POET MARTHA COLLINS PUTS UP A “BLUE FRONT”

Friday, January 26, 2007


POET MARTHA COLLINS PUTS UP A “BLUE FRONT”

Interview with Doug Holder

Martha Collins, the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection “Blue Front” ( Graywolf, 2006) walks into a room and exudes energy, intelligence and warmth. Collins who established the Creative Writing Program at U/Mass Boston, and currently holds the Pauline Delaney Chair in Creative Writing at Oberlin College, seems to have abounding enthusiasm for her work and an infectious curiosity about the world-at-large. Born in Omaha Nebraska in 1940, she earned a B.A. at Stanford University and holds a PhD from the University of Iowa. Collins is the author of five books of poetry, a chapbook “Gone So Far,” and two co-translated poetry collections from the Vietnamese. Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation and others.

In her most recent collection “Blue Front,” Collins dissects a lynching her father experienced when he was a child in Cairo, Illinois. I spoke with Collins on my Somerville Community Access TV Show “ Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: The poet Richard Wollman told me he lives the “poetic life.” What would that be for you- and do you live it?

Martha Collins: I do. I write it. I’m not sure what it is. I think being a poet shapes the way you look at the world. I don’t write all the time. I don’t worry about it. There are periods when what I am doing is figuring out what I am going to do next.

It is work. It is natural work. It is work that engages me on every level. Both on the intellectual and emotional level.

So I don’t really know what the “poetic life” is. I am a poet, and my life gets filtered through that fact in ways I don’t even know.


DH: In your most recent poetry collection “ Blue Front” you dissect a horrible lynching that occurred in your father’s hometown of Cairo, Illinois. How much in detail did you father go into about this event?

MC: He didn’t say much at all. And when I was much younger I wasn’t asking a lot of questions. Once when I was a child we were driving through Cairo and my father told me that he saw someone hanged there. I had an image of a grizzly, public execution. Later I saw an exhibit of lynching postcards in New York City in 2001. The images were shocking. (This collection is now available online.) There were messages on the back of these cards. People kept them as souvenirs. I came across a series of postcards about the Cairo lynching. And for the first time I realized that this “hanging” that my father saw was a public lynching. By-the-time I came to this awareness my father had passed away—so I couldn’t ask him of course.

The point-of-view in this book is one of wonder. I did a tremendous amount of research, and used the Illinois State Archives extensively.
I visited Cairo several times.

DH: Is there a Southern sensibility down there?

MC. It is very Southern. Cairo is at the very tip of the state, where the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers come together. On one side of one river is Kentucky and the other side Missouri.

DH: How were you received down there when you were doing your research?

MC: People down there were terrific. The librarian was extremely helpful. I got into the vault and was able to look at the city directories. I talked to the city treasurer down there who was involved in the short and unsuccessful civil rights movement in Cairo from 1967 to 1973.

DH: Were you a Civil Rights activist?

MC: I was not much of an activist. I wasn’t unconcerned but I wasn’t an activist. I really became an activist during the Vietnam War.

DH: In the poem “Hung” from “Blue Front” you use stripped down language, short staccato bursts of language with great effect:

“ as a mirror on a wall, or the fall of a dress. A dress, a shirt on a line, to fasten to dry… with rope, like a swing, from a tree… from a pole, like a flag,… in the night, in the air, like a shirt, without, or without, or without only a shirt, without, like an empty sleeve.”

Was this approach used to convey the shock of the event?


MC: People asked about the style. I wrote it as I was finding out things. I didn’t know a lot when I started writing. I could not leave the subject alone. I was in Santa Fe on a residency, and I started playing around on the internet. I typed in “lynching,” etc.. The point of view of the book is “wondering.” What happened? I kept approaching it from different angels.

I obsessed about several aspects of the lynching. I just took a word: hang, shoot, burn, and sort of played with the various meanings of the words. It is a way of trying to get into the subject matter.

DH: You are known for your translations of Vietnamese poetry. How did you become involved with the language?

MC: Through a specific poet. This began at the William Joiner Center at U/Mass Boston. The center started as a veterans group in the late 80s’. Later they opened the workshop. From the very beginning they brought Vietnamese to the workshops. One of the amazing things was to see veterans from both sides reading together. I met Nguyen Tang Shih there and wound up translating him.

DH: Did you actually learn the language?

MC: I did. Kevin Bowen ( the director of William Joiner) called me up and said there is a course at Harvard and did I want to take it? I said sure. I took Vietnamese for most of a year.

DH: You are an editor of a literary magazine—right?

MC: I am the editor of Field magazine. It is published at Oberlin College in Ohio.

DH: You started the creative writing program at U/Mass Boston. Can you tell me about this?

MC: I started it in 1979. There were creative writing courses before. What I did was to give it structure.

DH: Dana Goodyear wrote in the New York Times Book Review of your book “Blue Front” that in least in regard to your syntax you are a language poet.

MC: I never considered myself in any school. There is an experimental quality in my poetry.


---Doug Holder