Poem of the Week

This Is What I Do Instead of Dying

Camille Rankine

I check the news to tell me

what I know the great minds easy

in their thrones

I rattle in my brain’s cage

roll my heavy hopes uphill

It takes all kinds

of muscle all the animal

I am to build this life and all day long

to live it

I check the news

but no one knows me

the great minds assign my worry

and elation I tend their thrones

it takes all kinds of toll on me

I shake apart my hope

unfolds my worry sediments

I built this throne for you and for myself

I built these wings

I’m ready I rise

like the dickens

The Yale Review · "This Is What I Do Instead of Dying" by Camille Rankine

describe one formal realization or change you made during the writing of this poem.

I wrote several versions of this poem before landing on its final form. As the poem began to take shape, it was at first in couplets. Ultimately, the form felt too tidy and easy for the work the poem meant to do and its effortful movements. I found I had to disrupt the orderly pairing of couplets and introduce more irregular space, pulling the poem apart into a more jagged shape so that as we read, we have to reach for the next word, the next line, the next idea.

Camille Rankine is the author of the poetry collection Incorrect Merciful Impulses and the chapbook Slow Dance with Trip Wire. She serves as co-chair of the Brooklyn Book Festival Literary Council and is an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University.