Language can deceive us if we believe in its absolutes, as the language of politics, for example, invites us to do. But it can also open doors for us. My last book of poems is called Some Things Words Can Do. I’d like to read a short poem from that book, from a sequence of fourteen line poems that explore the multiple meanings of a single word. This one was written eleven years ago just after the first trial of the police officers who beat up Rodney King in Los Angeles and the riots that followed. There is a voice that enters this poem about half way through that isn’t my own, but rather that of someone I overheard.

Rights

He had no rights, they beat him up, you’ve got
no right, he said, and he was right, we thought
we saw them beat him up, right? it happened right
over there, but it was proper form, the jury
said, and they were right, if you could judge
the beating by what happened next, our driver
said, right off they up and burn the place,
this rights stuff goes too far, next thing it’s an-
imal rights, vegetable rights, mow ‘em down
I say, he said and turned, he had the right
of way, license to get where he needed to go,
but what if they stopped him anyway, they’re
the law and that’s their right, the right side
of the body’s on the other side of the heart.

“Rights”, copyright 1998 by Martha Collins, from Some Things Words Can Do, published by Sheep Meadows Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Martha Collins.  Poet, translator.  Martha Collins is the author of four books of poems, including A History of Small Life on a Windy Planet, winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award.  Collins co-translated with the author, The Women Carry River Water, by Vietnamese poet Nguyen Quang Thieu, which won the American Literary Translators Award.  Other awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation, as well as three Pushcart Prizes.  Since 1997 Collins has taught at Oberlin College.

Martha.Collins@oberlin.edu

My name is Martha Collins. I am a poet and also a translator of poetry, most recently from the Vietnamese.  I live in various parts of the United States...in Ohio in the fall, in Massachusetts in the spring, and I have a husband in Connecticut.

I’m, of course, interested in language, as a poet must be, but I am perhaps unusually interested in the complexities of language, both because of what translation has taught me and because I’ve always been fascinated with the multiple and slippery meanings of words.

Martha Collins