Monday, December 29, 2014

Poet Claudia Rankine: 'Racism works purely on perception' in America


The Jamaican writer’s latest collection tackles race. She explains how she’s using poetry to make sense of one of the most fraught times in recent US history
Claudia Rankine: “There’s something very moving about having so many people step into a subject that I have been consumed with for so long...”
Claudia Rankine: “There’s something very moving about having so many people step into a subject that I have been consumed with for so long...” Photograph: John Lucas/John Lucas
In August Claudia Rankine, the lyric poet and playwright, visited Ferguson, Missouri, only weeks after Michael Brown’s death.

She had been invited to visit St Louis months before Michael Brown was killed to deliver a reading while she was finishing up her latest work, Citizen: An American Lyric, a book-length poem and her fifth collection. She spoke to people who lived in Brown’s neighborhood, just as she had with her black male friends whom she interviewed and asked about their experiences of racism in America for the collection.

Now her work, which had started as a re-telling of personal experiences of racism, as well as a general view of the country and race, had inadvertently become a companion to one of the most volatile moments in recent US history.
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