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#claudia rankine
leosdooley · 2 years
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I WISH THAT I’D BEEN BRAVE.
richard siken, crush // christopher healy, a hero’s guide to saving your kingdom // the amazing devil, ruin // j.d. salinger, raise the high roof beam // susan sontag, as consciousness is harnessed to flesh: journals and notebooks // claudia rankine, don’t let me be lonely: an american lyric // the avett brothers, i wish i was // frank bidart, the war of vaslav nijinsky // nicola toon, everything, everything
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theglasschild · 10 months
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In my dream I apologize to everyone I meet. Instead of introducing myself, I apologize for not knowing why I am alive. I am sorry. I am sorry. I apologize. In real life, oddly enough, when I am fully awake and out and about, if I catch someone’s eye, I quickly look away. Perhaps this too is a form of apology. Perhaps this is the form apologies take in real life. In real life the looking away is the apology, despite the fact that when I look away I almost always feel guilty; I do not feel as if I have apologized. Instead I feel as if I have created a reason to apologize, I feel the guilt of having ignored that thing—the encounter. I could have nodded, I could have smiled without showing my teeth. In some small way I could have wordlessly said, I see you seeing me and I apologize for not knowing why I am alive. I am sorry. I am sorry. I apologize. Afterwards, after I have looked away, I never feel as if I can say, Look, look at me again so that I can see you, so that I can acknowledge that I have seen you, so that I can see you and apologize.
Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
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sharpened--edges · 3 months
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We live in a country where Americans assimilate corpses in their daily comings and goings. Dead blacks are a part of normal life here. Dying in ship hulls, tossed into the Atlantic, hanging from trees, beaten, shot in churches, gunned down by the police, or warehoused in prisons: Historically, there is no quotidian without the enslaved, chained, or dead black body to gaze upon or to hear about or to position a self against. When blacks become overwhelmed by our culture’s disorder and protest (ultimately to our own detriment, because protest gives the police justification to militarize, as they did in Ferguson), the wrong-headed question that is asked is, What kind of savages are we? Rather than, What kind of country do we live in?
Claudia Rankine, “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning," in Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief, edited by Cindy Milstein (AK, 2017), p. 29.
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maybuds · 8 months
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from DON’T LET ME BE LONELY: AN AMERICAN LYRIC by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf Press, 2004)
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feral-ballad · 2 years
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Claudia Rankine, from The End of the Alphabet; “Overview is a place”
[Text ID: “rip the mind out. go ahead.”]
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llovelymoonn · 1 year
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favourite poems of december
torrin a. greathouse ekphrasis on nude selfie as portrait of saint sebastian
snehal vadher hello flowers and cigarettes
robert pinsky death and the powers: a robot pageant
wendy barker taking a language
cindy juyoung ok terms and conditions
carl phillips this far in
christian wiman hard night: “the ice storm”
cathy linh che split: “the german word for dream is traume”
linda hogan when the body
david trinidad the late show: “a regret”
omotara james my mother’s nerves are shot--
marie howe the good thief: “death, the last visit”
kaveh akbar portrait of the alcoholic floating in space with severed umbilicus
donald britton in the empire of the air: “italy”
snehal vadher figures in a windswept language
jane wong after preparing the alter, the ghosts feast feverishly
ofelia zepeda ocean power: “deer dance exhibition”
lucille clifton good woman: poems and a memoir, 1969-1980: “the lost baby poem”
emily pérez dworzec
ouyang jianghe mother, kitchen (tr. austin woerner)
cathy linh che i walked through the trees, mourning
sam willets tourist
ed bok lee whorled: “if in america”
dan gerber marriage
matthew rohrer poem written with issa [“a friend emails”]
richard siken crush: “litany in which certain things are crossed out”
april bernard anger
claudia rankine citizen: “you are in the dark, in the car...”
barbara hamby letter to a lost friend
joy harjo everybody has a heartache: a blues
cathy linh che go forget your father
kofi
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sevenofdeers · 11 days
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darkk-stallion · 25 days
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“In my dream I apologize to everyone I meet. Instead of introducing myself, I apologize for not knowing why I am alive. I am sorry. I am sorry. I apologize. In real life, oddly enough, when I am fully awake and out and about, if I catch someone’s eye, I quickly look away. Perhaps this too is a form of apology. Perhaps this is the form apologies take in real life. In real life the looking away is the apology, despite the fact that when I look away I almost always feel guilty; I do not feel as if I have apologized. Instead I feel as if I have created a reason to apologize, I feel the guilt of having ignored that thing—the encounter. I could have nodded, I could have smiled without showing my teeth. In some small way I could have wordlessly said, I see you seeing me and I apologize for not knowing why I am alive. I am sorry. I am sorry. I apologize. Afterwards, after I have looked away, I never feel as if I can say, Look, look at me again so that I can see you, so that I can acknowledge that I have seen you, so that I can see you and apologize.”
Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
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lifeinpoetry · 1 year
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Exactly why we survive and can look back with furrowed brow is beyond me.
It is not something to know.
— Claudia Rankine, from Citizen, as excerpted in Julia Guez's The Certain Body
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freeurheart · 1 year
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Forgiveness, I finally decide, is not the death of amnesia, nor is it a form of madness, as Derrida claims. For the one who forgives, it is simply a death, a dying down in the heart, the position of the already dead. It is in the end the living through, the understanding that this has happened, is happening, happens. Period. It's the feeling of nothingness that cannot be communicated to another, an absence, a bottomless vacancy held by the living, beyond all that is hated or loved.
Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004)
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thoughtsandstripes · 4 months
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xjmlm · 1 year
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to the memory of Walter Wallace Jr and the abolition of the militarized white supremacist police infrastructure
___________
On a scrap of paper in the archive is written
I have forgotten my umbrella. Turns out
in a pandemic everyone, not just the philosopher,
is without. We scramble in the drought of information
held back by inside traders. Drop by drop. Face
covering? No, yes. Social distancing? Six feet
under for underlying conditions. Black.
Just us and the blues kneeling on a neck
with the full weight of a man in blue.
Eight minutes and forty-six seconds.
In extremis, I can’t breathe gives way
to asphyxiation, to giving up this world,
and then mama, called to, a call
to protest, fire, glass, say their names, say
their names, white silence equals violence,
the violence of again, a militarized police
force teargassing, bullets ricochet, and civil
unrest taking it, burning it down. Whatever
contracts keep us social compel us now
to disorder the disorder. Peace. We’re out
to repair the future. There’s an umbrella
by the door, not for yesterday but for the weather
that’s here. I say weather but I mean
a form of governing that deals out death
and names it living. I say weather but I mean
a November that won’t be held off. This time
nothing, no one forgotten. We are here for the storm
that’s storming because what’s taken matters.
Claudia Rankine, Weather
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thisismynarrative · 1 year
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"Sometimes I think it is sentimental, or excessive, certainly not intellectual, or perhaps too naïve, too self-wounded to value each life like that, to feel loss to the point of being bent over each time. There is no innovating loss. It was never invented, it happened as something physical, something physically experienced. It is not something an "I" discusses socially. Though Myung Mi Kim did say that the poem is really a responsibility to everyone in a social space. She did say that it was okay to cramp, to clog, to fold over at the gut, to have to put hand to flesh, to have to hold the pain, and then translate it here. She did say, in so many words, that what alerts, alters." - Claudia Rankine from Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
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pithia · 2 years
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I love language because when it succeeds, for me, it doesn't just tell me something. It enacts something. It creates something. And it goes both ways. Sometimes it's violent. Sometimes it hurts you. And sometimes it saves you.
Claudia Rankine
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literatureaesthetic · 2 years
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some university book mail!!
i'm taking a class in October that's all about women's innovative writing. the entire reading list consists of literature by women. the class itself seems like it's gonna be about everything surrounding discussions of authority and power and sexuality and the relationship between aesthetics and the gendered political body. but more than that, it's a course that simply appreciates women from all types of backgrounds. i'm so excited.
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feral-ballad · 2 years
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Claudia Rankine, from The End of the Alphabet; “Extent and root of”
[Text ID: “haunted at center, haunted at heart,”]
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