In the long wake of 9/11, I have often wondered what poetry can say about our country’s internal violence as well as the violence we export abroad (in the form of neoliberal trade deals, puppet governments, and military invasions). Much contemporary work strikes me as exceedingly private in varying ways, but I also suspect that this reflects a larger tendency to avoid the toughest conversations. My questions, then, have to do with response and responsibility: in particular, where to situate one’s work, and how to avoid the complicity of silence. What obligations does one have, and what opportunities does writing present to address them? How does one tackle, as a writer, the kairos of our cultural moment without drowning in it?

In her 2004 book, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Claudia Rankine writes that “the attack on the World Trade Center stole from us…our willingness to be complex” or, alternately, that it “revealed to us…that we were never complex” (91). We lacked the vocabulary to process what had happened, or rather that vocabulary had yet to be invented. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely writes into this void, which may be either the absence of complexity or the absence of rituals to address it. A poet may not be the priest Allen Ginsberg once claimed (self-deprecatingly) he was, but that is not to say her role is any less public or that the poem is any less ceremonial than prayer; although Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is not a spiritual text, this understanding underlies and animates the book.

Equally important is the realization that ours is a deeply disturbed culture, one unable or unwilling to process its traumas. And so Don’t Let Me Be Lonely moves, ceremonially, through one symptom of this disturbance after another. Against the painful “recognition that billions of lives never mattered”—and against our collective inability to acknowledge these lives—the book often reads like an oration over the bodies of the dead and dying: the body of Amadou Diallo, for instance—the young, unarmed Guinean immigrant shot 41 times by four New York City police officers in 1999; the body of the six-year-old girl beaten to death by her thirteen-year-old neighbor; the body of executed Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, as well as the bodies of his victims; finally, the bodies of millions of HIV-positive South Africans, sentenced to death by the drug companies that for many years prevented the distribution of low-cost antiretrovirals (23).

None of this is to say that Don’t Let Me Be Lonely should be compared, either formally or otherwise, to the texts of existing prayers, but that it has the tone and spirit of prayer without (in almost any sense) its object: there is no appeal to a higher power, no supplication for beneficence or mercy. It is not so much an invocation or entreaty as it is an observance or mourning ritual—a text that, at its heart, attempts to process the cultural context and aftermath of 9/11 more than the violence of the actual event. Because there is something ominous about a culture unable to respond to its own traumas, a culture that cannot compose the texts recited over its dead. Priest or not, Ginsberg was savvy enough to recognize this, and so he set about writing his own version of the Kaddish for his mother. Rankine is no less savvy a writer (and no less a socially-oriented one), and in a cultural and poetic context that almost demands our mourning take private forms, she has created a text that enacts the intersection of private and public grief, a ritual to address our wounds.

Situated at that very intersection between public and private, which is also perhaps the intersection of reportage and disclosure, the poem may be the form most adequate to our grief. But at the time Rankine began to write Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, the poem had undergone the latest in a long series of crises of conscience, one that arguably continues today. We don’t seem to know exactly what role is appropriate to the poem—epistemological inquiry, conceptual toy, formal relapse?

This much is clear: the poem’s widespread unwillingness to be wracked by overwhelming sadness (there are exceptions) reflects a larger unwillingness. Rankine writes:

Sometimes I think it is sentimental, or excessive, certainly not intellectual, or perhaps too naïve, too self-wounded to value each life like that, to feel loss to the point of being bent over each time. 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. (57)

These days intellectuals, including poets, are perhaps ill-equipped to respond to something on the order of Amadou Diallo’s death. Talk about it, sure. Process it, analyze it—absolutely. But to register this loss as a physical sensation in the body (or in the body of the poem), to be wounded by Diallo’s story in this way—that isn’t “something an ‘I’ discusses socially.” And yet, if poets are in some ways the voice and conscience of the culture, and if they aren’t able to grieve publicly—to pay witness to a death like Diallo’s—to what extent can you say of the culture that it can’t express itself? That it can’t feel? It’s this kind of thought without feeling, or thought disembodied from feeling, that may be the heart of the book’s “loneliness” and the object of its prayer.

But, again, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely isn’t quite prayer, and it isn’t quite poem either—or essay, for that matter, which is another of the labels its marketers have affixed to it. This, too, speaks to the kairos of the book’s setting. We were no longer in the mood, in 2001 or 2004 or 2011, to seek in poems what we couldn’t find in prayers. Or perhaps it’s better to say that what we found in the poems and prayers was not adequate to our needs. In response, the form the book takes is at once elliptical and discursive, lyrical and narrative. It might be said to cover its modal bases. Like many other works of our period, it is a hybrid, by which I mean the text is not, a priori, poem or essay or prayer.

Put another way, the poem—no less than prayer—might be operating under definitions that are no longer sufficient to conditions, in which case the emergence of the hybrid as a viable mode in the past several decades (which is not to ignore centuries of historical precedents) can be seen as an attempt to produce texts that are sufficient to conditions. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely can thus also be seen as a gesture toward the expansion of the possibilities of the poem, its range of expression. For, at least in the larger culture, the poem qua poem is suspicious: when, to escape the summer heat, Rankine sits on the roof of her apartment building and chants a poem to the sky, she is treated as a potential suicide by the neighbors who spot her legs dangling over the side of the roof. It is as though we no longer know what to make of poems and the people who write and recite them. More to the point: we have perhaps lost the willingness or the ability for making public what is otherwise private.

In response, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely tries “to fit language into the shape of usefulness”—useful in the sense that it reclaims or refines that ability (129). In a world that “moves through words as if the bodies the words reflect did not exist,” Don’t Let Me Be Lonely wants to reattach those bodies to the words they use—to reattach our bodies, through our words, to the world (129). Otherwise, we risk getting stuck in a lonely condition where language is a confusing and possibly dangerous abstraction, one in which words can all too easily be made to manipulate or obscure. (An extreme example: the hideous language around the extraordinary rendition of terrorism subjects, “ghost” detainees whose presence at a site is negated by the refusal to acknowledge it. Someone says the prisoner isn’t there, and as a result the prisoner “disappears” even while he remains quite physically present.)

Nowhere is this purpose more pointed than in the book’s opening passages, in which Rankine recalls her childhood confusion about both the silence surrounding death and the challenges of its representation. “Every movie I saw while in the third grade,” Rankine writes, “compelled me to ask, Is he dead? Is she dead?” (6). In the case of old movies, the answer was often yes, but then inevitably she would see some actors in other contexts—a late-night talk show, for example. The confusion is obvious: the third-grader cannot distinguish the character from the actor, what is represented as opposed to what represents it. The problem is compounded by the fact that, according to one famous study, a child will witness 16,000 simulated murders on television by the time she is eighteen. Given the enormity of that violence, how do you explain to a child what it means to be dead versus what it means to appear to be dead? How do you explain that the word dead attaches to a body? How do you divorce (or distinguish) words from make-believe?

I’ve used the word hybrid, and yet I am painfully aware of the inadequacy of that term. In recent years there’s been a fair amount of traffic in textual hybridity—works that often operate in several genres or defy genre labels altogether. To be certain, this hybridity is not that of the American Hybrid anthology (edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John), which repurposes the term toward altogether separate ends (namely, the reconciliation of the academy with the avant-garde—already a fait accompli). In experimental circles at least, there’s been either a marked fatigue with genre conventions or a sense that genres work well in collaboration. I’m not sure, however, that classifying Don’t Let Me Be Lonely as hybrid does us any good, as the label has been poorly understood and even more poorly applied.

In his review of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets—a book that shares some distinct thematic and formal similarities with Don’t Let Me Be Lonely—Ray McDaniel laments, apropos “the death of poetry,” that Wave Books marketed Bluets as “Essay/Literature.” McDaniel is a good critic—smart, incisive, and sensitive—and I think he’s onto something here. He writes:

Bluets reads like both [Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet and The Beauty of the Husband] at the same time, and many other books besides. Why not? The failure here isn’t Nelson’s (for I think this is a wild, brilliantly successful book) but how it is marketed. And while I cannot blame Wave Books for wanting to expand the readership for such an accomplished and fascinating book, it doesn’t help matters to deny Bluets as poetry. It does what Nelson’s admitted poetry does; it also does what her mixed-genre work does.

McDaniel is edging toward a statement here close to the concerns embodied by Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: in a way, he’s arguing for a new definition of poetry, one that includes work that thinks like a poem even if it doesn’t look like one. McDaniel seems to be saying that until we embrace the full range of possible poetic expression—which includes essayistic discourse and fictional narrative—we’ll be stuck with this self-involved angst about the death of poetry. We’ll also be blinding ourselves to nearly everything except what has already been accomplished.

Aesthetic categories, as the artist Robert Smithson was quick to point out, are commonly vehicles for establishing, maintaining, and exerting power, and part of what’s at stake here (e.g., in a work like Don’t Let Me Be Lonely or Bluets) is power—power over what counts and doesn’t count as an essay or a poem, power to build an academic or critical career, but also power over the reader. The hybrid is democratic—verging on the anarchic—and it privileges readers’ experiences with texts over the boxes into which we might place them. One reason a manifesto of hybridity has yet to appear is that no single document could account for the writers and readers of the texts in question (although this has perhaps always been the case).

Put another way, the hybrid situates reading as the articulation of genre, not its reenactment. In the context of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, such hybridity begins with its subtitle, “An American Lyric.” Outside of some recognizably lyric poems by Milosz and Celan included in the text, there is little in the book’s formal presentation we might mistake for lyrical poetry as it has come down to us, through innumerable divagations, from Sappho. But as Anne Carson has written, at its origins the lyric enacted a “crisis of contact”: an I encounters a You and/or him/her, and the external becomes internal (41). The lyric situates the poem squarely between one person and another (cf. O’Hara’s “Personism”), or as the critic W.R. Johnson has written, “the words and sounds and pictures of a lyric poem are spoken to someone about something by someone, and that someone who speaks is, or should be, an integral part of what he speaks” (34). Such definitions of the lyric reflect the concerns of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely more clearly than any review of the book I have read. The book refigures and revises genre conventions according to the demands of its very particular “crisis of contact.” Namely, how does one subject encounter an other in a post-9/11 world, and how can this encounter become something other than an avoidance (I avert my eyes) or—pardon me—an apology? If strangers passing on the street can be models for strangers passing on a page, the question becomes how to enact and embrace the encounter between reader and writer.

One way to understand spirituality, divorced of its religious trappings, is as a longing for connection, not to material things—we have enough of that kind of connection—but to the unseen world that consists, in part, of everything internal both in ourselves and in others. At the same time, we tend to confuse spirituality with the practices that make us aware of that unseen world; the point of meditation, for instance, is not meditation but its application in one’s daily life. Seen in this light, writing (particularly hybrid writing) might be its own variety of spiritual practice, one that, ideally, connects us not to the text itself but to the unseen and to each other.

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is obsessed with this kind of connection. It posits, as a solution to our cultural crisis and its accompanying static (indicated throughout the text by a series of fuzzy TVs), the poem as a kind of connective tissue; writing becomes the site of a reciprocal responsibility to everyone in social space, to paraphrase a line from Myung Mi Kim that plays a prominent role in Rankine’s book. And inlaid in that word responsibility is response. Much as the point to any prayer is its outward gesture, no poem exists in isolation: the poem enters and responds to social space. No matter how fiercely a piece of writing resists its context, it responds to the conditions in which it was produced. So why fight it? Myung Mi Kim makes the point that just as in a social situation there is a responsibility to those around you, the poem has its own sociability. Rankine writes:

Paul Celan said that the poem was no different from a handshake. […] The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handing over (here) a self to another. Hence the poem is that—Here. I am here. This conflation of the solidity of presence with the offering of this same presence perhaps has everything to do with being alive. (130)

Our being, in other words, is both an ontological (“the solidity of presence”) and an ethical/metaphysical (“the offering of this same presence”) fact. Here, the text is the practice of offering and asserting the self simultaneously. It is a vehicle and ritual for connection, a conduit for the spirit. Rankine also quotes Emmanuel Levinas: “By offering a word, the subject putting himself forward lays himself open and, in a sense, prays” (120).

At the same time, if a Paul Celan poem is a handshake, it’s a very peculiar handshake indeed, and although such comparisons may be odious, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely may perform a similarly strange greeting. Celan famously said that he could not allow his German to be the language of his oppressors, and as a result the surface tension of his language is extreme, even as he resisted characterizations of his work as hermetic. Rankine’s book is not hermetic, but it does resist its oppressors. And it can be painful. A few years ago I had a student who asked to be excused from class discussions of the book. Normally I wouldn’t entertain such a request, but coming from this bright student whose writing and thinking I respect, I asked her to give her reasons. She struggled with depression, she told me. I insisted: the point of the book is, in part, that depression is a product of an unwillingness to discuss it. She said she knew her triggers well, and certain conversations were off-limits. The hand may have been outstretched, but this student wasn’t ready to shake it. Knowing her reservations, I wasn’t about to force her.

The incident was the peculiar echo of exchanges with students who have had difficulty with Celan and, more commonly, Gertrude Stein. Any text may be a response, may invite and engage reciprocally with the world, but there is no guarantee that the world is ready or willing to respond to the text. If Celan is right and the poem is no different than a handshake, then who is on the other side of it? Inasmuch as “the poem is that—Here. I am here,” the reader has the opportunity to hand herself over to the writer and her text or to refuse to do so. That reciprocity, that exchange, that abandonment to the other is an ongoing challenge. There may be no accounting for taste, but the ability to accept the world’s outstretched hand, however painfully it is offered, may be a matter in which our very being, rather than our predilections, is at stake.

We wager our being in the gap between ourselves and the book, between the book and each other—in the interval that is the poem and which is also, in some sense, the interval of prayer. In which case the student who, in the end, did not discuss Don’t Let Me Be Lonely may have had relatively little to lose by engaging with the book; she had, comparatively, everything to gain. In failing to respond to the work, that is, she was perpetuating the very condition Rankine critiques: namely, the unwillingness to engage with difficult subjects and the ready substitution of diversion for that difficulty. A couple of pages after alluding to the racially-motivated 1998 murder of James Byrd, Jr.—and her justifiable anger that then Governor of Texas George W. Bush was incapable of remembering the details of the murder, which happened during his tenure—Rankine writes, “I just find when the news come on I switch the channel” (23). “Don’t like the world you live in,” she continues, “choose one closer to the world you live in.” And finally: “This is what is great about America—anyone can make these kinds of choices” (24). But here “great” also smacks of the attributive, as in: “It’s a great American habit to make these kinds of choices.” Which is to say that such choices are writ-large over American consciousness—tiny extensions of the title’s plea, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely.

No doubt it is difficult to be lonely, as difficult as it is to face the brutality of the news, but how much more difficult is it to deny one’s condition? Rankine suggests that as painful as it is to read how, after being chained to and dragged from the back of a pickup truck, the trail of James Byrd’s “blood, body parts, and personal effects stretched for 2 miles,” it may ultimately be more painful to suppress those details (135). They can only suppurate with time. And yet, the message disseminated by the culture is very much that of the suicide hotline attendant who tells the caller, “Don’t believe what you are thinking and feeling” (7). Such disbelief is intimately tied to the aggressive marketing and concomitant proliferation of anti-depressants (“Your life is waiting,” reads one ad [29]), and it is ultimately tragic. It might even be the heart of the American tragedy, which includes, as one of its most visible symptoms, the events of 9/11. The attendant for the suicide hotline (admirable as such organizations may be) sends an ambulance, as though that were the only way to participate in, and ameliorate, the caller’s apparent distress. Like my student, he limited the options for engagement to a narrow comfort level—to the point where the conclusion would be unambiguous. Whether the caller really intended to commit suicide or not is almost—almost—beside the point: her hand was outstretched, but on some level he refused to shake it.

To lay oneself open, in Levinas’s phrase, is a hopeful gesture. A prayer is a hopeful gesture. Rankine quotes Cornel West: hope is not the same as our American brand of capital “O” Optimism. Philosophically speaking, the latter (first proposed by Leibniz in the 18th century) holds that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds; applied to America, it amounts to the widespread “fantasy that we will survive no matter what,” as Rankine puts it—that “our” way of life is the best possible (and so why not export it to other countries, too?) (25). It’s a worldview that posits the ultimate victory of good over evil (think of the Bush era political rhetoric: “evildoers,” “axis of evil,” etc.), one that maintains a certain confidence about the success of any given venture (the banner that read, prematurely, “Mission Accomplished”). Hope, on the other hand—and this is West’s point—is simply the desire that things will turn out, that life will get better, success will come, good things happen. The difference lies in thinking that things either are or certainly will turn out for the best, versus wanting and expecting this to happen, but with no real confidence either way.

As a group, West argues, African-Americans are “Too scarred by hope to hope”; and yet, what Rankine may be implying is that Americans as a whole are too scarred by our perpetual optimism to hope (23). Our collective inability to believe that life is anything other than the best it can be—to acknowledge “the dark side” of the American dream—may be part of the post-9/11 dilemma. Our optimism bars any consideration that things may not be so peachy after all, or that America may play a large part in the endemic despair, poverty, and destitution that are so much a part of life on the globe. Hope, which simultaneously acknowledges things could be better and desires they become so, may be a place to begin. “Maybe hope,” Rankine writes, “is the same as breath—part of what it means to be alive” (119).

Albeit with the caveat: hope scars.

A handshake, too, is a hopeful gesture. A poem also hopes. I think of Annie Dillard here: “For what is significance? It is significance for people. No people, no significance.”

And: “We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet’s crust.”

And: “All those things for which we have no words are lost.”

In the end Don’t Let Me Be Lonely may not be, like the work of Edmond Jabès or Emmanuel Levinas, the product of an agnostic theology, but like both Jabès and Levinas it is a work fixated on the ways we join by words “the life of human culture on the planet’s crust.” It is a book dedicated not to the life of the spectator but to the life of the participant, the celebrant, and the witness. Hence, the epigraph from Aimé Césaire: “And most of all beware, even in thought, of assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of grief is not a proscenium, a man who wails is not a dancing bear….” Beware, in part, because the spectator occupies a lonely position, one that alienates her from the proceedings by implying it’s possible to remain separate from them. It’s not, and there is no redoubt remote enough to exempt us from participation in the world, or the words, around us.

More to the point, writing is a resolutely social act, one that allays—if only tentatively or temporarily—the loneliness and grief that saturates our cultural moment. (It is a curious paradox that the world’s increasing interconnection and sociability have done little to reverse this tendency—indeed they may have aggravated it, but that’s another essay.) As such, writing is the ground of an encounter that cannot become codified lest it lose its power to affect us—an encounter that invites embodiment, vigilance, and sensitivity to the subtle shifts in the contexts and conditions of exchange. Seen in this light, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, like Celan’s work, is a strange handshake for precisely this reason: it requires us to acknowledge its particularity, to witness the people and events it describes as they are, not as we might wish them to be. Part public oration, part secular prayer, the book may ultimately be a kind of practice for living.