'That's not poetry; it's sociology!' – in defence of Claudia Rankine's Citizen

Made up of prose, photographs and an essay on Serena Williams, this award-winning collection isn’t easy to categorise – but it’s as much a poem as The Waste Land

At a recent reception following a poetry reading by elder, experimental poets, an academic critic – of decidedly avant-garde tastes – overheard that I had been teaching Claudia Rankine’s Citizen for the last four semesters. I knew, in fact, that this scholar’s life’s work centered around championing unsung postwar US poets such as Clark Coolidge and Susan Howe, who were difficult, acquired tastes (that I shared). Howe, for example, is known to publish textual sculptures often quite literally illegible. Who better, I thought, to appreciate my teaching of a complex poem like Citizen than this brainy, patient scholar. Yet quickly he fired off: “That’s not poetry; it’s sociology!” My spirits sank.

Related: Poet Claudia Rankine: ‘The invisibility of black women is astounding’

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