"Claudia" (for Claudia Rankine)

by artist Carrie Mae Weems*

I wrote this in 2011 in response to Claudia Rankine's calling out of Tony Hoagland.  The debate can be Googled. Easily.

Writing poetry is not easy and creating characters or presenting a persona is not easy. I appreciate that. We make mistakes and sometimes create crappy art. If we were to offend, say, the KKK, we would be proud. They are bad people.

But if we reveal our own racism (everyone's got it), well, we say we're sorry. It's embarrassing, I can see that, but all God's creatures are idiots at one point or another. Hoagland, to my understanding, couldn't admit participation in the great idiocy of mankind and wouldn't apologize or recognize the issue.

I can't imagine it's easy being a man, and I know it's not easy being white, but we stumble through this one lifetime and hope for some grace now and then.

Rankine offered to post relevant poems on her blog. I wrote the following back then but never shipped it over and now I can't find her blog. I feel a little shaky about the poem's value. It's not even easy being me, but I stumble along.

Claudia

      legislate paper

draft a bill

      name it

The Inscrutable East

Mother

Dialogs of Plato

          

          cast

      Socrates as Chinook

The Symposium a potlatch

the eidos of flesh the

perfect form of each of us

      a woman

The perfect form is

a woman but hush on that

Tough enough a trek

      out of Africa made

more beautiful

for ultimate

inaccessibility of return by

      likes of me

Do we rescue

(a ship is burning)

the captain or smirk as an arrow

feathers his bone

      Glad's another word for

the elephant felt up by

blind men and thus

      elephants grieve

an impossible perfecting

of the heart

the impossible accepting

of the self

      nine hundred hatreds

Each orchid in a bell jar

each girl in an orchid

each boy in an orchid each

      movement of only gratitude

If Jesus dies for sins

of the west, his suffering

is just begun.

____

Sarah Sarai, 2011

*Carrie Mae Weems online:http://carriemaeweems.net/