White Papers #1
Because my father said Yes
but not in our lifetimes Because
my mother said I know my daughter
would never want to marry…
But mostly because they rarely spoke
of or noticed or even whispered
about and did not of course …
Because magazines rarely TV
rarely textbooks rarely or not
at all except for figures like
George Washington Carver
who’d lived in our state
Because among the crayons
there was one called Flesh
Because paintings rarely or never
until because books from the library
never until because college literature
not at all the American lit anthology
had only Gwendolyn Brooks
who was not assigned
Because a few years after Brown
v. Board of Education I wrote a paper
that took the position Yes but not yet
In his essay “A Defence of Poetry”, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. Award-winning author Martha Collins might just be the sort of poet he had in mind. Shelley was not advocating that poets ought to control the levers of government—but he hoped the clarity of their thought, the power of their moral suasion might provide the sort of wise leadership a people could rely upon. Many writers have become self-appointed ministers-without-portfolio, taking on the vital social and political issues of their time, and Martha is a perfect example. After discovering that her father had witnessed a racial lynching as a young boy in Cairo, Illinois, she “became obsessed with thinking about what that experience might have meant to him.” Like a one-person legislative committee, she began a far-ranging investigation of the ways our concepts about race are embedded, often invisibly, in our individual and collective imaginations. It was clear to her that no political solution could effect any real change unless these ideas and images were untangled first.
The result was, not one, but three complete poetry collections published across a decade: the first, Blue Front, was issued by Graywolf Press; the next two, White Papers (where today’s Red Letter selection first appeared) and Admit One, under the imprint of the University of Pittsburgh Press. Employing original source material from her extensive research, her poems interweave the fragmentary strands of consciousness—the sort that might be spoken in public, as well as the private monologues we might never dare give voice to, not even within the walls of our own homes. Hers are more potent than any congressional ‘white paper’ in that they are documents of psychic intimacy in whose presence we too may come clean to ourselves about what we actually feel.
Martha Collins is something of a unique literary talent. Poet, translator, educator, citizen-historian, she’s been lauded for her book-length examinations of social and political forces, and the ways they are manifest in the lives of ordinary Americans (though the poet uncovers extraordinary circumstance at every turn). In 2022, she published her eleventh volume of poetry, Casualty Reports (Pitt Poetry Series). The following year, her fifth volume of translations from the Vietnamese was released; Dreaming the Mountain (in collaboration with Nguyen Ba Chung) carries over into English work from across a forty-year period by the Buddhist poet and scholar Tuệ Sỹ. And just this year, a collection of prose works appeared: Word Work: Essays, Reviews, Reflections (Tiger Bark Press). Among Martha’s trove of honors are fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, and the Witter Bynner Foundation—as well as three Pushcart Prizes, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Because she is quiet and self-effacing, I suspect Martha might bristle at my use of the Shelley quotation. So I’ll say that she’s, if not legislator, then certainly educator-at-large—because this poet has assigned herself this intensive exploration in order to come to grips with the emotional material she herself was carrying. Martha’s work makes the facts of our American condition manifest and inescapable. But like any good teacher, she knows these tools might then become of use to all the rest of us who’ve come to understand—especially in the age of Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor—how much we’ve yet to learn.