Works of Genius
How MacArthur Fellows Claudia Rankine and Maggie Nelson continue to blur the lines between poetry and prose
In 1936, Irish poet W.B. Yeats edited the Oxford Book of Modern Verse. A relatively traditional poet, Yeats opened the anthology with a startling choice — a poem by Walter Pater, entitled “Mona Lisa.” With this inclusion, Yeats delivered a decisive statement on poetry.
Why?
Well, because the poem wasn’t actually a poem. Yeats came across these lines in a passage of Pater’s analytic prose. Struck by their poetic sensibility, Yeats lifted them from the text, added line breaks, and declared them a seminal work of modern English poetry.
This decision mattered — and, today, still matters — for the way in which it blurred the lines between what we call poetry and what we label prose. Just because a body of text has a jagged right-hand margin doesn’t mean it’s a poem; and sometimes a block of words resembling an essay might be better named poetry.
Fast forward eighty years, and you’ll find a recent announcement from the MacArthur Foundation, which awarded genius grants — awards worth $625,000 — to two writers who continue this Yeatsian tradition of genre defiance.
Claudia Rankine and Maggie Nelson, listed as “poet” and “writer,” respectively (by the MacArthur Foundation), embody in their works the interplay between poetry and prose.
Take Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine’s voracious foray into the national spotlight. A National Book Award finalist, Citizen contains traditional verse — that is, Rankine writes at times in couplets (they even rhyme!). See, for example:
Everything shaded everything darkened everything
shadowed
is the stripped is the struck –
is the trace
is the aftertaste.
The last couplet, a slant rhyme, retains the formal elements of old-school verse. Hear the confluence of trace and aftertaste, as well as the repeated “is the x” phrasings throughout the last three lines.
But Citizen’s dexterity comes from its long prose sections, in which the speaker confronts everyday racism through everyday moments. In this vein, the stories, memories, and snapshots that comprize Citizen are devoid of traditional poetic form. As when Rankine writes:
When a woman you work with calls you by the name of
another woman you work with, it is too much of a cliché
not to laugh out loud with the friend beside you who says,
oh no she didn’t. Still, in the end, so what, who cares? She
had a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right.
This block of text, informal and dispassionate, does not call to mind the grandiose phrasings or meticulous line breaks of what Yeats’s editors would have named “poetry.” But still, as the book’s title suggests, these lines comprise “an American lyric.”
What, then, do we mean when we say “poetry”?
Some hint resides in the works of Maggie Nelson, the other poet recognized by the MacArthur Foundation this year. While her crowning achievement remains her much-lauded pseudo-autobiography entitled The Argonauts — which rejected notions of traditional memoir so as to discuss freely nontraditional identity — Nelson’s collection Bluets tiptoes the hazy edge that separates poetry from prose.
Published in 2009, Bluets opens with an unassuming claim: “Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color…And so I fell in love with a color — in this case, the color blue — as if falling under a spell…”
What follows is difficult to categorize. The book contains 240 prose passages which range from anecdote to quote to rote recitation of etymology. And though listed as “Essay/Literature” on the back cover, a perusal of Bluets reviews speaks to the confusion over what to name these vignettes.
PEN published excerpts from the collection in its Poetry Series. So it’s poetry, yes? Well, not according to the website of her publisher, Wave Books, which claims Nelson as a “brilliant lyric essayist.”
What, then, to name these moments? Poems? Prose? Lyrical fragments?
Perhaps all of them at once. But, to be more decisive, to call Bluets “poetry” is to name it accurately. See, for evidence, a passage taken from a later portion of the volume:
212. If I were today on my deathbed, I would name my
love of the color blue and making love with you as two of
the sweetest sensations I knew on this earth.
If poetry were nothing more than sentences with a jagged right-hand margin, then no, this passage could not name itself a poem. But if poetry follows the lead of Yeats — or, more recently, of Claudia Rankine — then it may claim a larger genre, namely, it may self-identify as elevated discourse, aware of its own musicality, signifying more than it seems.
With this definition in mind, these three lines from Nelson fall easily under the label “poetry.” Through its location in the lines, the color blue becomes as important as both human love and human death.
Taken from another angle, hear the music of the verse, specifically the long “oo” sounds: “…the color blue and making love with you as two of / the sweetest sensations…” Nelson crams into one line three rhyming words — blue, you, two. In this moment, the vacuous term “essay” falls flat — and poetry strides boldly out.
How then do these two poets fit into the poetic tradition?
Nelson and Rankine write obsessively about identity. For Rankine, much of Citizen is concerned with matters of race. For Nelson, the questions revolve around love and sexuality.
Though it might appear at first blush that both poets reject traditional forms of poetry in favor of a sleek, progressive variation, they have actually continued a tradition as old as — and older than — Yeats.
This does not take away from their genius. Rather, the diachronic reading validates it. Nelson and Rankine do not reject the past poetic tradition as the claim of the white men who wrote it. Rather, they write themselves stubbornly into that tradition, shouldering past generations of sexism and racism.
In her 1999 essay entitled “Owning the Masters,” poet Marilyn Nelson wrote, “Our Angloamerican tradition belongs to all of us, or should. As does the community into which the tradition invites us.”
These joint concepts — of historic community and invitation — represent much of these two poets’ mission. The creation of new forms requires old forms, and Claudia Rankine and Maggie Nelson understand this. In response, these two poets create a space for themselves inside the historical poetic lineage.
