Camille Rankine Interviewed for Interview Magazine
Wow: Camille Rankine is interviewed at Interview Magazine! Rankine (no relation to Claudia) "dives into the ocean, city, and memory, through webs of lineage and isolation to deliver poems as symptoms, still lives, letters, and instructions." Her first book, Incorrect Merciful Impulses (Copper Canyon Press), came out late last year.
Sarah Herrington spoke with Rankine about ordering a manuscript, music, poetry, and the apocalypse, and much more. Here's a start:
HERRINGTON: What one or two songs might be the soundtrack of this book?
RANKINE: I have so many musical obsessions, it's difficult to say! But I do find a sort of familial sympathy between this book and "Eight Minutes," a song about the end of the world that's on my brother Jerome Rankine's latest album. We're both a bit preoccupied with the apocalypse, and the book is definitely infused with a sense of impending disaster. Along those lines, another piece that comes to mind is William Basinski's "Disintegration Loop 1.1," which a friend I met at The MacDowell Colony brought to my attention—he played it one night while a bunch of the fellows gathered on the lawn to watch the Perseids. I loved it so much I played it in my studio while working on finishing the collection. Apparently Basinski finished the piece on the morning of the September 11 attacks, and listened to it during the last hour of daylight on a rooftop in Brooklyn, watching smoke rise from the city.
HERRINGTON: Which makes me think of this line I loved: "In the city the climate is hostile, which suits me." How important is place in both the theme and creation of your art?
RANKINE: I grew up between Portland, Oregon, and Jamaica, so the ocean has always been a presence for me, and the landscapes in which I feel most at home are lush and green. Now I live in New York City, and it is neither lush nor green. I don't know if I write differently in one place versus another, but both landscapes are very present in my psyche always, and both are present in my work. There's a tension between the natural world and the manmade in the book that springs from that.
HERRINGTON: Speaking of human-made...I'm always curious how poets order and group their collections. Can you speak about that process?
RANKINE: I'm not a person who writes toward the container of a book, so at certain points along the line, I would pause and take stock of where I was, what I had written, what themes were forming among the poems. Eventually, I could sense common concerns threading their way throughout these individual poems, and I began to see them coming together as a collection...
Read the full interview at Interview.