The television is company to the lonely subject, but it distorts a sense of time, excluding the consumer from their own experience (‘eventually the suicide hotline is called’) and from current events. In this instance, such an address might make one dead. Lyric’s habit of addressing and, in doing so, invoking dead or absent subjects is here powerfully complicated by the technologies of television and telephony. He finally says, Don’t believe what you are thinking and feeling.

When he makes no response you add, I am in death’s position. You tell him, I feel like I am already dead. Do you feel like killing yourself? The man on the other end of the receiver asks. You are, as usual, watching television, the eight-o’clock movie, when a number flashes on the screen: 1-800-SUICIDE. Am I dead? Though this question at no time explicitly translates into Should I be dead, eventually the suicide hotline is called. Or one begins asking oneself that same question differently. With wit and intelligence, Rankine strives toward an unprecedented clarity-of thought, imagination, and sentence-making-while arguing that recognition of others is the only salvation for ourselves, our art, and our government.ĭon't Let Me Be Lonely is an important new confrontation with our culture, with a voice at its heart bewildered by its inadequacy in the face of race riots, terrorist attacks, medicated depression, and the antagonism of the television that won't leave us alone.Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre writing, fuses the lyric, the essay, and the visual in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America.

Sadness lives in the recognition that a life can In this powerful sequence of TV images and essay, Claudia Rankine explores the personal and political unrest of our volatile new century

Dont let me be lonely rankine