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

Abstract

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, naive, 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,