Now Online: Claudia Rankine's Paris Review Interview
The Paris Review published Claudia Rankine's "Writers at Work" interview, conducted by David L. Ulin, in the Winter 2016 print edition. Now, their conversation is available "online, in full, free to read for subscribers and nonsubscribers alike," the Paris Review Daily (the magazine's daily blog) announced just yesterday. Their conversation intersects current events that took place from 2014-2016, including Donald Trump's ascension to become Republican presidential nominee, and police shootings in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. "The question is, How do you get to an authentic emotional place? I’m often listening not for what is being told to me but for what resides behind the narrative," Rankine explains at one point during their conversation. "What is the feeling for the thing that’s being told to me? One of the reasons I work in book-length projects, instead of individual poems, is because I don’t trust the authenticity of any given moment by itself." Let's start there:
INTERVIEWER
The individual poem falls prey to the same narrative contrivance—
RANKINE
Of the novel, yes. Its trajectory is on an arc of time. Instead, I feel that what happens formally in Citizen, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, and Plot is an obsessive circling of the subject. Many positions are inhabited relative to a line of inquiry. It’s like one of those mirrored rooms where the spectator sees the same thing repeated in different variations and from different angles.
INTERVIEWER
So in Citizen, those second-person vignettes form a series of slightly different but similar interactions. And part of the effect is that we feel it in the body.
RANKINE
Didn’t feel it the first time? Here it is again. We don’t get there by saying it once. It’s not about telling the story, it’s about creating the feeling of knowing the story through the accumulation of the recurring moment.
INTERVIEWER
Immersion as opposed to narrative.
RANKINE
That’s why, in this case, narrative is irrelevant in a certain sense. It could be these ten stories or it could be ten other stories. I tried to pick situations and moments that many people share, as opposed to some idiosyncratic occurrence that might have happened only to me. For example, many black people have been in a situation where they’ve been called by the name of the other black person—at the office, at the party, in the room. The stories are many and the emotion is one.
Continue at Paris Review.