31.

Twenty- rst Century Poetry and Politics

Myung Mi Kims Commons and
Claudia Rankines Dont Let Me Be Lonely

Angela Hume

1. Introduction: Forms of Political Poetry Today

What is English now, in the face of mass global migrations, ecological

degradations, shifts and upheavals in identi cations of gender and labor?
asks the contemporary Korean-American poet Myung Mi Kim in her essay
Pollen Fossil Record, which appears in her book Commons (2002: 110;
emphasis in original). What are the implications of writing at this mo-
ment, in precisely this America? (ibid.). In posing these questions, Kim
suggests that the forms and content of American literature are necessarily
bound up with the political, environmental, and social conditions under
which this literature is produced. As readers, it becomes our task to read
literature for what it can tell us about these conditions. One might say
that for Kim, all poetry written today is political poetry.
This essay considers the work of Myung Mi Kim along with that of
the African American poet Claudia Rankine, two contemporary writers
for whom poetry plays an important role in illuminating the nature of
American political life in the 21st century. For Kim and Rankine, poetry
lends form to the struggles of racial minorities, immigrants, the work-
ing class, women, and others for social legibility and a sense of cultural
history. Some critics have noted how American literature published after
the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center has
often focused on evoking the sense of loss that has permeated the culture
in the new century (Baym/Klinkowitz/Wallace 2007: 3205). In line with
what might be a turn to mourning in American literature, Kims and
Rankines poetry also laments the various losses and historical erasures
that constitute their respective cultural pasts and presents. For Kim and
Rankine, however, poetry must do more than just grieve; in fact, poetry
may have the capacity to incite resistance and the imagination of new,
more democratic forms of relation.
564 Angela Hume

Kims and Rankines poetry comes out of a rich tradition of activ-

ist writing in the United States that began after World War II. The wide
range of innovation that occurred in the latter part of the century makes
it dif cult to generalize about American poetrys trajectory during this
period. That said, one might observe the ways in which poets writing about
political issues have turned increasingly to nontraditional and hybrid
forms. From poetry that experiments with meter and syntax, to poetry that
rejects or re-imagines the lyric I, to poetry that blurs traditional genre
distinctions, the last fty years have seen the emergence of a wide range
of innovative political poetries. As Cole Swensen notes, todays poets often
draw from a number of different traditions when imagining new forms (St.
John/Swensen 2009: xxi). In an attempt to evoke the emotions of lived
experience while also expanding the boundaries of poetry, a poet might
draw from the Romantic tradition, for example, while also employing the
techniques of Language poetry, a later 20th-century movement in which
poets shifted their focus from the meaning of language to its surfaces,
exposing how even language is a social construct (ibid.). While political
issues may or may not be the ostensible subject of hybrid work, Swensen
adds, the political is always there, inherent in the commitment to use
language in new ways that yet remain audible and comprehensible to
the population at large (ibid.).
For example, poets have experimented with various formal con-
straints to communicate political messages. In Cruelty and Conquest
(2006), an example of a procedural poem, Kristin Prevallet employs
Oulipo, a technique that can involve systematically switching out words
from a source text. By replacing language from a speech by George W.
Bush with the word oil, Prevallet suggests that former President Bushs
Iraq War was not about protecting the Iraqi people but rather about se-
curing access to the countrys crude oil. In her recent work, activist and
poet Brenda Hillman has adapted musical forms like the Korean pansori
(folk opera) and the oratorio in order to write poems about environmental
issues in California, from the pollution of the Paci c coast to the endan-
germent of wildlife species.
Kims and Rankines work is also exemplary of the poetic hybridiza-
tion and innovation that have come to characterize some American po-
litical poetry in the 21st century. Both poets employ a formal technique
that this essay will refer to as documentary collage, one that draws
not only from the post-World War II experimental tradition but also from
earlier Modernist collage practices. Juxtaposing language from various
sourcesfrom medical and historical texts to individual accounts of
famine, hard labor, war, and migrationKims work translates (to use
the poets own term) forms of violence, revealing the ways in which this
violence mediates language and thought today. For Kim, translation is
poetrys taska practice that has the potential to foster new forms of
 Twenty- rst Century Poetry and Politics 565

social awareness and responsibility. In her essay Pollen Fossil Record,

Kim writes that the poem may be said to mobilize the notion of our
responsibility to one another in social space (ibid.: 111). In her 2004
volume of prose-poetry, Dont Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyrica
book that interrogates histories of violence against African Americans in
particularClaudia Rankine cites Kims essay. Upon recounting an act
of police brutality against a black man in New York in 1997, Rankine
meditates on the embodied experience of loss. She writes:
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 it was okay to cramp, to clog, to fold
over at the gut, to have to put hand to esh, to have to hold the pain, and then
to translate it here. (2004: 57)

The poet observes that before mourning becomes a shared social expe-
rience, it is something physically experienced in the individual body.
Working through Kim, Rankine suggests that the poem might serve as a
space in which we can begin to do the dif cult work of translating the
bodys pain, rendering it socially intelligible.
For both Kim and Rankine, the process of poetrythe making or
reading and interpreting of a poemcan bring experiences of violence
and subjugation to language and form. In their work the poets focus
especially on the experiences of minoritiespopulations that have long
stood on the sidelines of democracy. Both employ documentary collage,
juxtaposing voices, languages, cultural documents, and images with
moments of more traditional lyric utterance. This essay explores these
innovative collage practices in order to show how politically engaged
poetry is being transformed in the early 21st century.

2. Myung Mi Kims Poetics of Translation

The author of ve booksUnder Flag (1991), The Bounty (1996), Dura

(1999), Commons (2002), and Penury (2009)Kims poetry explores the
relationships between language, subjectivity, politics, economics, and
ecology. In particular, her poetry examines the effects of militarization
and capitalist development on already disenfranchised populationsthe
colonized, the working class, the refugee, and the immigrant. Kims book
Commons employs documentary collage as a means to translate forms
of violence that have occurred and continue to occur under the conditions
of empire, global capitalism, and ecological degradation. Comprised of
fragments from various sources, Commons enacts a processural poet-
ics of transcription and rehistoricization (2002: 111). The poems embody
566 Angela Hume

languages gaps and between-spacesthat which occurs in the interstices,

in and through processes of translation, or failures of translation. In these
between spaces, meaning becomes multiple, and the poems resist what
is arguably the totalizing power of rei ed language systems. Kim suggests
that allowing for such multiplicity might be a rst step in the direction
of realizing new forms of relation. Or, a practice of responsibility to one
another in social space (ibid.).
In Commons, Kim points to the experiences of people living on the
Korean peninsula leading up to, during, and after the Korean War, as well
as toward the dif culties and contradictions that came with emigration
from Korea. While the book does not focus exclusively on Korean history
and culture, Kim repeatedly evokes the 20th century Korean diaspora;
millions of Koreans were forced to leave or left their country during
Japans colonial rule of the peninsula from 1910 to 1945, during the
United States occupation from 1945 to 1953 leading up to and through
the Korean War, and in the aftermath of the Korean war under a contin-
ued American occupation from 1953 to the present (see Cumings 2005).
Consider, for example, the following lines from Kims series Works,
which appears in Commons:
For the most part there is the smell of dried meat
Detail of blood smears
All at once the maggots were arrived

Capital . wound fragrant

Here are specimens grit in the folds of greens

Direct pillage
Equal dispensation of dirt in the doorway

Compelled for the rest of the year to feed on noxious shoots (2002: 81)

Here is a picture of the exhaustion of life and land under empire or a

military invasion. The consequence of this violence is famine: Compelled
for the rest of the year to feed on noxious shoots. The poem may point in
part toward the famine that resulted from American scorched-earth tactics
during the Korean War, which were devastating for the peninsulas food
and water supply (Cumings 2005: 294-6). The poem goes on to depict a
dwelling space: dirt in the doorway. The leveling of or disregard for hu-
man life by empire or enemy invaders is juxtaposed with the vulnerability
of the body and the home: Capital . wound fragrant. When we read
the poem as incriminating the West for its involvement in the Korean con-
ict, we can read the single period as creating a caesura in the already
 Twenty- rst Century Poetry and Politics 567

fragmented line (one might almost read wound fragment), evoking the
antihuman, death-driven nature of capital in contrast to the raw animal-
ity of a wound. One could also read the period as linking the two terms,
underscoring the way in which the rst calls the latter into existence
(i.e., the poem highlights the way in which capitalism is predicated upon
the exploitability of the laboring body). While the relationship between
capital, the destruction or deterioration of the food supply, and domestic
life remains somewhat ambiguous, we might ultimately read the poem
as registering the dehumanizing effects of the Wests effort to institute a
capitalist economic system in Korea at the outset of the Cold War, one
that came at the cost of many civilian lives.
With regard to form, one might consider the sound structures and
collage methods of Kims Works as they relate to Modernist poetry. As
Marjorie Perloff points out, experiments with sound, textual materiality,
and the spatialization of time were hallmarks of Modernist innovation
(see 2002). Perloff suggests that in poetry today we can see a return to a
more Modernist approach to experimentation. In Kim, arguably, there is
a foregrounding of sound and collage that is similar to that which Perloff
identi es as so important for Modernist poetry. In Works, Kim creates
severe sound structures through the use of alliteration. The sibilance in
the lines Detail of blood smears / All at once the maggots were arrived
and Here are specimens grit in the folds of greens . . . Equal dispen-
sation of dirt in the doorway / Compelled for the rest of the year to feed
on noxious shoots contributes to the ominous mood of the images. The
lines hiss and fade, giving way to caesura (as in Here are specimens ),
leaving much to the readers imagination. Instead of creating a historical
narrative, the lines collage the sounds of a historical moment, immersing
readers in the unhealthy ecology of mid-century Korea.
Born in 1957 in Seoul, Kim emigrated from South Korea to the
United States with her family when she was nine years old (Keller 2008:
335). Technically, English is her second language. As someone who grew
up between two languages, Kim cites what she calls her interrogative
relationship with language, one that has helped foster for her a sense
of the translative space that exists between languages (ibid.). In other
words, for Kim, moving between two languages enables one to question
everything about language and, moreover, to see oneself as an active
participant in the determination of its meaning. She continues: Poetry
invites a practice of language/perception that embraces mutability, un-
decidability, the motion underneath and around whats codi ed in con-
ventions of language, grammar, syntax, semantics, and so forth. Poetry
produces new ways of participating in perception, thinking, historical
being and becoming (ibid.). As a practice situated to register those inde-
terminate and dynamic spaces in and around language, poetry, argues
Kim, shapes the way we see and think about the world and our histories.
568 Angela Hume

Kims poetic forms re ect this belief in that they are often fragmented,
full of space and air, and comprised of more than one language, ambigu-
ous marks (e.g., punctuation or other symbols), and cultural documents.
In Works, Kim collages voices and testimonies of individuals living
under a colonial power or foreign occupation with those of refugees and
immigrants, English with Hangul (the Korean alphabet), and traditionally
legible marks with those that are not traditionally legible. In the series,
Kim gestures toward the effects of the administration of the Korean people
by both the Japanese and American governments during the 20th cen-
tury. Modernization under Japanese colonial rulewith which both the
American and British governments were largely complicitoften entailed
the deracination, forced labor, and slavery of Korean men and women
(Cumings 2005: 142). The title of the series itself may point toward this
labor of Koreans leading up to and during World War II. While the end of
the war in 1945 signaled the end of Japanese imperialism in Korea, it was
not the end of foreign administration of the peninsula; later that same year,
the United States instituted a full military government in Korea (ibid.: 185).
Because Works does not name a speci c population, the fragments
resonate with many different histories of colonization, impoverishment,
and diaspora. Consider the rst page of the series, an example of Kims
collage technique:
Aggregate
Placed onto the actual
As in tool, scraper, shaper

Operative f fl
A bereft
aba . apa
A small number multiplied many times by itself (2002: 69)

The rst word of the series, aggregate, references its method: the collection
of many parts or units into a single body or whole (OED Online 2013). An
aggregate method is, of course, a kind of collage method in that collage
involves the sticking together of unrelated parts in such a way that these
parts constitute a new whole (Perloff 1998). Halfway down the page, the
consonant sounds f fl bring the line to a stuttering halt, highlighting
not only the materiality but also the dif culty of speech. The word bereft,
which follows in the next line, may gesture toward the repression and
deprivation that have contributed to the silencing of certain individuals,
populations, and histories. As Lynn Keller has noted, one might read the
following aba . apa as mere consonant play, but in fact the two terms
translate from Korean as father and hurt[s me] (2010: 167). The period
 Twenty- rst Century Poetry and Politics 569

between the two terms creates pause in the line. One could also read the
period as an interruption of a caesuraa struggle for utterance in the midst
of the silence and pain embedded in the pages negative space.
At times the poem, in all of its white space, feels to be hardly there
at all. In this way, the form of the poem registers modern Koreas long
history of erasure. Even today, millions of Koreans who labored under
Japanese imperial rule from 1935 to 1945 cannot locate of cial records
of that which happened to them (Cumings 2005: 139). In the absence of
history, perhaps, a culture must assemble an aggregate of its individual
tracesa sudden sense of a family members grief (A bereft), the sound
of a child calling out (aba . apa). Together, these traces comprise not
a seamless whole but rather a small number multiplied many times by
itself. Of course, Kims collage of consonant sounds, punctuation, words,
and languages will mean different things for different readers. In light of
the poems reference to tools (scraper, shaper), one could read the poet
as evoking the hard work of assembling, or aggregating, personal and
cultural histories while subject to a colonial power (operative), dearth,
or diaspora. Kims collage, or aggregate, engenders a highly textured,
visual, spatial poeticsone for which reading the white of the page, the
caesuras and absences, becomes as important as reading the text itself.
Drawing on contemporary trauma studies, critic Grace Cho offers a name
for this aggregate: diasporic vision. In and through its form, diasporic
vision registers the nonnarrativizable and is characterized by its scat-
tered images, affects, and voices, the haunting of those pasts distributed
across the multiple bodies of the diaspora (2008: 24).
Early in Works is a page titled Siege Document (see g. 1). On
this page are ve tercets, each comprised of three variations on a single
line. The rst line of each tercet is in standard romanization of Korean;
the second line is in Hangul characters; and the third line is Kims own
transliteration, or what [I] might be said to be hearing, as Kim explains
in her commentary on Siege Document in Pollen Fossil Record (2002:
110). Flanked by transliterations that make the Hangul characters more
accessible to the English speaker, or that nd correspondence with
English (to use Kims language), the Hangul characters themselves could
be read as being under siege (ibid.). We might read each transliteration as
evidencing histories of violence against Koreans and their culture in the
20th century. Notably, Hangul has its own fraught history. The alphabet
was invented in the 15th century as an alternative to what had been
the dominant writing system, Hanja, comprised of Chinese characters.
It was systemized under the reign of King Sejong (1418 to 1450) of the
Choson dynasty (Cumings 2005: 64-5). The of cial explanation for the
new alphabet was that Hangul offered Koreans a written language that
enabled them to convey in writing the sounds of their own language,
which were not easily conveyed in Chinese writing (ibid.: 65). The new
570 Angela Hume

script of only 28 letters made it easy for almost anyone to learn and use
it (ibid.). Even so, the alphabet did not come into general use until the
20th century, since many texts continued to be written and published in
Chinese (ibid.: 66). Under periods of colonization and occupation, Hangul
has been altered, marginalized, and repressed. For example, during the
Japanese rule of Korea, the Korean language was forcibly replaced by the
Japanese language (ibid.: 141). While today Hangul is the of cial script
of North Korea and a version of it is used in South Korea, Kim herself
recalls leaving the language behind upon immigrating to America (ibid.:
66; Keller 2008: 354-5).
Kims documentary collage illuminates ways that Hangul has been
appropriated, distorted, and transformed. Her collage also conveys more
broadly a condition of language itselfthe way in which language comes
alive in its transitions between various handlers and authorities, in and
through the various processes by which it is realized. With regard to the
practice of romanizing, Kim asks in Pollen Fossil Record: Whose ears are
at work? Where does the authority of romanizing reside? How might it be
entered into otherwise? (2002: 110). Here the poet suggests that, despite
what may be transliterations inherently imperial nature, an experimental
or improvisational (mis)transliteration might actually have the capacity to
subvert this imperial nature from within, redistributing authority among
those who have not traditionally held it. In this way the colonized or the
immigrant gains access to the language of the country where he or she was
born. Moreover, (mis)transliteration has the potential to be realized anew
as constructive, collective practicea means for sharing social space or, in
the case of Siege Document, a means for sharing the space of the page.
Importantly, Kim does not provide a translation of the Hangul in
Siege Document, nor does she attribute the text to anyone in particu-
lar. Around these facts, tensions and dif culties ariseboth for those
who can read Hangul and for those who cannot. The ve lines of Hangul
translate as follows:
People of the world
Please listen to what I have to say
When it is day the water is clear
When it is night the re is bright
What kind of time is this time? (ibid.: 76, translated by Yoo-hyun Oak)

Kim incorporates a strong appeal to readers (Please listen to what I have

to say), knowing full well that many of her readers will not have the
language skills to be able to heed this appeal. The text calls out from the
page, but few readers will have the ability to hear it in any traditional
sense. Readers who can read Hangul will experience the tension around
this catch-22. Readers who cannot read Hangul will experience a different
kind of dif culty: lacking access to Korean, they will be forced to imagine
 Twenty- rst Century Poetry and Politics 571

alternative methods for interpreting the text. For them, reading involves
encountering the Korean variations in stark juxtaposition. The experience
may leave readers with feelings of being alienated or excluded by language.
Alternatively, it may also be one of raw encounter with the violence of lan-
guage appropriation, evidenced by the visible contrast between alphabets.
While the Korean characters and letters may not carry symbolic signi cance
for these readers, the shapes and textures of the characters and letters in
harsh contrast create their own powerful effects.
On another page of Works appears a hand-written page of Hangul
(see g. 2). Notably, this Hangul is ridden with errors, re ecting, perhaps,
the limited Hangul available to whomever transcribed it. (We can assume
this person is Kim, though we cannot know for certain.) Kim says as
much in Pollen Fossil Record as she explains:
A further rehearsal: being compelled to write down as exactly as possible the
words of Olga Kim, speaking about her forty years of living in Siberia, and
knowing fully that an atrophied, arrested, third grade Korean writing is what
was available. What was missing? What was forgotten? What was never learned
in the rst place? What was and was not written correctly? Each of these
instances is enunciative. (2002: 110)

For Kim, the act of transcription is rehearsala practice that is tentative,

not yet perfected. In its errors and failures, transcription has the capacity
to reveal histories of language deracinationhow language is depleted,
even lost, in and through colonization and diaspora. A translation of the
handwritten transcription, one that re ects the kinds of errors found in
the Hangul, might read:
Dont work from tomorrow
I thought like dat
Theres no hop
so much as my throat choked
because of dat
onetime before I am die
my un forgetabl hom town
without any family member
fer about 40 years _ _
so much long time (ibid.: 83, translated by Gowoon Noh and Kevin Smith)

Alternatively, a translation that re ects more closely the transcriptions

intended meaning might read:
Starting tomorrow do not work
Ive thought that way
There is no hope
such that my throat chokes
Because of all this
Before death Ive never once
572 Angela Hume

forgotten my hometown
Without family
for about 40 years
How long it was (ibid., translated by Yoo-hyun Oak)

Kim explains in an interview that Olga Kim is a construction, an allegori-

cal gure in ecting the ways in which the Korean diaspora has taken place
globally (Keller 2008: 346). Both gures in the poemOlga Kim and also
she who attempts to transcribe Olga Kims narrative in her atrophied, ar-
rested, third grade Korean writingreach toward their native Korea. Their
attempts at storytelling and at language are incomplete, lled with gaps
and errors. The effect of these two accounts is a picture of a Korea that is
only partially intelligible. In the end, Kims collage reveals how narrative,
transcription, translation, and transliterationhowever botched, partial, or
contradictoryare necessary rehearsals, a means for reimagining histo-
ries of language and culture and entering them into the historical register.
For Kim, poetrys processes are situated to do the work of translating
individual experiencesof marginalization, repression, physical pain, and
griefrendering them accessible in and through their aggregation. More-
over, Kim suggests, the translative, interruptive work of poetic language
has the capacity to undermine prevailing language systems (2002: 110).
Drawing from the Modernist tradition, Kims poetry attempts to glimpse
history in and through a poetics of acute sound forms, merging lyric trace
with documentary collage. While history may not be recoverable in any
traditional sense, attention to the way the material conditions of the past
have mediated and determined language and knowledge can help illumi-
nate possible methods for relating to one another differently in the future.

3. Claudia Rankine and the Wasting of Life

Like Kim, Claudia Rankine is also not originally from the United States.
Born in 1963 in Jamaica, Rankine was raised in Kingston and in New
York City (Flescher/Caspar 2006: n.p.). Today Rankine identi es herself
as a black woman who lives in America (ibid.). The author of four po-
etry booksNothing in Nature Is Private (1994), The End of the Alphabet
(1998), Plot (2001), and Dont Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004)
Rankines most recent volume evokes in particular the sense of alienation
that many minority populations experience living in America. In recent
years, Rankine argues, the American government and economic system
have been responsible for the proliferation of chronic disease, racial sub-
jection, policing, and preventive warfare. Her poetry incites readers to look
critically at these institutions that structure and in many ways determine
peoples lives. Arguing that the poem is a process without resolution,
 Twenty- rst Century Poetry and Politics 573

Rankine advocates an investigative poetics that takes race and class

into account (Flescher/Caspar 2006). She explains that by acknowledg-
ing who we are in the world as poets, we can keep the eld re ective
(ibid.). For Rankine, the Language poets in particular model this kind of
self-awarenessthat language itself is constructed around . . . certain
sets of privileges (ibid.). Rankines co-editorship with Juliana Spahr of the
2002 volume American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets
Language underscores her interest in the question of how innovative writ-
ing helps bridge the gap between the personal and the collectivebetween
private intimacies and public obligations, as Spahr puts it in her intro-
duction (Rankine/Spahr 2002: 11). Notably, while Rankine emphasizes
the importance of Language poetry for her work, the forms of her poetry,
like Kims, employ collage techniques that draw from Modernism as well.
In Dont Let Me Be Lonely, Rankine employs documentary collage to
interrogate the political, social, and environmental conditions under which
people have lived and continue to live. The book is a series of prose medi-
tations interspersed with images and documents: lists, drawings, media
photographs, diagrams of the body, X-ray images, prescription labels, and
others. Each prose section is separated by an image of a television with
static on its screen, as if reading the sections were like switching from
channel to channel. At times the books lyric prose dwells on and mourns
the experiences of contemporary life post-9/11, from living with chronic
disease and addiction to standing witness, oftentimes daily, to racism,
terrorism, and war. In collaging lyric language with documentsprivate
with publicRankine illustrates the way in which even personal experi-
ences of grief are mediated by the ideologies of capitalism and empire.
In referring to her book as an American lyric, Rankine invokes a con-
tested genre history while also alluding to the question of whether there can
even be such a thing as a distinctly American lyric genre. While today the
term lyric is generally used to refer to poetry written in the rst person,
expressing personal feelings, or to poetry that foregrounds the musicality of
language, these de nitions, as Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins point out,
are actually relatively recent ones (2014: 1). In fact, the term has denoted
different poetic forms at different points in time, often eluding critics as
they have attempted to pin it down (Jackson 2012: 826-34). Contrary to
popular belief, lyric is not an ancient genre that developed over centuries,
but rather a modern idea that tends to collapse a wide range of disparate
poetic practices and theories from centuries past. Simultaneously resisting
and conforming to the modern idea of what a lyric is and has always been,
Dont Let Me Be Lonely points not only to the amorphousness of the term
lyric, but also to that of its modi er, American. In inviting the question,
What is it to be lyric? Rankine prompts us in the same moment to ask,
What is it to be an American citizen? The latter question is troubling in
the context of Rankines work, in which citizenship does not necessar-
574 Angela Hume

ily guarantee one rights (let alone equal rights) or humane treatment by
society and the state. To be an American lyric is to be legible only to a
certain point, and therefore always also to be at risk of historical erasure.
The tone of Rankines Dont Let Me Be Lonely oscillates. Sometimes
the speaker is sincere, almost sentimental: I forget things too. It makes
me sad . . . the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter
. . . I write this without breaking my heart, without bursting into anything
(2004: 23). At other times the speaker is cynical: Now it is the twenty- rst
century and either you are with us or you are against us. Where is your
ag? (ibid. 91). However tonally disparate, both of these moments gesture
toward what Christopher Nealon has described as a central problem or
question for the book: how to give meaning to broken lives, or meaning
to death, in a context where historical hope seems pass, and where its
becoming pass is explicitly linked to its having ballooned into an empty
spectacle (2011: 148). Or in other words, how are we to hope for better
lives when it is precisely in the name of this hope that the capitalist state
has repeatedly made a mockery of equality, freedom, and democracy? How
can we hope for better lives when hope has become the justi cation for
making in nite war on just about anyone (from the African American to
the non-western foreigner) who is perceived as threatening the coherence
of the American good life? At the end of the book, Rankine includes an
extensive notes section that details the sources for and stories behind
her collaged images and further situates the book and its subjects histori-
cally. Why do people waste away? the poet asks (2004: 11). Arguably,
the book itself is a chronicle of this wasting away (what the critic Lauren
Berlant has named slow death), which for many people today, and in
particular for African Americans, is de nitive of their experience living
under Western democracy.
In her book, Rankine explores two forms of violence against African
Americans that are the result of power structures in place. These forms
of violence are chronic disease and police violence against black men. The
section begins with a conversation between the speakera journalistand
her editor. The speaker explains:

We are having lunch because I am writing a book on hepatotoxicity, also known

as liver failure. In the public imagination, liver failure is associated with alco-
holism, but the truth is 55 percent of the time liver failure is drug-induced . . .
My editor asks me to tell her exactly what the liver means to me. She must not
have read Laurie Tarkans article in the Times, though she pulls it from her
briefcase and places it in the middle of the table. I point to a paragraph and
read aloud: The liver is particularly vulnerable to drugs because one of its func-
tions is to break down or metabolize chemicals that are not water-soluble . . . But
sometimes the breakdown products are toxic to liver cells. Indeed it is surprising,
given the noxious chemicals that the liver is exposed to, that more drugs do not
damage it. (ibid.: 53-4; original italics)
 Twenty- rst Century Poetry and Politics 575

We cannot assume that the speaker is Rankine or even that the speaker is
black. That said, at other points in the book Rankines speakers do identify
with African Americans or as African American. Cornel West says this is
what is wrong with black people todaytoo nihilistic. Too scarred by hope to
hope, too experienced to experience, too close to dead is what I think, writes
Rankine (ibid. 23). For this reason we might also read Rankines journalist
as African American. Of course, liver disease is not a condition that affects
only African Americans. However, both diabetes and obesitytwo chronic
conditions that African Americans are at higher risk of developing due to
a variety of genetic, socioeconomic, and environmental factorscan lead
to an increased risk of liver disease (US Department of Health and Human
Services; Mayo Clinic). Furthermore, exposure to chemicals, toxins, and
drugs can also contribute to liver problems (Mayo Clinic). Overexposure
to any of these factors, Rankines speaker suggests, can even lead to liver
failure (Rankine 2004: 53). For all of these reasons, one could read Rankine
as suggesting that liver disease is just one of the many chronic conditions
that are associated with the wasting of African American life today.
In relating her own experience, Rankines speaker defers to a docu-
ment (Tarkans article, a work of popular journalism), allowing it to speak
for her. In deferring to the authority of the document, the speaker be-
comes empowered, asserting the way in which her own body is situated
precariously amidst medication and noxious chemicals. Here is a key
irony that Rankines book distills: in order to care for ones body, to arm
oneself with knowledge of the risks that ones body faces everyday, one
must consume and internalize mediated forms of knowledge produced
and circulated by institutions that in many cases are complacent with
or even contributors to the production of these risks in the rst place
(e.g., the media, the government, pharmaceuticals, other corporations).
The speaker continues:

I understand that what she wants is an explanation of the mysterious connec-

tions that exist between an author and her text. If I am present in a subject
position what responsibility do I have to the content, to the truth value, of the
words themselves? Is I even me or am I a gearshift to get from one sentence
to the next? Should I say we? Is the voice not various if I take responsibility for
it? What does my subject mean to me? (ibid. 54)

The speakers question, What does my subject mean to me? ironically

echoes her editors earlier question (My editor asks me to tell her exactly
what the liver means to me), in that when weighed against the conditions
and interests that produce and reproduce subjectivity today, ones subject
ultimately amounts to very little. Directly below the speakers meditation
appears a diagram of the body (see g. 3). The speakers confession, which
appears next to the image, borders on sentimentality: Why do I care
about the liver? I could have told her it is because the word live hides in
576 Angela Hume

it (ibid. 54). But any sentimentality is quickly undermined when read-

ers see that the soul to which the speaker refers, which looms large
though is hidden, is in the shape of the United States. What the image
in juxtaposition with the text implies is that there is no soul; instead,
there is only empire looming large, penetrating every aspect of ones
worldly, embodied, subjective experience. The image conveys a notion
central to the book: that societys violencewhether in the form of the
media, the commodity, or the policeis always experienced at the level
of the physical body, violating it to its core.
The pages that follow, in which the speaker re ects on cases of police
violence against young black men, drive home this idea. Before recalling
the cases, the speaker confesses: I get a sharp pain in my gut. And though
heart disease is the leading killer of American women, the pain has nothing
to do with that. I have had it all my life. Not quite a caving in, just a feeling
of bits of my inside twisting away from esh in the form of a blow to the
body (ibid. 56). For Rankine, to live in todays world is to live with injury,
and the line between emotional and physical injury has become increas-
ingly blurred. Below the speakers meditation is a television. On its screen
is an image of Abner Louima, a New York City black man (see g. 4). Its
been four years since he was sodomized with a broken broomstick while
in police custody, Rankine writes bluntly (ibid.). On the next page she
writes: And the other: All the shots, all forty-one never add up, never
become plural, and will not stay in the past. It felt wasteful to cry at the
television set as Amadou Diallos death was announced (ibid. 57). The
books notes tell us that Diallo was a West African immigrant and street
vendor, shot dead in his New York City apartment building despite being
unarmed (ibid. 142). Also framed by a television screen, an image of a
smiling Diallo appears below Rankines text (see g. 5).
Rankines collagelyric confession (I get a sharp pain in my gut)
juxtaposed with images of two victims of state-sanctioned violencein-
stills in readers a sense of horror. This horror intensi es as the speaker
gestures toward the pain she experiences in her own body, the way she
feels loss to the point of being bent over each time (ibid. 57). The collage
brings images of physical violence into close proximity with thoughts of
the body in one of its most vulnerable states: bent over. Readers begin
to see that in a culture capable of violence that penetrates both physically
(in the form of broomsticks and bullets) and psychologically (in the form
of ideology and intimidation), the sentiments and suffering of individual
bodies are rendered nearly insigni cant. Even grief is highly mediated and
administered; to condemn cultural violence is always also to consume
this violence, as it has been repackaged by other parties and interests
via channels like television and the Internet.
The poem, Rankine suggests, in its insistence on [holding] the pain
. . . [translating] it here, might come as a kind of refusal in the face of
 Twenty- rst Century Poetry and Politics 577

these conditions. Citing Kim, Rankines speaker echoes the other poets
sentiment that the poem is really a responsibility to everyone in a social
space . . . what alerts, alters (ibid. 57). But it is unclear whether Rankines
speaker actually believes what she is saying. Can the restatement of
shocking facts (the fact that Abner Louima was sodomized with a broken
broomstick while in police custody) and the inclusion of images (the smil-
ing face of the now-dead Amadou Diallo) really inspire social change? After
all, as one of Rankines speakers admits later in the book, One observes,
one recognizes without being recognized. One opens the paper. One turns
on the television. Nothing changes (ibid. 117). It is this tensionbetween
the impulse to translate ones embodied grief, a hopeful gesture; and
the impulse to give in and give up in the face of so much wasted life, a
kind of radical pessimismthat pervades the book. In the end, Dont Let
Me Be Lonely reveals the way in which it is this tension, and not poetrys
mourning, that may be what has the affective power to incite readers to
ght for more democratic social structures and arrangements.

4. Conclusion: The Political Poet in the 21st Century

Continuing the 20th century tradition of innovative political writing, Kim

and Rankine employ documentary collage practices to register and interro-
gate the social, political, and environmental conditions under which people
have lived and continue to live. They evoke in particular the experiences
of minority populations that have long been vulnerable to subjugation
by society and the state. Kims and Rankines hybrid forms are adapted
not only from the post-World War II experimental tradition but also from
Modernism and Modernist collage.
Importantly, both Kim and Rankine tarry with the question of whether
politically engaged poetry can play a role in bringing about real social
change, a question that has long been of concern to American activist
poets. While Kim and Rankine both grapple with the relationship be-
tween personal experience and social relations and responsibility, their
politics and poetics diverge in a number of essential ways. For Kim, the
translative, interruptive work of poetic language has the capacity to
undermine prevailing language systems and alert and alter that which
surrounds it (2002: 110). In and through this process, notions of social
responsibility can be activated and histories can be realized anew (ibid.
111). Ultimately for Kim, poetry plays an active role in the realm of the
political. For Rankine, on the other hand, the conditions for social life
under the capitalist state often render the modern subject, and in par-
ticular the black subject, too scarred by hope to hope, too experienced to
experience, too close to dead (2004: 23). Powers unrelenting administra-
578 Angela Hume

tion of knowledge has reduced subjectivitythe fact of the Ito nothing

more than a gearshift to get from one sentence to the next (ibid. 54).
Rankines work meditates on the rami cations of this fact for the lyric
subject in poetry, ultimately questioning how and whether poetry can
make a difference under these new pressures. In the end, Rankine weighs
what might be the poems ability to translate the bodys painrendering it
newly intelligibleagainst the fact that the poem is always already medi-
ated by capitalism and the state. It is only in and through the poems own
realization of this tension, Rankine suggests, that poetry might become
capable of inciting resistance and bringing about new forms of relation.
Together, Kims and Rankines projects foreground some of the most
pressing questions for political poetry today. Their poetry registers the
changing nature of social and political life in and through documentary
collage practices, demonstrating how poetrys processes are uniquely
situated to do the work of translating individual experiences of margin-
alization, repression, physical pain, and grief. What we know and how we
know it, Kims and Rankines work shows, is a product of the material
conditions and contradictions under which we live. In this way, regardless
of whether the poet herself intends it, poetry takes on particular social
and political signi cance.

Bibliography
Selected Primary Literature
Kim, Myung Mi. 1996. The Bounty. Minneapolis: Chax Press.
. 2002. Commons. Berkeley: University of California Press.
. 1999. Dura. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press.
. 2009. Penury. Richmond: Omnidawn Publishing.
. 1991. Under Flag. Berkeley: Kelsey Street Press.
Rankine, Claudia. 2004. Dont Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Minneapolis:
Graywolf Press.
. 1998. The End of the Alphabet. New York: Grove Press.
. 1994. Nothing in Nature Is Private. Cleveland: Cleveland State University
Poetry Center.
. 2001. Plot. New York: Grove Press.

Selected Secondary Literature

Cumings, Bruce. 2005. Koreas Place in the Sun: A Modern History. New York
and London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Cumings provides an account of both North and South Koreas social,
political, and economic history in the 20th century.
 Twenty- rst Century Poetry and Politics 579

Jackson, Virginia and Yopie Prins. 2014. The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical
Anthology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
Jackson and Prins gather 20th century writings on the topic of lyric poetry,
revealing that what we call the lyric is in fact a relatively recent invention of
Western culture and criticism.
Jameson, Fredric. 2001. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP.
Jameson examines postmodern aesthetics across a wide landscape, from
architecture and lm to painting and literature. Ultimately, Jameson argues,
postmodern aesthetics register the developments of a particular moment in
late capitalism.
Perloff, Marjorie. 2002. 21st-Century Modernism: The New Poetics. Malden and
Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Perloff traces the relationship between Modernist aesthetics and
contemporary poetic forms, arguing that some new poetry is notable for its
return to the experimentation of the early 20th century.
Rankine, Claudia and Juliana Spahr. 2002. American Women Poets in the 21st
Century: Where Lyric Meets Language. Middletown: Wesleyan UP.
Rankine and Spahr examine forms of innovation in contemporary womens
writing, challenging the lyric poetry-Language poetry binary.

Further References
aggregate, n. 2013. Oxford English Dictionary Online. Web. 28 Aug. 2013.
Altieri, Charles and Daniel Herwitz. 2013. Postmodernism. In: Micheal Kelly
(ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Oxford Art Online. Ed. Michael Kelly. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. Web. 1 Apr. 2014.
Baym, Nina, Jerome Klinkowitz & Patricia B. Wallace. 2007. The Norton
Anthology of American Literature, Seventh Edition, Volume E. New York and
London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke UP.
Cho, Grace M. 2008. Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the
Forgotten War. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Flescher, Jennifer & Robert Caspar. 2006. Interview with Claudia Rankine. In:
Jubilat 12: 14-28. Web. 1 Apr. 2014. <poems.com/special_features/prose/
essay_rankine.php>.
Jackson, Virginia. 2012. Lyric. In: Roland Greene & Stephen Cushman (eds.),
The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton UP. 826-34.
Kachur, Lewis. 2013. Collage. Grove Art Online, Oxford Art Online. Oxford:
Oxford UP. Web. 1 Apr. 2014.
Keller, Lynn. 2008. An Interview with Myung Mi Kim. In: Contemporary
Literature 49.3: 335-6.
. 2010. The Thing Seen Together With the Whole Space: Myung Mi
Kims Visual Poetics of the Aggregate. In: Thinking Poetry: Readings in
Contemporary Womens Exploratory Poetics. Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press. 153-80.
Nealon, Christopher. 2011. Bubble and Crash: Poetry in Late-Late Capitalism.
In: The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century.
Cambridge and London: Harvard UP. 140-66.
obesity, liver problems, and type 2 diabetes. 2013. Mayo Clinic. Web. 1 Apr.
2014.
580 Angela Hume

Obesity and African Americans. 2013. US Department of Health and Human

Services Offi ce of Minority Health. Web. 1 Apr. 2014.
Perloff, Marjorie. 1998. Collage and Poetry. In: Michael Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia
of Aesthetics. Ed. Michael Kelly. New York: Oxford UP. Web. 1 Apr. 2014.
. 1999. Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron Sillimans Albany,
Susan Howes Buffalo. In: Critical Inquiry 25.3 (spring): 405-34.
. 2012. Poetry On the Brink: Reinventing the Lyric. In: Boston Review. May
18. Web. 1 Apr. 2013.
. 1996. Poetry, Politics, and the Other Conscience: The Duncan/Levertov
Correspondence. In: PN Review 112 (November/December): 33-8. Web. 1
Apr. 2014. <marjorieperloff.com.>
St. John, David and Cole Swensen. 2009. American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology
of New Poetry. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Victor, Divya. 2013. Eight discourses between Myung Mi Kim and Divya Victor.
In: Jacket2 (April). Web. 1 Apr. 2014.