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5 / Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: A Lyrical Long Poem in a Post-Language Age Hence the poem is that— Here. I am here. —claudia rankine, don’t let me be lonely, 2004 Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric is a thoroughly revolutionary twenty-first-century hybrid work that expands the limits of the long poem form in order to investigate the status of the politically situated, socially mediated human subject in contemporary American culture. Rankine’s poem merges the epiphanic lyric, visual media, journalistic/academic writing in the form of prolific endnotes, and the cultural-critical essay in a formally complex critique of subject production and regulation at various sites in our current historical moment, including sites of official culture, media culture, and literary culture. Thematically, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is at once an internal meditation on the private and public meanings of death and loneliness (death-inlife ); an interrogation of the politics of racial violence as they play out in public spectacle; a critique of the American media’s function as a means of subject interpellation and social control; a condemnation of war; and a single-voiced song of hope for the American body politic that takes inspiration from precursor poets as well as sustenance from the field of ethical philosophy. For even as Don’t Let Me Be Lonely enacts an immediately contemporary critique of American culture as it is produced in visual-media spaces beyond the reach of language, the poem also draws upon the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Celan, Cornel West, Wallace Stevens, Czesław Miłosz, Aimé Césaire, Myung Mi Kim, and Gertrude Stein in producing a network of, to borrow Joan Retallack’s useful phrase, “poethical thinking,”1 an investigative countercultural poetics, assembled in this case collectively, which is designed to intervene in and claudia rankine’s don’t let me be lonely / 125 foment resistance to the deadening effects of our mass-produced, quotidian American life. Working at multiple sites formally and thematically , Don’t Let Me Be Lonely functions as a searching and far-reaching poetic response to our material, historical, American moment, a formally complex calling-out that is itself an occasion of hope in a globally violent and politically chaotic time. Simultaneously, as part of Rankine’s commitment to social change through the development of innovative art forms, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely constitutes a grand experiment with the long poem genre, an experiment that draws upon the form’s varied history in modernism while arguing for its new uses as political discourse, achievable through expansion, hybridization, and—at times—return to the spirit of a usable past. Given Rankine’s earlier, more disjunctive work, and especially given the thirty years of aesthetically radical political poetry preceding it, it is indeed quite striking that Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is—for all its many parts—immediately legible as a lyric long poem, and one resonant variously with modernist, midcentury, and postmodernist iterations of the form. As such, this work marks a pronounced turn away from the various forms of Language-y writing that have dominated the experimental poetry scene since the late 1970s. Although Don’t Let Me Be Lonely does layer photographs, drawings, lists, and footnotes into the prose poem/ essay form, and although the work quotes at times ironically and at others sincerely from other sources, there is no linguistic interpretive guesswork here for the contemporary reader, no need to swim in new syntaxes or interpret broken words, no gestures toward indeterminacy of language or subject, no winking commentary on the word as such. Instead, the book makes clear its assumption that the trope of the speaking subject of poetry is a viable means of engaging larger sociopolitical issues, demonstrated not only by Rankine’s use of the lyric I but also in the several references to the speaker’s actual body riddled with physical suffering as a result of what she witnesses in a debased society. For in addition to the mere presence of this witness, the notion of pain as a communicable affective response to information is central to this text, pain being that feeling that marks the body’s permeability but that also, in its very expression, commands the attention of another, as Elaine Scarry argues in The Body in Pain. Writes Scarry, “[A]t particular moments when there is within a society a crisis of belief—that...

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