White Papers

By Martha Collins

White Papers is a series of untitled poems that deal with issues of race from a number of personal, historical, and cultural perspectives. Expanding the territory of her 2006 book Blue Front, which focused on a lynching her father witnessed as a child, this book turns, among other things, to Martha Collins' childhood. Throughout, it explores questions about what it means to be white, not only in the poet's life, but also in our culture and history, even our pre-history. The styles and forms are varied, as are the approaches; some of the poems address race only implicitly, and the book, like Blue Front, includes some documentary and "found" material. But the focus is always on getting at what it has meant and what it means to be white—to have a race and racial history, much of which one would prefer to forget, if one is white, but all of which is essential to remember and to acknowledge in a multi-racial society that continues to live under the influence of its deeply racist past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Jan 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9780822978176

Martha Collins

 Martha Collins is the co-translator of Dreaming the Mountain and Black Stars. She has also published eleven volumes of poetry, most recently Casualty Reports and Because What Else Could I Do, which won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Her previous books of poetry include the paired volumes Day Unto Day and Night Unto Night, as well as a trilogy of works that focus on race, beginning with the book-length poem, Blue Front. Collins has published three additional volumes of co-translated Vietnamese poetry and coedited a number of volumes, including, with Kevin Prufer, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries. Founder of the creative writing program at the University of Massachusetts Boston and former Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College, Collins lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Book preview

[ 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

[ 2 ]

the skin under

all skin is all

white seen skin

is skin deep none

is white pink

is blood showing

through almost

transparent thin

skin blood as in

on our hands

protected by gloves

laws guns while

brown tan to almost

black protects from

sun that burns

us red-handed us

[ 3 ]

they lived

in the colored section

of town though we lived

in a city not a town it had

a downtown where we saw

them sometimes in stores

on streets at the movies we

didn't think much about

it did we lived in Iowa where

we saw them mostly saw

ourselves what did

we didn't know

where we were living

[ 4 ]

In the dream I am black, telling myself, who am white,

who I am. Like the woman inside the man, or like

the man inside the woman the man who wrote

about these things found hard to handle I

wrote:

anima soul

animus soul or

skin was black but her heart

was white she wrote of herself