White Papers

White Papers is a series of untitled poems that deal with issues of race from a number of personal, historical, and cultural perspectives.

Collins continues the inquiry into race that shaped Blue Front (2006) in this startling and provocative collection, exploring the motif and myth of racial ‘whiteness.’ . . . Within the stark chromatic scale of black, white, and gray, Collins evokes a dazzling spectrum of palpable emotions, racial tensions, and unraveling binaries”    —from  Booklist

This tightly focused, strongly argued book-length sequence uncovers a personal, regional, cultural, and institutional history of whiteness and white privilege: its clipped quatrains, spare recollections, and embedded citations give the rare and valuable show of a white author reflecting on the meanings and the oddities of race. Collins’sBlue Front(2006) told stories of an Illinois lynching, and this volume clearly grew out of that one; but she here deploys a range of forms, visual as well as aural, and a range of effects, from a hammering self-reflection (‘could get a credit card loan car/ come and go without a never had/ to think about’) to ironic collage. Race is not only or always black and white: ‘the natives of southern New England,’ Collins notes, were ‘our first them.’ But black and white and their intertwined asymmetries rule this serious collection.”     —Publishers Weekly

The book is a white paper that defrocks whiteness, lays it down naked on the page. It does so by persistently and variously interrogating the vocabulary of whiteness, interleaving a racial biography with history lessons, etymological reflections/deflections, and meditations on whiteness as an ontological state.”     —Beloit Poetry Journal 

White Papers is a praise song for the truth. It bravely pulls back the covers of whiteness to offer us precious views of racial privilege. Martha Collins has laid bare the more complex dangers of America’s central trauma in a book of innovative craft and startling honesty. The rhythmic tapestry of this remarkable work helps open the door to a healing that is long overdue. Let this praise song be praised.”     —Afaa M. Weaver

The path of Martha Collins’ work—selflessly risky, formally innovative, profoundly social—has always been leading to White Papers. These fierce, beautiful poems not only confront the illimitable issue of ‘whiteness’ itself, they are a breakthrough in the conversation we, with our fractured thinking about race, have yet to have. They defy the silences and insist nothing is unspeakable.”       —Gail Mazur

[14]

black keys from trees white keys locked
on black shoulders locked together above

skeleton ribs keys to 45 keyboards from one

tusk the word ivory rang in the air

one tusk + one slave to carry it bought

together if slave survived the long march

sold for spice or sugar plantations if not

replaced by other slaves five Africans died

for each tusk 2 million for 400,000 American

pianos including the one my grandmother

played not to mention grieving villages

burned women children left to die the dead

elephants whose tusks went to Connecticut

where they were cut bleached and polished

while my grandmother played in Illinois

my mother played and I— there were many old

pianos and slaves were used till the 20th century:

an African slave could have carried a tusk

that was cut into white keys I played, starting

with middle C and going up and down

[42]

my white I’ve said my
baby bed underwear tub
toilet washing machine
whatever got rid of dirt my
wedding dress veil what-
ever could hide X sheets
bleached coffin lined
against the dark dirt
banned when we started
to buy underwear in colors
even black white was on
its way out of cover over

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