Claudia Rankine

Summary

On the Growth of a Writer

That was the big life question in my twenties: what path to take? In college, I worked with Louise Glück, and even though poetry wasn’t exclusively my focus, I kept coming back to it because it remained inchoate, the realm of the unsayable. It remains the place where I feel the unbearable is held, recognized, honored. In this sense, it did something very different than other genres. I was especially interested, back then, in Yeats, because he was both political and petty; he wrote incredibly misogynistically about Maud Gonne as a revolutionary while writing beautifully about the natural world and pointedly about the political situation in 1916. I learned from Yeats that poetry, in a single breath, could call Maud Gonne ‘a mess of shadows for its meat’, but also invoke a nation’s struggle: ‘I write it out in a verse– / MacDonagh and MacBride / And Connolly and Pearse / Now and in time to be, / Wherever green is worn, / Are changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.’

I always had the sense that poetry actually allowed for the most feeling, the most humanness. But running alongside that, Joan Didion, Renata Adler, Audre Lorde – those prose stylists were also incredibly important to me, along with James Baldwin and Virginia Woolf.

As a first-gen student, I was extremely sensitive to the fact that my parents worked hard to educate their children. I didn’t want to waste their hard work. I thought the way you are an adult in the world is that you get an adult job, and I thought that an adult job was being a lawyer. Law seemed reasonable because it was basically about reading. The fantasy I had about being a lawyer was that you would read briefs and write and make arguments. And so, after college I worked for a law firm. And I made the mistake, or maybe not the mistake – maybe it was a blessing – of working for a corporate law firm. If I’d had somebody like Bryan Stevenson as a mentor, or a lawyer who was doing the kind of work that folded into my interests, maybe I would have gone on. But after working as a paralegal, I thought: hell, this is not really what I want to do.