This was one of the best literary events I had been to in years. To say I'm a fan of Claudia Rankine is putting it mildly, so I made sure to sit at the front.
Claudia Rankine, poet, essayist and playwright, was at LRB to discuss a new forthcoming revised and re-issued version of PLOT, (2023) her third collection of poetry, initially written in 2001, before Claudia Rankine had a child, as a thought experiment around what it means to decide to be an artist and to be a parent and the challenges that brings. PLOT is a poetry collection concerning pregnancy and motherhood told fictiously by using a couple named Erland and Liv to drive the narrative.
The text of PLOT crosses genres, existing at times in poetry, at times in dialogue, in order to arrive at new life and baby Ersatz. At most, the text explores what it means to be human and to invest in humanity.
Excerpt
1
Submerged deeper than appetite she bit into a freakish anatomy, the hard plastic of filiation, a fetus dream, once severed, reattached, the baby femur not fork-tender though flesh, the baby face now anchored.
What Liv would make would be familial, not foreign, forsaken. She knew this and tried to force the scene, focus the world, in the dream. Snapping, the crisp rub of thumb to index, she was in rehearsal with everyone, loving the feel of cartilage, ponderous of damaged leaves, then only she, singing internally, only she revealed, humming, undressing a lullaby: bitterly, sinkholes to underground streams ...
In the dream waist deep, retrieving a fossilized pattern forming in attempt to prevent whispers, or poisoned regrets, reaching into reams and reams, to needle-scam a cord in the stream, as if a wish borne out of rah-rah's rude protrusion to follow the rest was sporded, split, and now hard pressed to enter the birth.
In the dream the reassembled desire to conceive wraps the tearing placenta to a walled uterus, urge formed complicit.
* * *
NM: It's great to see you in the flesh as I've been watching you on YouTube for a long time. It actually feels like I'm in your front room.
CR: Because you are! This is my home. I'm really enjoying reading.
NM: I wanted to ask you about Just Us — the process — because I also make art and I'm a writer and poet, so all of that is working well for me. Do you think there will be any more books like Just Us in the future?
CR: Right now, I'm failing badly at trying to work on a new book ... I've been looking at all of these people ... Mahsa Amini, people who do things ... in grasping life they also have to grasp death at the same time, that you can't separate the two things. [NB: Mahsa Amini, aged 22, died in custody on 18 September 2022, three days after her arrest by the notorious morality police in Tehran for allegedly breaching the Islamic Republic's strict dress code for women] Mahsa Amini, the woman who lowered her headscarf, was killed in Iran. But the people came out in objection to her killing, but, they too in coming out to value Mahsa's life, had to grasp their own death and know that the moment you do that, is the moment that the State no longer has control over you.
Lewis Hyde once said, 'Poetry is outside of the market economy so it allows that freedom for the writer to do whatever they want.' So, I've always felt that in the realm of poetry, it's the one genre that has not needed market controls or influences. The world of poetry is the most open place"
When asked about the meanings of the title PLOT, Claudia Rankine said:
CR: The title was chosen because of the multiple meanings and it contained both the idea of a storyline and a plan and also a grave — all thematically relevant to the possibilities of where we were going, i.e. whether following Wolff to the River Ouse or fighting in scenes of a marriage or using language to describe my own husband. Throughout the book, there are moments when the titles are words that are contained in other words. I wanted to show how the word lives independently and also in relation too.
The final question was 'Do you have any advice on how to broaden the readership of poetry?
CR: Poets like T.S. Eliot used to be able to fill stadiums. I think poetry should be heard on the radio. It's an oral activity ... the music ... there's so much work that goes into the cadenza... we could have five-minute sections in mainstream radio, just before the 12 o'clock news, to listen to a poem. I think when people begin to hear it, they'll become less afraid because poetry is just language but because it defies the rules of grammar, of expectation, there's a kind of 'I don't get it.' But you do know, and you will get it if you're open to it. You have to let down the guard that says, because this isn't functioning like a newspaper article, I'll be able to understand this. It's just habits of reading and listening.
Claudia Rankine recommended Poor (2020) by Caleb Femi, winner of The Forward Prize Best First Collection (2021). "Unlike me, he doesn't have to buy in images, he takes his own photographs that are in the book. It's really phenomenal."
Claudia Rankine is the author of five volumes of poetry, two plays and various essays. She has won numerous awards, too many to list here. I particularly enjoyed reading Just Us: An American Conversation, a brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images, which includes the voices and rebuttals of others, e.g., white men in first class responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend's explanation of her infuriating behaviour at a play, and much more.
