Throughout the quarter, we have explored a number of poetic works that deal with themes of loneliness and isolation. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen explores the feelings of being discriminated against as a black person in the United States. Patricia Lockwood’s “Rape Joke” poem concerns rape joke culture and discusses the otherness and madness of being a victim of rape. Fred Moten’s “Block Chapel” refers to the fun, fancy, and mystery of an unidentified group, but seemingly ostracizes the reader by filling the poem with paragraphs of outwardly incomprehensible words. Out of all of the works we have looked at, however, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets stands out as the “bluest”; in it, she writes “Loneliness is solitude with a problem,” and throughout the…show more content… While Lockwood’s writing attempts to get the reader to acknowledge the horrors of rape (whereas Citizen attempts to get the reader to acknowledge the horrors of racism), it also attempts to get the reader to acknowledge the disgusting behavior of rape jokes in general. Lockwood accomplishes the first goal by specifically including lines that reference the dissociation and disenfranchisement experienced by the poem’s central rape victim character: “…[you] had to move cities, and had to move states, and whole days went down into the sinkhole of thinking about why it happened.” Lockwood accentuates this listlessness and wandering; she emphasizes the idea that the rape victim has been seriously affected by the event, and that the event changed their life. Lockwood accomplishes the second goal by speaking sardonically about the idea of the “rape joke.” She writes: “The rape joke is he was a bouncer, and kept people out for a living. Not you!” and “He said he was sorry and then he gave you Pet Sounds. Come on, that’s a little bit funny” and “Come on, that’s a little bit funny. Admit it.” These lines sort of place pressure on the reader to realize that, no, rape jokes aren’t actually funny. It’s not funny that he gave the rape victim a book called Pet Sounds after the fact. It’s not funny that the rape joke checked every “rape joke” stereotype box. Lockwood says starkly with “Rape Joke” that there should be no such thing as a “rape joke.” Thus, “Rape Joke” stands as a collective, public work, meant to use the “loneliness” of rape to educate the public about the harsh realities of rape victims and the abject humorlessness of rape joke
