Martha Collins has published ten volumes of poetry, most recently Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), which won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Her previous volumes include Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006), White Papers (Pittsburgh, 2012), Admit One: An American Scrapbook (Pittsburgh, 2016), and the paired volumes Day Unto Day and Night Unto Night (Milkweed, 2014, 2018). Collins has also published four volumes of co-translated Vietnamese poetry and co-edited a number of volumes, including, with Kevin Prufer, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf, 2015). Her numerous awards, in addition to the recent one, include an Anisfield-Wolf Award, three Pushcart prizes, the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Lannan Foundation, and the Siena Art Institute. She founded the U.Mass.-Boston creative writing program, and later served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. Her website is marthacollinspoet.com.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: In pouring over your many collections—volumes that range from book-length documentary poetics to translations to sequences of compressed lyrics—I hardly know where to begin. In the wake of a large grief of my own, I have turned to a daily practice of writing, and also gravitated to the twelve sequences of linked “half-sonnets” in two more recent books, Day Unto Day and Night Unto Night. These move so expansively; poems traverse childhood streets, golden leaves’ descent, a loved one’s bedside—but also inaugurations and drone strikes, suicides and climate change—negotiating faith and death. Would you mind describing how the poems in these sequences came to be, and how (if) your approach differed from poems in previous collections?

Martha Collins: When I finished the book-length poem Blue Front, which focused on a lynching my father had witnessed as a child, I realized that I really didn’t know how to even think about a stand-alone poem—or a personal one either: Blue Front had involved a lot of research. But I felt a need to do so: my mother had recently died, and my husband was about to have serious surgery. So I decided, somewhat arbitrarily, to write seven lines each day throughout October 2004. A year later I found that I still couldn’t write a stand-alone poem, so I decided to try the month-long experiment again. At almost the same moment, I vowed that I would continue to write one month-long sequence each year until I’d completed, in no particular order, all twelve months. This meant that I’d finish in 2015, which indeed I did: the first six sequences appear as Day Unto Day, the second six as Night Unto Night.

I should add that I’d been writing sequences for some time. The title poem of my first book, The Catastrophe of Rainbows, is a sequence—and my second book, The Arrangement of Space, is comprised of three sequences. One of those is titled “A Book of Days,” and though it honestly didn’t occur to me when I began Day Unto Day, it was obviously a precedent. So, too, were the poems of the first poet whose poems were published in the American colonies, Philip Pain, whose small posthumous book was titled Daily Meditations.

CL: It’s interesting that you bring up a stand-alone poem, or the idea of writing a single poem. To me at least, it seems most poems come out of a particular season, or angle of looking, or obsession, and with a whole host of influences—and so I wonder if any stand truly alone? To write the sequence or series seems to place an explicit frame around what a stand-alone poem implies: namely an understood vantage point, moment, or subjectivity. Do you see your work as trying to make a particular context clear? Can we separate personal and historical or civic poems? In your trilogy, what sort of new context(s) are you trying to create?

MC: There are degrees, I guess, of “stand-aloneness”—or maybe better to say there are degrees (and different kinds) of sequences. The loose trilogy you mention consists of three books that focus on race, published between 2006 and 2016. When I wrote the first, Blue Front, I didn’t want to offer background information over and over—but if I didn’t do that, many of the individual pieces wouldn’t make much sense. So I gave up the idea of titles (new sections are just marked with a line at the top of the page) and called the whole collection a book-length poem.

When I wrote White Papers a few years later, the focus was broader, with individual poems each focusing on some aspect of “whiteness.” Most of the poems can stand alone (I think)—but they gain a lot (I hope) by being read in context. The poems don’t have titles, just numbers, so when I published them individually, before the book came out, they were called e.g. “White Paper 14.”

Admit One: An American Scrapbook lies somewhere between. It deals with the early twentieth-century eugenics movement, so it’s more focused than White Papers, but less so than Blue Front. All the poems (except the purely documentary sections) have titles, but their titles aren’t listed on the contents page, and most work much better in the context of the whole.

All three books bring together the historical and the personal, though in different ways. The most obviously personal aspect of Blue Front is my five-year-old father, who witnessed the lynching and gave me a lens through which to wonder about both what happened and what it would have meant to him. There are family connections in Admit One too; in fact I’m rarely moved to take on historical subjects unless they have some personal significance for me. But White Papers contains a lot of my own very personal history, going back to childhood, and most of the more purely historical material is confined to places I’ve lived. Some of the poems are mostly personal, some are mostly historical, and some are explicitly mixed. But in the context of the book they’re all part of one vision.

I don’t think I’m conscious of trying to create new contexts; what I’m doing in all three books is exploring a territory that I’ve felt moved or even compelled to enter.

Day Unto Day and Night Unto Night are different: in each of the six sequences that make up each of the books, I had only the vaguest sense of context; the territory was the month. My mode of exploration was formal, as I’ve said: seven lines each day for most of the months, with some formal connection. But the days—the seasons, the holidays, the news—created the context as I went along.

For every writer, of course, there is a broad context that is that writer’s work, which is why it’s a pleasure to read many poems by Emily Dickinson, say, or Robert Hayden. I do write what I think of as “stand-alone” poems—fewer than I used to, but I know one when I write one. And when I read one, as well.

CL: The lens of Blue Front is compelling and requires a real unflinching imagination and grace, also. We begin with the father as a young boy when the lynching occurs; he worked outside his uncles’ restaurant selling fruit and ‘making change,’ which becomes a refrain throughout the book. At the outset “people came / He made change // came to see him / make change”; by the end of the collection: He wanted to know / everyone in the end / he was a kind // man …and the last day / he said You know / this world could be // a better place just / promise me that you / will help he waited // he made change may / I help you please / make change.”

I include this because I’m curious about the way you rely, here and across collections, on refrain, idioms, and enjambment to both highlight and trouble the status quo, at least on the page’s landscape. Why (or are) these especially powerful devices? How do you think about poetry’s tools when it comes to dismantling big things like dominant histories or systemic injustice?

MC: I don’t think consciously about using these techniques to (as you say) “highlight and trouble the status quo”: they’re techniques I’ve been using for a long time, in various contexts. But I think they do trouble the linguistic status quo, and in that sense ask for attention. Enjambment of course creates pauses, and therefore emphases, in places where we’re not normally used to hearing them, and thus calls our attention to certain words—or in some cases makes us hear a voice differently than we otherwise might, as in the last instance you cite. Refrain is an old technique, originating with song, that can produce different effects in different contexts. The lines you cite combine repetition and idiom, with a shift of meaning that’s also an old thing for me: I’ve been noticing, ever since I was a kid, that words can mean and do different things in different contexts.

CL: Even as the linguistic status quo often reflects, or can shape reality, right? And to me, everything comes back to attention, on and off the page. Your pieces, in their slips and enjambments push the (often self-) interrogation further:

what he had seen
is also what he was
I had to know

white what white
had done thought
what white does not

think an absence
white is not a given
point extended line

blank for signing if
you don’t mind
my asking why

a white person
had to see my name
listed white (wht)

an other owing
what it is to what
it thinks it isn’t

Here I could ask about the pronoun choice with ‘it’ or the separation of “another/an other,” but more I’m fascinated by the way negation starts to define, how the speaker can only write whiteness when other realities are present. This piece seems to prefigure your next collection, White Papers, which moved past the dangers of “color-blindness” to write race. How do you begin to either explicitly or implicitly interrogate whiteness? Why are poems good forms for doing so? And what have you learned in the process?

MC: You’re quite right in pointing to that section of Blue Front as prefiguring my next collection. It was a very late addition, and came as both a discovery and a necessity: what I gained from writing the book was a life-changing awareness of my whiteness. As I approached the end, I realized that, having written about my father through the lens of a racist lynching, I now had to turn my attention to myself. When the term “white papers” came to me, I knew I had a way to do that. Significantly (although I didn’t realize this until after the book was published), the first White Paper begins: “Because my father….” First my father; now me. And of course by way of negation: there is no whiteness on its own, as the inaccuracy of the designation suggests (no one is actually white).

CL: I don’t know that it’s an ‘of course’ for many people, although upon examination, it does become clear. For example, in a recent essay on writing whiteness, Joy Katz says she “couldn’t find what to claim. At the same time, [she] had to accept responsibility for [her] whiteness” since she “was granted the power of whiteness without asking, and [has] used it, as it has used [her] to harm.”

A force outside yet of the self, one that troubles and hones, drives many writers. White Papers is difficult to excerpt because it has such a wide lens of responsibility, incorporating everything from common children’s hymns, ivory piano keys, New England slave traders, to our first black president in the White House. It is a book that details vaudeville and sundown towns, highlights instances of manifest destiny, modern lynchings, systems of privilege, etc. even as it bares the speaker’s own complicity and hesitance. Continually I’m struck by how fresh and also how familiar so many phrases and instances are. We have “skin / is skin deep none // is white…protected by gloves / laws guns white // brown tan to almost / black protects from / sun that burns / us red-handed us”; or our sins as “scarlet before / they are white as snow” among the many common phrases or associations, upended.

Where poets so often try to escape cliché, to avoid trope or adage, your examination of white/not-whiteness seems to claim these and transform them. Can you speak some on how you see stereotype (for lack of a better word) broken in poems? Why does examining something so catch-all but dangerous as whiteness often require invented forms and/or external voices? How did these emerge for you?

MC: You’re of course right about the “of course” in “of course by negation”: It’s not until we really start thinking about what it means to be white that we realize that racial “whiteness” is, like the color white, an absence of something—of hue or of what we call “color” in people.

Which may be why examining—or, as you say, upending—cliché can be so useful in this context. What do we mean when we say “skin deep”? What, outside of the racial context, are some connotations and associations that might tell us why we use the inaccurate terms “white” and “black” to describe ourselves? Black, darkness, evil; white, purity, good. Black hat, white hat. “White as snow”: what, to do a little upending, are the connotations of that? Pretty cold, right?

But I should also add, as I’ve suggested before, that I’ve been thinking about language—cliché, idiom, dead metaphors, the voices that employ them—for a long time, even before I wrote poems, even as a child. We take language for granted, as we take race for granted.

I think invented forms must somehow follow from all of that, though I haven’t thought a lot about how. Upending again, I guess.

CL: Maybe an invented form starts to plow through what locks us in or renders us—dare I unpack ‘white as snow’—capable of erasing landscapes or peoples. Some of your fragmented poems use slashes, spacing, and word banks, of a sort, to riff on dead language and challenge readers to fill in something new. You have staggered lineation and syntax, and also genre, since before it was common practice in poetry, so I wonder how you’ve seen, over collections and decades—your forms and processes evolve? Or maybe more interestingly—what has remained constant? What do you no longer take for granted?

MC: I think someone looking at my work from the outside could answer this question better than I can, but let me give it a try. My first book opens with a villanelle and includes a sestina; meter (often a loose pentameter) can be heard throughout the book—and in fact in subsequent work as well. In my second book, The Arrangement of Space, I began to use a lot of irregular lines, fragmentation, and irregular white space, and those have been with me ever since. The word banks/riffs you mention started in a conscious way in my fourth collection, most notably in a sequence of fourteen-line poems in which I riff on specific words—which suggests the way that fixed form and invented form play off each other in my work. Also, as parts of your question suggest: fragmentation on the one hand, consciously complex syntax on the other, as needed. I don’t take anything for granted; I wait to be surprised.

CL: Oh, yes! I crave that in poems and—no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader, we know. Many people have some familiarity with poems, but often in a stereotypical way. If you were to meet someone who had little exposure to poems, what would you share with him or her first?

MC: I guess it would depend on whether we were sitting down somewhere with access to poems. If we were, I’d share a very short poem, maybe by Denise Levertov or Lucille Clifton—reading it to my new friend first, then talking about it. If we were sipping wine at a party with no poetry in sight, I might just pass on something I heard Helen Vendler say some years ago about reading poems: Relax! And then I’d go on to say: Don’t try to “understand” it at first; just listen to it. And then read it again. And again. And see what happens.