The Blues
“Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color…” -Maggie Nelson.
An entire book of poetry about the color blue? Yes, and that is the opening line from the book, Bluets, by Maggie Nelson. It’s absolutely mind blowing, one of my favorite books of poetry.
“So please don’t write to tell me about any more beautiful blue things. To be fair, this book won’t tell you about any, either. It will not say, Isn’t X Beautiful? Such demands are murderous to beauty,” she says in 9. The book is about love, lost love, a friend that suffers a terrible accident and becomes a quadriplegic. And of course, it’s about the color blue.
The book is a series of prose poems, each one numbered (no titles). Prose poems are wonderful: you get the familiarity of the box looking paragraph, but you’re hit with the language and lightness of a poem. Actually, I think that is how I ended up with this book. I wanted to study two things in one of my first project periods in my MFA program: prose poems and the works of female writers.
What I love about poetry is, of course, imagery, so let’s look at a few things from this book:
“66. Yesterday, I picked up a speck of blue I’d been eyeing for weeks on the ground outside my house, and found it to be a poison for termites.” This is fabulous—a dangerous blue that is just a speck on the ground. The author takes us down to street level, and then opened it up to something much bigger.
Or in 128. where she is writing about jacaranda trees: "Then, the first time I saw them myself, I felt despair. The next season, I felt despair again. And so we arrive at one instance, and then another, upon which blue delivered a measure of despair. But truth be told: I saw them as purple.” That repetition of seasons and despair, and season and despair, all around the color blue can really make you feel and see what despair, but then Nelson shakes the image up by telling you that they’re purple.
This book really pulled me in; I read it cover to cover pretty quickly. I’ve reread it. I pick it up sometimes just to read a poem or two. The form, the narrator, the emotions and images… What a piece.
Now, I think you should write a single long poem about a color. I have tried, a two page one about the color green: it didn’t turn out so well. But, I think I should have another go.