Blue Front by Martha Collins (2006)

Several reviewers wrote that Because What Else Could I Do represents a departure from Collins’s earlier work, because the book is more personal and less political than her other books; and while this is true, the personal and the political—in life and in art—are always entwined. In Blue Front, Collins collages together an account of a lynching her father witnessed when he was five years old. The content of this book is very different from Because What Else Could I Do, yet like this later book, the syntax of both Collins’s sentences and lines is often broken, interrupted, and fragmented.

Because What Else Could I Do by Martha Collins (2019)

“Again Later” is in many ways a coda to Because What Else Could I Do. In Because What Else Could I Do, the speaker addresses her dead husband using the second-person pronoun “you.” In “Again Later,” an impersonal recording addresses the speaker using the second-person pronoun “you.”

"In Memoriam A. H. H." by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1850)

Writing In Memoriam, Tennyson repeatedly used the position of a widowed woman as a metaphor for his grief over the death of his best friend, Arthur Hallam. In Because What Else Could I Do, Collins—an actual widow—alludes to the twining of love and grief in Tennyson’s In Memoriam. “Again Later” echoes Tennyson’s contention from In Memoriam that writing an elegy is a “mechanic exercise,” because Collins manipulates an automated message to make her poem. Just as she did in Because What Else Could I Do, in “Again Later” Collins makes literal what for Tennyson was only a metaphor.

Writing White, an Introduction by Martha Collins (2014)

Collins ponders the difficult question, “How . . . do white poets . . . get past difficulties and enter the mine-filled territory of race?” She comes to the conclusion that white poets need to start by implicating themselves “and to keep starting, over and over, until we get it, if not right, at least a little less wrong” (Collins, Martha. “Writing White: an Introduction.” The American Poetry Review, vol. 43, no. 2, 2014, pp. 33-35.). Reading the earlier works by Collins suggested in Related Poems as well as this essay will help contextualize “Again Later” in Collins’s larger body of work.

Translating Viet Nam by Martha Collins (1996)

Collins co-translated four books of Vietnamese poetry. In this essay, Collins explains how she came to that work and describes taking her first trip to Vietnam:

The trip, like the translation process itself, reminded me of what we often forget in the United States: whatever its limitations, whatever terrible things we allow it to do, language is still the best resource we have for making connections. (Collins, Martha. “Translating Viet Nam.” AGNI, no. 44, 1996, pp. 170-174.).