When the World Opens Up
Christian J. Collier, a rising voice in Southern poetry, explores loss, faith, and the complexities of Black identity in the South. His work challenges traditional masculinity and interrogates the divine.
My first significant memory of a funeral goes back to 1987 in Gloucester County, Virginia. My great grandmother, Sarah Ollie Moore Brown, had died at Ninety-four, with eleven kids, twenty-three grandchildren, thirty-nine great-grandchildren, and countless other relatives. It seemed like they were all there at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Still, it was calm and quiet for the entirety of Grand Memaw Brown’s service, until they started wheeling her casket from the altar down the aisle toward the door, headed for the graveyard.
That’s when everyone let loose.
All these people, most of them grown, many old, who’d been so subdued for nearly an hour—they all started crying. Audibly. It was like something had literally split them open and was now escaping their bodies as tears and wailing.
Christian J. Collier is a poet who knows loss well, and the attendant, terrifying wrestling with the divine. He renders that struggle in poems that have god-like effects: there is something elemental, naked, sacred, and devastating in them. They do not comfort or shy away; they reveal and strike awe with those revelations.
Collier was born in Louisiana, but a year later, his father moved to a job in Chattanooga, the rest of the family followed, when Collier was about five years old, and he has lived there ever since, with the exception of the four years he spent at the University of Tampa. “Whenever I’m asked, ‘Are you from Chattanooga?’ I always tell people that I’ve been here long enough to claim it,” he says.
His work also claims space—an authoritative, vulnerable space. Just listen to the opening of “How It Feels to Be Black,” the first poem in his first chapbook, The Gleaming of the Blade : “Sometimes, it feels like we are loved by no God, / like there is no gospel living in the gusts of wind that comb our cheeks.”
That chapbook is very much about flesh: people in interracial relationships, others’ perceptions of those relationships, fathers showing sons the Rodney King video, the mob-lynchings of Alfred Blount and Ed Johnson from Chattanooga’s Walnut Street Bridge, police committing violence, police almost committing violence, Black bodies’ relationship to the city of Chattanooga and to God.
There are also two poems, “Candyman Blues” and “Elegy for Julius Gaw,” that are based on the Candyman and Friday the 13th movies, respectively. As Collier told Chelsea Risley of the Southern Review of Books, “when horror is most effective, it has something to say about us as a society.”
That consideration of the horror genre as a tool for psychological and sociological exploration is something I share. I first heard Collier discuss this on the Reckon podcast (which is what led me to his work—thanks, Reckon!), where I also learned of his work as an arts organizer and teaching artist. One significant effort is The Plug Poetry Project, a series of six short documentaries featuring local artists (including Salvation South contributor KB Ballentine). That project also involved a reading series that brought folks like Julian Randall, Jericho Brown, and Jose Olivarez to Chattanooga to run free workshops for the community.
“Men are the most honest when they can’t look another man in the eye.”
—Christian J. Collier
I was figuratively raised, as a poet, by such grassroots efforts to make artistic things happen with and for your neighbors, so I read some of Collier’s poems online and immediately became a fan, which eventually led me to Greater Ghost, Christian’s first full-length book of poetry, published last September by Four Way Books.
To paraphrase another Salvation South contributor, Jason Gray, in his Drunk as a Poet on Payday podcast, Greater Ghost is a book full of hard things: the deaths of loved ones, a miscarriage, aging, police violence, and a profound interrogation of the divine, evident in the first lines of the poem “God”: “I used to think / there was only one of You / before the miscarriage. / Now, I am not so sure.”
There is a stripped-down quality to Collier’s voice and tone. For me, that’s a response against an undercurrent in his work: the failures of traditional masculinity. In the conversation with Gray, Collier says, “Men are the most honest when they can’t look another man in the eye. And so much is said only in touch, or in really understated language. I think that’s one of the ways that inherited masculinity fails, when we’re gutted in ways that we never really anticipated.” For me, this challenge to traditional masculinity is one of the most welcome aspects of Christian’s work.
In moments when we’re gutted in new ways and rendered speechless, Collier’s work rises to the occasion and speaks with daring, precision, and heart—and it just plain rises.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Andy Fogle: So you’ve lived in Chattanooga since you were about four?
Christian J. Collier: For most of my life. But I attended [college] in Tampa. I was down there for those four-plus years, and what’s interesting is Tampa is a place that still always feels like home. I don’t know exactly what that is. Maybe that’s the whole thing about home being wherever you come of age in a way, you know?
AF: Oh yes.
CJC: When the world opens up to you in a real way. My college [University of Tampa] booked me back in 2018 to come and do some workshops. I took my wife with me and she immediately fell in love with the place. Then we went back the next year for leisure and she was like, “I can see us living down here,” and I was like, “You know, I can too.” It feels weird to say that, but I can too.
AF: The place you come of age and the world opens up to you in a real way. I have a similar feeling about D.C. I grew up in southeastern Virginia, then went north for college and grad school at George Mason University. I was around there for eleven years and have now lived in upstate New York for twenty, but the place that still feels most like home is the D.C. area. There’s this whole web of spots, events, and people that nourished me. How about the people that nourished you in terms of education, formal or informal?
CJC: I was just recently telling a friend of mine—and this is gonna sound bad—but I asked him, “You realize most of our teachers, like, were not the best?” And he’s like, “What do you mean?” But my fifth-grade science teacher was a guy named Mr. Boston. He actually came to my wedding a couple years ago. If you take science out of it and look at just him being a teacher, he was always trying to instill in us a sense of creative and intellectual curiosity. You might never leave this place, but you can still have adventures and seek out different things of the world, right? And there were very few teachers I had that ever chose to do that. It was always just kind of by the numbers, or some of them had a real disdain for us which—that was an interesting thing.
AF: Yeah, I don’t get that.
“When you go to public school, you just get that week—or perhaps two, if you’re lucky—of lessons in poetry, which is pretty much the same poems. ‘Let’s look at this John Donne poem,‘ and so on. Aside from that, I had to educate myself.”
CJC: I mean, I don’t think that teaching is the best job for you if you feel like that, but hey. So Mr. Boston is definitely special. And I always credit my high school English and writing teachers, Mrs. Sachsman and Mrs. Foster, for allowing me to see myself as a creative person in the realm of English. They weren’t poetry people, but their attitude was, “There is so much that you can do using words; let’s look at some of those things.” And I think that’s so important. But aside from that, outside of school, I started writing in 1998. For some reason, I was trying to mack on this girl that I went to high school with. She was a senior, and I was a freshman and for whatever reason, I was like, “I’m going to write poems about her.” And when you go to public school, you just get that week—or perhaps two, if you’re lucky—of lessons in poetry, which is pretty much the same poems. “Let’s look at this John Donne poem,” and so on. Aside from that, I had to educate myself.
AF: How old were you here?
CJC: This is the late ’90s when I picked it up, so I was maybe fifteen.
AF: That’s when I started, too.
CJC: Yeah! Fifteen’s the age. Fourteen, fifteen, that’s the time. I picked up Shakespeare’s sonnets, started reading those, and then I read whatever I could get my hands on. I got Yusef Komunyakaa’s Neon Vernacular and I’m like, “I don’t understand all of this—yet. I’m going to, though.” I was that locked in. Yusef is in my top five of all time, my personal Mount Rushmore of poets, and my list of inspirations continues to grow. I credit Tyree Daye for helping me step into and really own my poetics. Working with him in 2019 at The Frost Place was the first time—ever—I’d felt really seen and held by somebody in a way that they’re like, “This is what you’re doing, but if you were to do this and this, and stop doing this, everything would open up for you.” And I think that it’s such a gift when somebody gets it on that level. There’s a saying in hip hop culture where they kind of put the battery in your back. That’s what Tyree did for me. And Airea D. Matthews. She’s cracked my head open so many times. I think the beautiful thing about teaching—because teaching comes in all different shapes and sizes—is that inspiration gives you permission. And the older I get, the more I’m interested in things that grant me more and more permissions.
AF: Yeah. “Hey, you can do this.”
CJC: Absolutely.
AF: I don’t recall ever hearing anybody make the addition you made. We often hear about people needing to feel seen, but you said “seen and held.” Not just seen but also held by. That’s a beautiful addition.
This isn’t exactly related to the arts, but I can remember being about four years old, looking at a Batman coloring book, and on the cover, in all caps, it said “BAT-MAN” and it clicked in my head: “Whoa, that says Batman!” It’s a silly example, but it’s the first time I remember being wowed by language, the first time that letters and words clicked for me. The awe, the opening up. It’s something especially relevant to poets, because we aren’t working only on the level of meaning, but also on these other dimensions of sound and texture. Do you have any memories of falling in love with words?
CJC: One, I give you kudos for the Batman coloring book.
For a long time, I was set that I wanted to work in comics. And I’m still championing the genre, but I wanted to illustrate my own books. When I was in the seventh grade, I got super deep into hip hop culture and the four elements. Tagging is one of them, and I loved being able to see in the most visceral way how people can literally bend language around the side of a car or a building. So from then up to now, I’ve been interested in containers and poems. I think, a lot of times, we get conditioned to completely left-justified work, when really you have a whole page at your disposal. I think a lot of that ethos comes from tagging, of taking up space and claiming space.
“I’m really trying to lean more into that music. Aside from verbal language, I’ve loved listening to Miles Davis since I was in high school and so then I’m thinking, ‘What’s happening here, tonally? How can I get that in my work?’”
And I remember in ’98 in particular getting the Big Pun album Capital Punishment—that multisyllabic mastery. I remember the first time that I heard his verse on “Twinz,” I rewound it about thirteen times like, “Wow, that’s crazy.” It’s like what I was saying before about people who show you something different about what you’re utilizing every day, and then you have that in your wheelhouse and you can step into that. John Murillo was on The Glimpse podcast a couple weeks ago and he said, “I think that when the poems are really working, when they’re really firing on all cylinders, it’s part song and part cinema.” And then there’s Gregory Orr’s four temperaments—music being one of those pleasures that we get from poetry [story, structure, and imagination are the others]. So I’m really trying to lean more into that music. Aside from verbal language, I’ve loved listening to Miles Davis since I was in high school and so then I’m thinking, “What’s happening here, tonally? How can I get that in my work?” I’m still trying to apply all those different things.
AF: You mention breath and Miles Davis, who has all these variations of quotes about silence: “In music, silence is more important than sound.” There’s “It’s not the notes you play; it’s the notes you don’t play.” And maybe my favorite: “Music is the framework around silence.” On the page, your work has all these interesting caesuras, white spaces, indentations—you really are working with the whole page—and I wonder, do you read those pauses in performance? To what extent is the page a musical score?
CJC: One of the superpowers we get as poets is that we can guide people on how to read the work. So if we want them to hang out with this image, we have a number of options that we can choose to let them do that. You could follow that by white space which forces them to reflect. All those different things play in, but I think that, at the same time, echoing the John Murillo thing about part song and part cinema, I look at writing like I’m a film director. I am curating each of these shots to move you through. So when I have to read the poems, I feel like I’ve done all the heavy lifting and everything to accurately convey what I’m after. So I’m pretty faithful, I just follow the text.
I used to teach a workshop for teens and we would talk about that. Some people are like, “I want to be the Southern Fried Poetry slam champion.” Well, that’s cool, but let’s actually look at how poems are working. It’s a lot easier for you to jump on a stage and read or recite in front of people when you know the poem is sound, when you know it has the legs, when you know what it’s doing versus when you have a very thin poem and you have to over-perform in order to try to get that thing across. So if I know that, “Here’s the emotional turn, here’s where you don’t see this coming, boom!” If I can knock out those things and block them out, I can get that same thing live. I know that. Because I’ve been able to map it out beforehand.
AF: You’ve mentioned a bunch of contemporary poets that you admire. How about someone from another era?
CJC: I always felt really connected to Amiri Baraka and also challenged by him. His perspective was “Poems need to be out there moving the everyman.” If you can go down the street while a guy who has taken a break from painting a building, and he’s eating his sandwich and you can do a poem for him, and he likes it, then that’s a poem. The poem does not exist in the hands of academia. And that’s something that has been a guide for me, but also being able to, with your whole chest, speak truth to power and if this is what you feel about something, then stand in that space. Have the gall to say it.
AF: Let’s talk about Greater Ghost, which is haunted by a number of losses. There’s a miscarriage, there’s a mother in the hospital, there’s a friend, a cousin—and we see these people pop up again and again. It’s not like they’re sectioned off into a mom section, a cousin section, pop up for one episode and then move on, and you’re on to the next episode. They appear and reappear, like ghosts. They keep getting called back, which is how I think grief works. I’m not moved by any of my own losses just once. They pop up one day, maybe a week later, and then five days in a row, and then not at all for a month. You never know when they’ll drop in.
Thinking about how a book’s structure relates to its content, I imagine that weaving between the various losses and memories was intentional. Did you ever consider having the book in sections?
CJC: Originally it was in sections, but I talked to Tyree about this technique of braiding. He might’ve gotten it from Eduardo C. Corral, because I’ve heard Eduardo talk about it too. If you braid different things, then you’re deepening and sometimes complicating the conversation that the pieces are internally having. I’m a big fan of texture, so when I was going back through the book I thought, “How can we get more mileage out of what we’re using?” There are four different storylines taking place in the book, and you can read them all as being separate or you can read them as just being part of one story. It’s kind of like Choose Your Own Adventure—you choose how to process the information. I like opening up a door for whoever’s on the other end of the work and just letting them know, “Hey, run in and have your own experience.” Although I think there’s a definite narrative arc that the work hits, I also think the braiding allows a reader to think and then rethink, almost like a Rubik’s Cube where you’re consistently turning and changing and twisting, and it allows me to work that way with any given subject. I can turn around from all these different angles and as long as I am implicating myself, I always have a baseline to return to, regardless of how far the interrogation and questioning gets—because I think so much of the work in Greater Ghost is interrogating the divine.
AF: Yes.
CJC: But the baseline is, “What has the speaker learned? What has he processed? What is he questioning about himself and mortality and being a spiritual individual?” So it’s always anchored to what is happening with the speaker.
AF: I’m a stats nerd sometimes. I blame baseball and baseball cards in particular. [C chuckles] I counted that of the forty-two poems in the book, there are at least twenty-five that include some kind of religious language or reference. You said that part of the book is interrogating the divine. Can you talk about your relationship with religion and/or the divine?
CJC: My relationship’s been interesting, but I think anytime that you believe in a higher power your relationship should be interesting, right? Because what you’re dealing with is for some supernatural and for others it’s super-natural. My mom is old-school Catholic. My dad is Baptist. I wanted to preach when I was like fourteen and then I hit a point where … there’s that saying “I’m more spiritual than religious.” That’s definitely something I’ve leaned more into. I enjoy ritual, but all these different ways of trying to govern something that, to my knowledge, one can’t definitively pin down in terms of what it looks or feels like? That just didn’t seem to hold all that much weight to me. Because I think that the people who were super-duper certain and from the church, I have to just sort of question what motive people have. I think that anytime you’re gonna put yourself out as having the answers, you should be questioned. When so little is certain, how are you so certain? I don’t know.
But I’ve always felt connected to something. And I think if something adds to your life, if you feel accountable to some divine thing and that enables you to be a better person or kinder and gentler with others and everything—I don’t see any downside to that.
But in 2009, I got in a relationship with who I call my evil ex-. And a number of horrible things were happening. And that was the first moment that I had my faith tested in a real way. I was always brought up to believe that God shows favor to his people and everything, but I was not seeing it. And had that line of questioning not happened, I’m not sure if I’d feel comfortable writing poems where God’s getting blamed for things.
“I know people are like ‘You don’t want to be blasphemous,’ and well, of course not, but I mean, blasphemy, if you look at it, is kind of a victimless crime. You know what I mean? If God is God, God can handle a little bit of blasphemy.”
I know people are like “You don’t want to be blasphemous” and well, of course not, but I mean, blasphemy, if you look at it, is kind of a victimless crime. You know what I mean? If God is God, God can handle a little bit of blasphemy.
AF: Right. What, are we gonna hurt God’s feelings?
CJC: You know? So it’s allowed me to complicate and challenge my relationship with the divine, at least artistically. It’s allowed me to surprise myself. I had the chance to work with Vievee Francis a couple years ago at Breadloaf, and she says that it’s always helpful if you can rarify your voice and make the world that you’re building more unique. So once I heard that, I was like “Well, there’s gonna be more than one God in this book. And how can I paint their images differently?” So there’s different colors, some of them have certain distinctions, some of them do different things.
AF: Yeah, that’s in the poem “God,” right? The idea that there are many versions of God to wade through.
CJC: Yeah. It allows me to build this world where all these things are happening. And that sometimes the god you get isn’t the god that you want.
AF: You have some poems in Greater Ghost where people’s names and relations to you are blacked out, and I heard you say on Han VanderHart’s Of Poetry podcast that’s partially there as a space for the reader to insert their own loved ones and loss. I love that you leave space for a reader to step in and fill some gaps—it’s what we do when we lose somebody, we’re trying to fill in gaps, living in these borderlands, two or more worlds at once. It’s with that idea of gap-filling that I wanted to ask about the poems “Passport” and “I Was a Ferry among the Stars,” but I got to go on a little bit of an aside here. You mentioned the hardcore band Black Flag in Han’s podcast, so I imagine you know the Minutemen, and their bass player Mike Watt?
CJC: Yeah, yeah!
AF: I used to be in a band in D.C. that opened for a band he was in, and we heard him giving an interview in the bar a couple hours before the show. He was describing how he and D. Boon loved when there would be titles of paintings that had no obvious relation to the painting itself and that they were often doing that with their own songs and song titles, because they liked there to be the tension of mismatch, but also the openness where people can be more active and fill in that gap. Can you talk about how that poem-title relationship works with “Passport” or “I Was a Ferry among the Stars”?
CJC: You really hit it a little bit earlier. “Passport” is really interested in dealing with being between two planes because the bird is obviously mourning. And a lot of times for men, we tend to do our mourning where we think that no one else can observe, right? And the act of stumbling upon this bird/burden allows the speaker to be honest about the way that they also have processed mourning. Like, I also cry and wail and all that when I don’t think that anybody else can hear me.
AF: Same here.
CJC: But I’m also just into language, so sometimes I’ll write something down and I won’t have an idea of what to do with it, but it sounds interesting, so I’ll kind of chase after it and just see what happens. The first line of “I Was a Ferry among the Stars” started that way, but evolved differently. I like writing poems where you can read from the first line to the last line and from the last line to the first, so it’s like you’re getting two poems in one. It’s also a bleeding title where the title automatically feeds into the poem itself, but if you flip it upside down and you read it, it changes. You get the caring of the other, the person that the speaker is talking to, that relationship that they have. I think it comes through a little bit.
AF: I’m running a quick test on the last stanza of that and I’m reading it last line, second to last line, third to last…I’m reading it upwards and…you’re right. Holy shit. [Both laugh.] Excellent.
CJC: I see text as being completely malleable. Nothing’s super duper concrete with me.
AF: Yeah. Speaking of malleable versus concrete, I seem to hear more people pushing back on the idea of the five stages of grief. Not necessarily that it’s untrue, just limited. It’s not all that linear or discrete a thing. “Oh, once you reach the fifth one, you’re good.” A late friend of mine used to say something about being mugged by grief, that it would jump you, and suddenly you find yourself weeping…
CJC: Yeah.
AF: …and unable to go on for a minute. It’s one of the most universal things about your book. Are there any generalizations that you can make about grief?
“I’m very aware that the South has been responsible for a lot of the brutality that has fallen upon people who look like me. ... But this is also the place that gave me the people that I love the most, the people who’ve shown me how to be graceful, how to be persistent, how to love in spite of colossal damage.”
CJC: I’ll give you one that emerged in a different context, but that definitely applies. I see trauma and grief as very similar—they have that tendency to just cut through air and take you back to another time and sometimes another self. I went to therapy in 2013 and during the intake session, the lady turned around that form and there were so many red x’s and such on it. I was like, “Oh no, maybe I really am…” But I did the work, and one of the things we got into was that maybe instead of seeing trauma as something to get over, maybe it’s more helpful to see it as something to try to live beside. And grief is very much the same way. Rather than conquering grief, you give it space to just appear. You have the emotion, and you move on. I think that the body is such a beacon of truth when we’re not trying to govern the responses that it should have. If you feel like you’re getting sick and you’ve been working too hard and not sleeping enough or whatever, your body will tell you. The body is super honest about these things.
So this is still on topic, but when [actor] Danny Trejo’s mother died, he was working on something with the Muppets. And everybody found out and they’re like, “Oh, sorry Danny.” And he’s like, “Oh, it’s fine. It’s all right.” But then the guy who was doing the voice of Kermit talked to him as Kermit—like “Gee, Danny, I’m really sorry about your mom,” but in the Kermit voice—and Danny fell apart. Danny Trejo fell apart.
There’s just something about the way the body is wired that regardless of what defenses you have, grief finds a way in. For a lot of people—especially if you come from a background where vulnerability automatically equals weakness—it’s really hard for you to allow yourself that space, even when nobody else is around. But so much undue harm comes from trying to deny ourselves human reactions. I think that just allowing ourselves that space to be vulnerable and walk beside our grief is probably the best way forward.
AF: Common question of mine here: how do you feel about being a Southerner?
CJC: I feel several things. I’m very aware that the South has been responsible for a lot of the brutality that has fallen upon people who look like me. A number of laws robbed us of our humanity and continue to in a number of ways. But this is also the place that gave me the people that I love the most, the people who’ve shown me how to be graceful, how to be persistent, how to love in spite of colossal damage. It’s also responsible for some of my favorite artists and some of the best art that continues to move me. And now this chance to have my voice out there in a bit more pronounced way. ... I don’t want to say—because I feel like this is kinda pretentious to say, “I can kind of be a little bit of an example”—nah, nah...
AF: Hey, I think that’s okay!
CJC: What’s the old adage of being the change that you want to see in the world? Just being able to join a conversation about what we think of when we think of the South. There’s a certain—I don’t want to say responsibility or charge or anything like that—but there’s a lineage of Southern writers and especially Black Southern writers that I feel a part of and excited to honor and contribute to in the ways that I can. So I do feel kind of conflicted, but I also feel good and hopeful.
AF: I appreciate your time and especially the book. It got me good, on a few levels.
CJC: I’ve been telling people for a long time this is my sad book. But I’m seeing it with more colors now. But that’s the thing. We put these things out and then our relationship to them changes.
About the author
Andy Fogle
Andy Fogle is the poetry editor of Salvation South. He is the author of Mother Countries (forthcoming from Main Street Rag), Across From Now, and seven chapbooks of poetry, including Arc & Seam: Poems of Farouk Goweda, co-translated with Walid Abdallah. He’s from Virginia Beach, spent years in the D.C. area, and now lives with his family in upstate New York, teaching high school.
Thanks Andy, for such an insightful interview, and thank you Mr. Collier for your breath-taking poetry.
Deb Bowen