“What an image,” an audience member whispered, looking at a photo displayed behind poet Claudia Rankine — it depicted a couch tied in a knot.
The photo was part of a rotating slideshow of artfully destroyed couches that served as the backdrop while Rankine read sections from her unreleased book, tentatively titled “Triage,” at an event hosted by the Northwestern Creative Writing Department on Wednesday.
After reading two sections from “Triage,” Rankine sat down for a Q&A with Classics Prof. Marianne Hopman, during which she discussed the inspirations for her newest book and her writing process.
“(‘Triage’) is a response to the pandemic, it’s a response to the administration, it’s a response to the state we are in both nationally and locally by these two women who, once upon a time, understood the fact that they needed to collapse,” Rankine said.
The book was partially inspired by themes from the ancient Greek tragedy “Antigone,” Rankine said. In the play, two sisters are faced with the question of whether kinship is more valuable than their commitment to the state when they are forbidden to bury one of their brothers.
Rankine said she sought a way to live in both positions — listening to the state and listening to kinship. These themes of duality were present in the first section she read.
“I wanted to find a way to enter many eyes in order to sit in the question of what it means to act or not to act in the face of anything or everything,” Rankine said.
Rankine said she needed a “single thing” to focus on to tackle this question. She selected a game she played with a friend in college, in which the two would collapse to the ground any time they saw each other.
Rankine uses the image of a destroyed couch in another section of “Triage.”
“The mutilated couch holds my attention as a thing refusing its function,” she read, “the refusals calling themselves a day, the daydream not a dream, the not again, again.”
She later related the sofa to collapse, saying, “Sofas function as a soft landing before you reach the ground.”
Rankine said the damages incurred by the pandemic spurred the concept of a sofa as the middle ground for collapse. This inspiration joined others in shaping “Triage.”
If published, “Triage” will be Rankine’s sixth book of poetry, joining titles such as “Citizen: An American Lyric” and “Don’t Let me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.” She has also written three plays and a collection of essays published by Graywolf Press.
Rankine has received numerous awards and honors for her work, including the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry and the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize.
English Prof. Lauren Jackson said she was stuck by “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” the first time she read it and spoke on the power in Rankine’s words.
“Claudia Rankine’s lyric as it converts in other modes — still image, the short form video, the dialog, the dramatic play, the essay — is historical, situated and intertextual,” Jackson said.
Medill junior Mya Copeland said she was also impacted by Rankine’s work, having just read Rankine’s poetry with her poetry cohort.
For her, “Triage’s” concept of writing in response to current events was especially interesting.
“There were a lot of things she that said that I’m interested to write my own experiences related to that, or things that I would not have thought of that are interesting concepts,” Copeland said.
Email: [email protected]
Related Stories:
— WIND hosts poetry reading, Q&A
— Fatimah Asghar shares personal experiences in poetry reading, Q&A
