. In her fourth book, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004), poet Claudia Rankine “stays messy” by exploding the boundaries of the lyric genre in order to disrupt the facile political frameworks promoted by mass media. Using investigative techniques, Rankine responds to the culture of information by writing poetry that engages the complexity of existence while emphasizing material interconnectedness and embodiment.

Part documentary, part imagination, investigative poetry incorporates a variety of data and reportage into the poem—including testimonials, interviews, facts, and figures—in order to explore the historical and political conditions of contemporary culture. Kristin Prevallet describes the investigative poet as one who “engages in an active relationship with the political, social, and cultural forces around him or her.” Using the same documents and information used by the media and other meaning-making institutions, the poet actively creates an “alternate narrative history” (115-16). In other words, the poet “breaks” open the original frame and re-contextualizes, or radically rethinks, mediated discourse. Following investigative techniques, Rankine juxtaposes a medley of cultural documents—including photographic stills of viral videos and spaghetti westerns, news reports, photos from Ground Zero, facts and statistics regarding the practices of pharmaceutical companies, and lines of poetry by at least nine different poets—with first-person lyrical prose. The reader enters the inner thoughts of an isolated speaker actively trying to make sense of the competing images and registers of language that barrage her daily life in the form of public signage, television, and print articles. Because the speaker’s response to the barrage of media is often personal and incomplete, the reader becomes simultaneously engaged in a similar active task, reading the lyric voice as one more competing register among the images and diagrams. Thus, as I will discuss in greater detail, Rankine abandons the fixed, unitary speaker traditionally associated with the lyric genre and in its stead offers a multiple and fragmented “I” that more accurately represents the entanglements of our material reality.

Dorothy Barresi describes the voice and style of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric as “commonplace performative,” labeling both poet and speaker “a reporter, a collector and a connector of uneasy moments” (189-90). This active performance—both the investigative act performed by Rankine and the subsequent action required of the reader—is the type of interrogative motion Karen Barad refers to as “posthumanist performativity”:

Performativity, properly construed, is not an invitation to turn everything (including material bodies) into words; on the contrary, performativity is precisely a contestation of the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real...