POEM OF THE DAY: excerpts from Martha Collins' Blue Front
For today, a couple poems by Martha Collins from her 5th full-length poetry collection, Blue Front. The book, part narrative, part lyric, is a series of poems and poetic fragments exploring the lynching of a black man in Cairo, Illinois in 1909, a horrific event that Collins' father witnessed as a five-year-old. I love this book's ambition––the way its fragments both cohere and refuse to cohere, and the way the event the book seeks to describe is given a surreal charge by its not quite ever being fully described, by the language circling and circling it….
First an excerpt from an untitled poem, on p. 4 of Blue Front:
Boats came from the north they came from the south
Trains came from the south they came from the north
Boats came on the blue Ohio they came on the brown Mississippi
Boats came on the brown they changed for the blue
Trains crossed that river people changed for the north the south
People changed in the middle of the river they changed cars
In the middle of the river they changed colors made a line
_____
the street was Commercial
Dowling Pressing
Saloon Drugstore Opera House
Three States Buggy Champion Tools
Dowling Pressing Club was where
his uncles Blue Front Restaurant he was five
And another poem-fragment from later in the book, called "hang":
hang
as a mirror on a wall, or the fall
of a dress, a dress, a shirt on a line
to fasten to dry, on the rack, or back
in the closet again, a sweet curse
on it all, sliver of nail, delayed
attack, shamed creature, a curse
on itself, so the act of doing it
changes the verb, tense with not
quite right, with rope, like a swing
from a tree, from a pole, like a flag,
or holidays, from an arch lit bright
with lights. in the night, in the air
like a shirt, without, or with only
a shirt. without, like an empty sleeve.
