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EDITORS' CHOICE Martha Collins, Blue Front. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 2006. Martha Collins’s book goes further; it suggests that when history is pinned down, it also loses contact with that which animates it, the uncontainable churning sea of divergent circumstances that shape it, that make it both real and horrifically unreal. Collins’s long poem folds together a wide range of primary sources: she describes the actual postcards of the lynching as well as an earlier studio portrait of one of its victims, newspaper accounts and editorials, census data, and the words of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Martin Luther King, Jr. This evidence flows alongside another narrative, the story of the speaker’s father, who was a small boy at the time of the lynching. The poem opens: He was five. He sold He sold fruit. People came came to see him Speculation about what he might have seen that day and what it is reasonable to assume he could possibly recall mirrors the poet’s speculations about what we can finally know with any accuracy about the event itself. Neither story fully breaks the surface; each remains in part irrevocably submerged in time, in the mystery of our susceptibility to mob violence, in the flotsam of misinformation and conflicting reports, and in the sensationalizing and conciliatory stories that begin almost immediately to collect around such a shockingly inhuman action. But the half-hidden is not lost on us or to us; it retains its capacity to haunt and to “make change,” the message this daughter comes to extract from her father’s life. In the section “bury,” as Collins explores that verb’s elusive nature, she concludes:
while the mob consigned the infamous night itself Blue Front is a narrative poem about narrative, about how we arrive, perhaps, at our most accurate reading of the past, whether personal or communal—and usually both at once—only through the process of assemblage, by consciously piecing together as much as we can find, a process that cannot help but be innately discerning and yet must also somehow be open and indiscriminate. Its genius is in the way that it cohesively, carefully, and patiently embodies and embraces its expansive idea. In “track,” Collins shows us how our dogged pursuit of the truth cuts both ways. How it might resemble, if we aren’t careful, the thirst of vigilantes. on the right no question of getting off to follow The facts of the case: a white woman was murdered; a black man was hanged in retaliation. When the rope broke, he was shot 500 times. His body was set on fire; his burnt head was mounted on a stake. A white man, in the town jail for killing his wife in a wholly unrelated event, was broken out and also hanged that night. The speaker’s father emerges as a man “with some success/ some common disappointments,” a pharmacist who “would teach his daughter to say may I please help you,” and, yet, who, also, for a time at least, “dressed in a white sheet just/ made noise he said made noise” as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. it is supposed that it is believed that Miss And when she tells us of Will “Froggie” James, the black man lynched for the crime, we learn once again that even an exhaustive search may not give us the certainty we want. We, like the poem’s investigator, are left, finally, having discovered not a tangible presence, a knowledge that is nearly graspable, but rather the presence of an absence, a gap where the tale would be: He had his picture taken Cooper if he had married From these excerpted passages, Collins’s unconventional syntax be-comes evident, but it’s wrong to think of this as a work in which verbal dexterity and invention have become their own rewards. The poet is always eyeing her higher purpose, harboring the conviction that this really is how diligent, self-correcting, self-qualifying, complex speech must sound. The refracted truths of the past are not devoid of meaning, but replete with it. Ultimately, we turn to the past, or to the river, not for what it says about itself, but for what it can say about us, for how the reflection shattered across its agitated surface gives us a truer sense of who we are. The speaker, a white woman trying to get to the essence of the lynching of a black man in order to “make change,”—to, quoting Collins quoting King, inject “meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization”—comes, in the end to this vision of herself: a white person an other owing The Cairo of 1909 fails, even after the fact, to see itself for what it is, not simply a “peaceful community” but also “the most southern point in all the North.” Whatever truth is, it is always multiple and, no doubt, more complex than we can ever wholly comprehend. But we are dogged in our struggle to get at it and to have it known. No one angle or perspective, no single snapshot, can capture the way it moves, the way it brings the forces of so many states together. Still, we want the world to be “a better place,” as does the speaker and her father. Everything in Blue Front, like the mingled Mississippi and Ohio, runs in more than one direction. Collins wants to believe Wells-Barnett has offered us the right advice, “The Remedy: Tell the world the facts.” Yet, as a poet, she shows us again and again that it’s not ever that simple. Let us be thankful for the wonder of Blue Front, a rare poem that gives us both the facts and what the facts, seemingly by virtue of being facts, will always omit. It reminds us of what we are up against when we seek to discern our troubled national history—and our own identities—and, then, what we are up against when we turn to the work, so much like cupping water in our hands, of saying what we’ve found. When we say shoot, we mean with guns, but we also mean so much more. Of shoot Collins writes, off, out, down: the body again, rolls Kathleen Graber
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