Like Lerner’s 10:04, Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric integrates poetry, prose, and images as it also slips across the boundaries of perspective and personality. However, where Lerner’s work moved from singularity to collectivity by way of stitching together seemingly disparate experience across first-, second-, and third-person perspectives, Rankine seems to remain in a paradoxically alienated collectivity. She moves through disparate experiences from a consistent position of isolation. Themes of loneliness, futility, and the impalpability of death recur throughout the lyrical meditation and are condensed with the motif of the television. The television connects a set of isolated individuals with collective information as it also necessitates isolation as a condition of observing this information.
Media itself seems an overarching source of contemplation throughout the work. As a something which simultaneously connects and separates an idea from its materiality, media seems to “fill the gaps created by the indirectness of experience” while it also deepens these gaps (89). The idea of the television then functions to give substance to the very idea of substanceless-ness, lends an image to the idea of negation and isolation that Rankine explores as a condition of modern collectivity, which is perhaps similar to Lerner’s account of “bad forms of collectivity.”
As a response to Whitman, then, Rankine seems to take hold of Whitman’s idea of intimacy with a collective humanity through the notion of an all-encompassing “I.” However, her understanding of the modern collective “I” is tragic, rather than celebratory, for its paradoxically isolating, rather than unifying, connectivity.
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