Is Citizen Poetry?

Throughout my life I've grown accustomed to thinking that all the stereotypes Perrine pointed out in What is Poetry must be true to be considered poetry. Even now that I know better, I still can't shake the facts. When I picked up Citizen my immediate reaction was, "this isn't poetry". To me, it seemed like a regular book simply with run on sentences and a singsong background noise in my head. (My brain had already automatically categorized it into the poetry file- there was no going back.) It seemed to me that this was just a book and every couple paragraphs there would be a paragraph that didn't fit in with the others because it was more like classic poetry which left me confused about how this book could be considered poetry. There was an obvious lesson Rankine was trying to get across to her audience about racism, it did seem to me to be philosophical, and it can be considered beautiful. It seemed to be going against everything Perrine believed. But then I read over what poetry is... a universal language. Every race, religion, and gender can, probably (I'm looking at you white males), connect to some time in their life where they were held back from doing something because of an uncontrollable feature about themselves. Even though Rankine (so far) only addresses a racial issue in her poems we as readers can most certainly take these experiences and connect them to our own lives and our own hardships. Poetry is... condensed and concentrated. When Rankine was explaining Serena Williams' tennis matches, and the unfair treatment she received at them, she was straight to the point- in and out. She did not linger on describing the tension in the air, as an author of a book would have done but simply stated the facts. Poetry... conveys an experience. For one, I felt as though I was on that tennis court and I know I would not have been able to hold in my frustration. And at the beginning of the book I felt almost as I was the person in the uncomfortable position of listening to my friend speak of their hardships. Why? Because Rankine used the words you and I. She literally placed you in that moment in time and we reacted. So, even though it ticks off the marks on either side of the T chart, Citizen is poetry. Even if it is 200 pages long.