 I'm publishing, and we're very, very excited. She led a great master class yesterday. She's been kind of meeting people over time, so this is the culminating event. Tomorrow night she'll be at the ICA, so if you're around, go check that out. And so, a little bit of housekeeping. We are live streaming this event, so you are being live streamed. And it'll be available once the event is over at howlround.com, part of HowlRoundTV. Lives inside the Office of the Arts. If you don't know the website, go check it out. And also, in case of an emergency, exits are located there and there. Please go down the stairs and peacefully away from the building. All right, and so now I'm going to hand it over to Kimberly McLaren of Writing Literature and Publishing to get this started. Thank you. Thank you all for being here. I'm okay. No, I won't use the microphone. I just wanted to say that we're really excited to work with the Office of Arts and Arts Emerson as part of our WLP reading series. Sorry, it's been a long semester. I just wanted to give you a heads up that for our part for WLP, this is an annual reading series. And this year we've had an extraordinary year ending on a high note. We began with Jeffrey Renard Allen. We had the poet Richard Blanco. We had Roxanne Gay, which was a really great experience. And now we have Claudia Rankin. And I want to have you keep in mind that we're going to be bringing in more talented poets, writers, SAS next year. I can announce that we're bringing in Teju Cole, which is very exciting. And also we're bringing in Michael Cunningham. And we have two others that we're on that we're constantly currently negotiating with. So please keep an eye out for the posters and the newsletters and come and take part of this reading series, and experience these writers, poets, SAS playwrights who are working at the top of their game and coming here to interact with you, and with some students and with the members of the public. So if you're not on our mailing list, please get on our mailing list so that you will be informed. I want to thank the Office of the Arts for this extraordinary time, Fresh Sound Foundation. And especially David Dower. I want to thank Maria Condor, the chair of WLP, and Ross Ball, the dean of the School of the Arts, and everyone for all their support. And I'd like to introduce my colleague, Wendy Walters, who's going to introduce our guest speaker, reader for tonight. We'd like to, Wendy is an extraordinary scholar and well versed in Ms. Rankin's work, and I thought it would be appropriate for her to do the introduction. Dr. Wendy Walters specializes in African American literature. She teaches here, obviously. And in the larger context of diaspora studies. She's the author of archives of the Black Atlantic, reading between literature and history, and at home in diaspora. Black international writing. She's been a non-resident fellow at the Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, and has published articles in Calalu, American literature, African American review, novel, critical arts, and many other publications. She's published chapters in the books, Borders, Exiles, Diasporas, and Diasporic Africa, a reader, as well as has entries in the Oxford Companion to African American Literature, Black Writers, and the critical response to Chester Himes. Wendy is an extraordinary scholar, a great colleague, and a great mentor, and a friend, and I'm pleased to introduce her to you all. Thank you so much, Kim, that was very nice. I'd like to begin this introduction by noting the powerful student protest that occurred yesterday at Emerson. We all witnessed and took part in a courageous and saddening reminder that the past and the present are not so distinct. Any of my students in the room will recognize when I quote Ian Boccombe's specters of the Atlantic and say, time does not pass, it accumulates. When I think of the affronts, insults, and exclusions students have been talking about since I came to Emerson back at the turn of the last century, it saddens me to know that today's students who are only in kindergarten back in 1999 are still facing the same affronts, insults, and exclusions. The language has not passed, it has accumulated. I had to leave yesterday's protest to meet a student who's working on an Afro-Futurist story about Rosewood, Florida, a thriving black community that was leveled, burned to the ground by white mobs in 1923. In her research into Rosewood's history, though, my student has found that the reporting about Rosewood in 1923 shares the same language as reporting about Ferguson in 2014 and now Baltimore in 2015. The language has not passed, it has accumulated. Who better to turn to when we seek to understand this accumulation of language than a poet? How does this painful accumulation of language continue to shape the world in which we live? Claudia Rankin's poetry asks this question repeatedly and her work teaches us the myriad ways that language matters. Her book, Citizen and American Lyric won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry and was the first book ever to be named a finalist in both the poetry and criticism categories. A judge from the NBCC Poetry Committee wrote, citizen uses the realm of the lyric to critique the terms by which we live. In citizen, our bodies and our racial selves are not isolated or even present tense, but also communal, unconscious, historical. Indeed, the specters of the Atlantic return in multiple ways in citizen as the violence of past centuries continues to haunt our present. Claudia Rankin writes, quote, yours is a strange dream, a strange reverie. No, it's a strange beach. Each body is a strange beach. And if you let in the excess emotion, you will recall the Atlantic ocean breaking on our heads. Citizen's final two pages depict a famous 19th century painting which happens to be in the Museum of Fine Arts, just down the road from here, JMW Turner's slave ship. As you may know, the painting depicts the 18th century slave ship Zong after the captain and crew threw into the sea 132 living African captives. Claudia Rankin's reproduction of the painting portrays the entire painting with ship and background. And then next to it, a second image, the foreground of the painting, depicting the humans thrown overboard as she implores us to attend to this drowning. Perhaps this excess emotion called up by the memory of drowning in the Atlantic is again, as it was in the 18th century, a righteous rage. In section six of Citizen, Claudia Rankin presents the poetry of one of our contemporary archives, CNN, on August 29, 2005, during Hurricane Katrina. Is the government's lack of response to that storm urinating at sea another more recent deliberate drowning? She writes, quote, have you seen their faces? We are drowning here still in the difficulty, unquote. Poetry is one of the places we turn to find a way to communicate the difficulty we are still in, to rescue each other from drowning in it. Citizen holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category. And it was a finalist for the National Book Award, longlisted for the Penn Open Book Award and was selected as an NPR best book of 2014. Claudia Rankin's other books of poetry are Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Plot, The End of the Alphabet, and Nothing in Nature's Private. And she's co-edded several anthologies. In 2014, she was a National Book Award finalist and received poets and writers, Jackson Poetry Prize, and she's been awarded fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Land and Foundation. It's my great honor and pleasure to introduce Claudia Rankin. Good evening. It's been such a pleasure being here. I want to thank Wendy and David and Pauly and Kevin, and you for being here. I thought that tonight I would do something a little different than what I have been doing. So we worked on a video for you, my husband and I, and so I thought we would start by showing two videos that are in Citizen and in New York. So that will take about 15 minutes, and then I will read you. On the train, the woman standing makes you understand there are no seats available, and in fact, there is one. Is the woman getting off at the next stop? No, she would rather stand all the way to Union Station. The space next to the man is a pause in a conversation you are suddenly rushing to fill. You step quickly over the woman's fear, a fear she shares, you let her have it. The man doesn't acknowledge you as you sit down because the man knows more about the unoccupied seat than you do. For him you imagine it is more like breath than wonder. He has had to think about it so much he wouldn't call it thought. Another passenger leaves his seat and the standing woman sits. You glance over at the man. He is gazing at the window into what looks like darkness. You sit next to the man on the train bus in the plane waiting room anywhere he would be forsaken. You put your body there in proximity to adjacent to alongside the end. You don't speak unless you are spoken to and your body speaks to the space you fill and you keep trying to fill it except the space belongs to the body of the man next to you, not to you. Where he goes, the space follows him. If the man left his seat before Union Station you would simply be a person in a seat on the train. You would cease to struggle against the unoccupied seat when, where, why the space will lose its meaning. You imagine if the man spoke to you he would say, it's okay, I'm okay. You don't need to sit here. You don't need to sit and you sit and look past him into the darkness the train is moving through a tunnel. All the while the darkness allows you to look at him. Does he feel you looking at him? You suspect so. What does suspicion mean? What does suspicion do? The soft gray green of your cotton coat touches the sleeve of him. You are shoulder to shoulder the standing you could feel shadowed. You sit to repair who, who. And it might be too late for that. It might forever be too late or too early. The train moves too fast for your eyes to adjust to anything beyond the man. The window, the tile tunnel, its slick darkness. Occasionally a white light flickers by like a displace sound. Across the aisle tracks roam Harvard World. A woman asks a man in the rose head if he would mind switching seats. She wishes to sit with her daughter or son. You hear but you don't hear, you can't see. It's then the man next to you turns to you. And as if from inside your own head you agree that if anyone asks you to move you'll tell them we are traveling as a family. Something is there before us that is neither the living person himself nor any sort of reality. Neither the same as the one who is alive nor another. What is there is the absolute calm of what has found its place. Every day I think about where I came from and I am still proud to be who I am. Big Algerian shit, dirty terrorists, nigger. Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word. The Algerian men for their part are a target of criticism for their European comrades. Arise directly to the level of tragedy. Notice too, illustrations of this kind of racial prejudice can be multiplied indefinitely, clearly. The Algerians who in view of the intensity of the repression and the frenzied character of the oppression thought they could answer the blows received without any serious problem of conscience. And there is no black who has not felt briefly or for long periods with anguish, sharp or dull in varying degrees and to varying effect, simple, naked and unanswerable hatred. Who has not wanted to smash any white face he may encounter in a day to violate out of motives of the cruelest vengeance to break the bodies of all white people as low as the dust into which he himself has been and is being trampled. No black who has not had to make his own precarious adjustment. Yet the adjustment must be made, rather it must be attempted. Do you think two minutes from the end of the World Cup final, two minutes from the end of my career, I wanted to do that? Each decision gave rise to the same hesitation, produced the same despair. No one is free. For all that he is, people will say he remains for us an Arab. You can't get away from nature. Big Algerian shit, dirty terrorists. Let him do his spite. My services, which I have done, shall outtongue his complaints. When such things happen, he must grit his teeth, walk away a few steps, allude the passerby who draws attention to him, who gives other passersby the desire either to follow the example or to come to his defense. Big Algerian shit, dirty terrorists, nigger, that man, who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it. He knows something about himself and human life that no school on earth and indeed no church can teach. He achieves his own authority and that is unshakable. This is because in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words. We hear, then we remember. The state of emergency is also always a state of emergence. But at this moment, from whence came the spirit, I don't know, I resolved to fight. And suiting my action to the resolution, what we have here is not the bringing to light of a character known and frequented a thousand times in the imagination or in stories. It is the white man who creates the black man, but it is the black man who creates. This thing was there. We grasp it in the living motion. What he said touched the deepest part of me. The rebuttal assumes an original form. This endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority contains for all its horror, something very beautiful. Daily we share the same elevators, streets, corridors, stairways, sidewalks, highways, arenas, restrooms, lobbies, subways, in short, all public spaces. Even when access is gained by a ticket, the true price of the ticket is dependent on an implicit trust. The understood question is always, can I trust you? We signal indicating our desire to change lanes on the freeway. We cross streets without stop signs by catching the eye of the driver in the moving car. We drift off in waiting areas. We are dreaming on planes. We depend on those around us to keep us safe. This is our unspoken agreement between us, between strangers, our civic contract states. We will act in each other's best interest for no other reason than we are here together. Do you have an emergency? I'm at the barricade Walmart. There's a gentleman walking around with a gun in the store. Is he got pulled out? Yeah, he's like 20 other people. What do they look like? He's a black male, probably about six foot tall. Okay. Blue shirt, blue pants. The alliance we pledged is to one another. Assurance is taken. Can I trust you? Assurance is taken. Different from and similar to each other. Whatever the precise thinking behind the question, the question is asked deep within us. We recognize that inevitably I am going to have to put my trust in you. We are circling the understanding that daily we have to take a leap of faith regarding you. In order that we can go on believing in our mobility, trust is what pledging and allegiance secures. Public trust relies on both an implicit understanding and a mode of seeing. Someone is paying attention. Someone is watching. See. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Hey nothing. Say something because we will trust you. Peace of mind gives us the ability to move through our day without fear. It keeps us in our rhythms. It gives us an air of confidence regarding an illusion control of the world around us. We drift off in waiting areas. We are dreaming on planes. We understand what will happen next. And this is crucial to a sense of well-being, even if this control is no control at all. When something occurs that disallows a taking for granted of one's own safety, when something happens, when that thing happens. So what's your business with me right now? I want to find out who you are. There is no problem, that's the thing. And let you know, why do I have to let you know who I am to let, who I am isn't the problem. Well I don't have to let you, well I know my life first off. Secondly, secondly, I don't have to let you know who I am if I haven't broken any laws. Like I told him, I'm going to New Horizons to pick up my kids at 10 o'clock. I was sitting there for 10 minutes. Like not before he walked up to me or anything. He walked up to me a minute after and got irate with me. So first off, that's a public area. And if there's no sign that doesn't say this is a private area, you can't sit here, no one can tell me I can't sit here. That's the case and I can't sit here. The problem is I'm black, that's the problem. No it really is, but I didn't do anything wrong. I'm not sitting there with a group of people, I'm sitting there by myself. Walking by. Walking by and doing what? By making people nervous. By walking by? Wow, walking by having your hands in your pockets and making people nervous to call the police. What is snowing outside? Okay. I'm fine or how about you? Walking with my hands in my pockets. Walking. In discomfort and loss of comfort, we might lose an ease of movement around another. The perceived inability to trust another. No one wishes his or her sense of trust violated. Each time we pass through our public spaces, the question presents as a gentle nudge against an unconscious reliance on public trust. Would you, could you, should you trust? We are dozing in airports. We are dreaming on planes. As we daily move through our streets and our parks across bridges in the aisles of stores anywhere and everywhere we live. A simple truth and a basic understanding exists. When I walk toward you, it's one of the reasons I'm interested in. As we turn to each other, it's one of the reasons I'm interested in. Each second inside our unspoken question is one of the reasons I'm interested in. Can I trust you? So, my brothers are notorious. They have not been to prison. They have been imprisoned. The prison is not a place you enter. It is no place. My brothers are notorious. They do regular things like wait. On my birthday they say my name. They will never forget that we are named. What is that memory? The days of our childhood together were steep steps into a collapsing mine. It looked like we rescued ourselves or rescued. Then there are these days each day of our adult lives. They will never forget our way through. These brothers, each brother, my brother, my dearest brother's dear heart. Your hearts are broken. This is not a secret, though there are secrets, and as yet I do not understand how my own sorrow has turned into my brother's hearts. The hearts of my brothers are broken. If I knew another way to be, I would call up a brother. I would hear myself saying my brother, dear brother, my dearest brother's dear heart. On the tip of a tongue, one note following another is another path, another dawn, where the pink sky is the bloodshot of struck, of sleepless, of sorry, of senseless shush. Those years of and before me and my brothers, the years of passage, plantation, migration, of Jim Crow's segregation of poverty, inner cities, profiling of one in three, two jobs, boy, hey boy, each a felony. Accumulate into the hours inside our lives where we are all caught hanging. The rope inside us, the tree inside us, its roots are limbs, a throat sliced through, and when we open our mouth to speak, blossoms, oh blossoms, no place coming out. Brother, dear brother, that kind of blue. The sky is the silence of brothers all the days leading up to my call. If I called, I'd say goodbye before I broke the goodbye. I'd say goodbye before anyone can hang up, don't hang up. My brother hangs up though he's there. I keep talking, the talk keeps him there. The sky is blue, kind of blue. The day is hot, is it cold, is it cold? It does get cool, is it cool? Are you cool? My brother is completed by sky. The sky is the silence, eventually he says, it is raining, it is raining down. It was raining, it stopped raining, it was raining down. He won't hang up. He's there, he's there, but he's hung up though he's there. Goodbye, I say. I break the goodbye. I say goodbye before anyone can hang up, don't hang up, wait with me, wait with me though the waiting might be the call of good-byes. I wonder, don't. He went away, and now he's coming back to save me. I just want to get back to the floor. This one? That piece in the book is followed by this, what I just read. This was the most difficult image to get the rights to use, because initially the Fulton Archives said no, they said they can't have it. Because they were afraid of what people would do with it. Basically, rehang the more people images through the image. We called another day hoping for another person. This other person said that they would agree to read the book. They agreed to read the book, and then they gave us permission. I was nervous to actually ask them if I could remove the body. I said, can we remove the body? They said, sure. Because that was the point of contention. That was the thing that gave them anxiety. We removed the body, because I was only interested in this, in complicity, in whiteness around white supremacist actions. That's it. That's in the text. It's the lynching of Thomas Schiff and Abram Smith, August 7, 1937, in Marion, Indiana. It looks like Indiana was preparing itself for a long time for its recent activity. Since I'm in Boston, I thought I would read this, when I was inspired by Robert Lowell. Sometimes I is supposed to hold what is not there until it is. Then what is comes apart the closer you are to it. This makes the first person a symbol for something. The pronoun barely holding the person together. Someone claimed we should use our skin as wallpaper, knowing we wouldn't win. You said, I have so much power. It's insane. And you would look past me, all gloved up in a big coat and fancy fur around the collar, and record a self saying, you should be scared. The first person can't pull you together. Shit. You're reading minds. But did you try? Tried rhyme? Tried truth? Tried epistolary untruth? Tried and tried. You really did. Everyone understood you to be suffering, and still everyone thought you thought you were the sun. Never mind our alightness. You too have heard the noise in your voice. Anyway, sit down. Sit here, alongside. Exactly why we survive and can look back with furrowed brow is beyond me. It is not something to know. Your ill-spirited, cooked, hell on Main Street, nobody's here broken down first person could be one of many definitions of being to pass on. The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow. Drag that first person out of the social death of history, then we're kin, kin calling out the past like a foreigner with a newly minted fuck you. Maybe you don't agree. Maybe you don't think so. Maybe you're right. You don't really have anything to confess. Why are you standing? Listen, you. I was creating a life study of a monumental first person, a Brahman first person, if you need to feel that way. Still, you are here, in here, and here is nowhere. Join me down here in nowhere. Don't lean against the wallpaper. Sit down and pull together. Yours is a strange dream, a strange reverie. No, it's a strange beach. Each body is a strange beach. And if you let in the excess emotion, you will recall the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads. I wanted to read that for you. And I'll show you the image you referenced. That's the Turner that you own in your midst. A song and then the detail of the Brahman. Do you know that Ruskin was the first person to own this? And when it was first shown, there was a poem that went along with it. I've always loved Turner, because he's so moody. I feel like I see a reflection of myself. The question that I asked many people, while I was working on this book, was, can you tell me a moment when you were moving along in your day and with a colleague, with a friend? And something happened that threw you out of that moment. And most of the stories that people remembered happening to them, I had an equivalent story. So in that sense, it wasn't a surprise. But there was one story told to me by a professor in Northern California. And she's a good friend of mine. And I said, no way. She said, way. The new therapist specializes in trauma counseling. You have only ever spoken on the phone. Her house has a side gate that leads to a back entrance she uses for patients. You walk down a path bordered on both sides with deer grass and rosemary to the gate, which turns out to be locked. At the front door, the bell is a small round disk that you press firmly when the door finally opens. The woman standing there yells at the top of her lungs, get away from my house. What are you doing in my yard? It's as if a wounded Doberman pincher or a German shepherd has gained the power of speech. And though you back up a few steps, you manage to tell her you have an appointment. You have an appointment? She spits back. Then she pauses. Everything pauses. Oh, she says, followed by, oh, yes, that's right. I'm sorry. I am so, so sorry. I asked my friend, what happened next? She went to the appointment. Way. She went to the appointment. And then I asked her what happened next. And she said she went home and she left. And then she wrote a letter to the therapist saying, I can't come back. And I said, so you made another appointment. But I totally understand it. I say that without any judgment at all because I would have done exactly the same thing. Maybe. I mean, now I wouldn't. But at the time I might have. I would have to walk into exactly the same scenario, not to do the same thing. But it could present itself in another way because I could see myself as moving forward. You're in the dark, in the car, watching the black tarred street being swallowed by speed. He tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there. You think maybe this is an experiment and you are being tested or retroactively insulted or you have done something that communicates with the K conversation to be having. Why do you feel comfortable saying this to me? You wish a light with her in red or a police siren would go off so you could slam on the brakes, slam into the car in the head of you, fly forward so quickly, both your faces would suddenly be exposed to the wind. As usual, you drive straight through the moment with the expected backing off of what was previously said. It is not only that confrontation is headache producing, it is also that you have a destination that doesn't include acting like this moment isn't inhabitable, hasn't happened before, and the before isn't part of the now, as the night darkens and the time shortens between where we are and where we are going. I am going to end. Actually, I wanted to show you this is Kate Clark. I saw this image many, many years ago and our bodies are so incredible. I am always marveled. And it stored itself. And then I was working on Citizen and I was just telling John I was in Wyoming in New Cross and I was sitting at my desk writing and I was looking out the window and I heard a deer and I thought, I'm going to join them. So I got up and I went to the door and the first click the door made meant that every face looked at me. So I thought, all right, I'm not going to join them. But when I sat back down I began to think about the vigilance the constant vigilance and suddenly there was a moment of indolence there was a moment where I moved into that space and then I remembered Kate's image and so I tracked it down and I contacted her and asked her if I could use it and I sent her the text which was a very early version of this and she said, why it's so painful let me make a new piece you can commission an actual piece so I got to choose the height and then she did a new face and I said I don't want it because what I had liked about the original why it stayed with me all the time was the affect in the eyes and so I went back to the original but since I take for the eyes I use that in the racial imaginary which is a collection of essays on writing race and the imaginary and I will end I just want to say that before I read this thank you all for coming some years there exists a wanting to escape you floating above your certain ache still the ache co-exists call that the imminent you you are you even before you grow into understanding you are not anyone worthless, not worth you even as your own weight insists you are here fighting off the weight of nonexistence and still this life parts your lids you see you seeing your extending hand as a falling wave I they he she we you turn only to discover the encounter to be alien to this place weight the patience is in the living time opens out to you the opening between you and you occupied, zoned for an encounter given the histories of you and you and always who is this you the start of you each day a presence already hey you slipping down burying the you buried within you are everywhere and you are nowhere in the day the outside comes in then you hey you overheard in the moonlight overcome in the moonlight soon you're sitting around publicly listening when you hear this what happens to you doesn't belong to you only half concerns you he's speaking of the lesionnaires and clear Denise film both survive and you are pulled back into the body of you receiving the nothing gaze the world out there insisting on this only half concerns you what happens to you doesn't belong to you only half concerns you it's not yours not yours only and still a world begins its furious erasure who do you think you are saying I to me you nothing you nobody you a body in this world drowns in it hey you all our favorite history won't instill inside won't turn a body conscious won't make that look in the eyes say yes though there is nothing to solve even as each moment is an answer don't say I if it means so little hold the little forming no one you're not sick you're injured you ache for the rest of life how to care for the injured body the kind of body that can't hold the content it is living and where is the safest place when that place must be some place other than in the body even now your voice entangles this mouth whose words are here as pulse strumming shut out shut in shut up you cannot say a body translates it to you you there hey you even as it loses the location of its mouth when you lay your body in the body entered as if skin and bone were public places when you lay your body in the body entered as if you're the ground you walk on you know no memory should live in these memories becoming the body of you you slow all existence down with your call detectable only as guy the night's yawn absorbs you as you lie down at the wrong angle to the sun ready already to let go of your hand wait with me though the waiting wait up my take until nothing whatsoever was done to be left not alone the only wish to call you out to call out you who shouted you you shouted you you the murmur in the air you sometimes sounding like you you sometimes saying you go nowhere be no one but you first nobody notices only you known you're not sick not crazy not angry not sad it's just this you're injured everything shaded everything darkened everything shattered is the stripped is the struck is the trace is the aftertaste I, they, he, we, you were too concluded yesterday to know whatever was done could also be done was also done was never done the worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much to you thank you so much