Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Poetry's a thing that belongs to everyone.
The act of making poetry is an act of hope.
What is love?/ One name for it is knowledge.
I want to be the best advocate and promoter for poetry that I can be.
What's left is palimpsest—one memory bleeding into another, overwriting it.
For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure.
When you begin to think about the past, you realize how much of it is lost to us.
A man's pursuit of knowledge is greater than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.
My mother and my father divorced during the time that my father was getting his Ph.D. at Tulane.
Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it.
It took me years of attempts and failed drafts before I finally wrote the elegies I needed to write.
My father is a poet, my stepmother is a poet, and so I always had encouragement as a child to write.
From the catbird seat, I've found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in America.
I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.
The experience of poetry could bring my mother back to me. Poetry offers a different kind of solace - here on earth.
I've been most happy to be an advocate for the kinds of grassroots things that people are doing who care about poetry.
My parents had to go to Ohio to get married in 1965 because it was still illegal in Mississippi. My white father and black mother.
I find myself frequently introducing myself to someone, saying that, you know, I've grown up black and biracial in the United States.
Writers, particularly poets, always feel exiled in some way - people who don't exactly feel at home, so they try to find a home in language.
You can get there from here, though there's no going home. Everywhere you go will be somewhere you've never been. "Theories of Time and Space
Often people would mistake me for white when I was younger, and I didn't correct them; there would be a period of time that they just thought I was.
I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing--I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to "fix" a poem.
Even as I think of myself as a 'rememberer,' I also know my memory is probably doing all this work to reconstruct a narrative where I come off better.
I think that as a poet, I am always concerned about history and baring witness to history. But so often, it's through the research that I do, the reading.
People always want to be on the right side of history; it is a lot easier to say, 'What an atrocity that was' then it is to say, 'What an atrocity this is.'
I love mystery novels... I love seeing the dramas played out in academic departments, particularly English departments. I started reading these when I was going up for tenure.
In my own life, I believe it was an early education in poetical metaphor that helped me to grapple with and make sense of all the difficult and traumatic things that were to come.
When I write notes in my journal, I'm just trying to scribble down as much as possible. Later on, I decide whether to follow some of those first impressions or whether to abandon them.
My name is Natasha Trethewey, and I was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966, exactly 100 years to the day that Mississippi celebrated the first Confederate Memorial Day, April 26, 1866.
Often it seems that there are writers who are their best selves on the page. That Seamus Heaney was as genuine and deeply admirable in person as in his poems was to me a gift, then as now.
When I was born here in Gulfport in 1966, my parents' interracial marriage was still illegal. And it was very hard to drive around town with my parents, to be out in public with my parents.
When I was born here in Gulfport in 1966, my parents' interracial marriage was still illegal, and it was very hard to drive around town with my parents, to be out in public with my parents.
As much as we love each other, there is some growing difficulty in my adult relationship with my father. Because we're both writers, we're having a very intimate conversation in a very public forum.
I am interested in 18th century natural philosophy, science, particularly botany, the study of hybridity in plants and animals, which, of course, then allows me to consider the hybridity of language.
Before I was ever a poet, my father was writing poems about me, so it was a turning of the tables when I became a poet and started answering, speaking back to his poems in ways that I had not before.
I think I felt at some point that I couldn't understand poetry or that it was beyond me or it didn't speak to my experience. I think that was because I hadn't yet found the right poems to invite me in.
'NewsHour' is very interested in poetry, but they're also interested in not just that something's cute to add on at the end of their programming, but something that actually is integrated into the news.
Writing 'Native Guard,' I didn't know I was working on a single book. I began writing that book because I was interested in the lesser-known history of these black soldiers stationed off the coast of my hometown.
When I was growing up there, North Gulfport was referred to as 'Little Vietnam' because of the perception of crime and depravity within its borders - as if its denizens were simply a congregation of the downtrodden.
My own journey in becoming a poet began with memory - with the need to record and hold on to what was being lost. One of my earliest poems, Give and Take, was about my Aunt Sugar, how I was losing her to her memory loss.
My own journey in becoming a poet began with memory - with the need to record and hold on to what was being lost. One of my earliest poems, 'Give and Take,' was about my Aunt Sugar, how I was losing her to her memory loss.
I think often people don't realize the great diversity of Southern writing because in their minds, if you're not from the South, it can seem regional and small, and of course that's not the case at all when you start to read the work.
The entirety of 'Bellocq's Ophelia' was a project, and I was interested in doing research and looking at photographs and writing about them, imagining this woman Ophelia and what her life was like and the kinds of things she thought about.
The more I've gotten interested in writing about history and making sense of myself within the continuum of history, the more I've turned to paintings, to art. I look to the imagery of art to help me understand something about my own place in the world.
I overheard things in the Woolworths when I was a child, people saying, 'Oh, poor, little thing,' as if they had some understanding that I was being born biracial into a world that was still very difficult for interracial marriages and biracial children.
When kids look at broccoli, they call it 'little trees,' because they see it not just for the word 'broccoli.' They see it for what it looks like, the image. We, as adults, forget to think like that. We forget to think figuratively and have to be reminded.
One of two historically African American communities that sprang up along the Mississippi Gulf Coast after emancipation, North Gulfport has always been a place where residents have had fewer civic resources than those extended to other outlying communities.
Growing up, my birthday was always Confederate Memorial Day. It helped to create this profound sense of awareness about the Civil War and the 100 years between the Civil War and the civil rights movement and my parents' then-illegal and interracial marriage.
On a very personal level, I have fond memories of spending a lot of time in the Library of Congress working on my collection of poems 'Native Guard.' I was there over a summer doing research in the archives and then writing in the reading room at the Jefferson building.
I think that it's hard enough being an adolescent and wanting so much to fit in with your peers, your schoolmates, and to erase any sign of difference, to be part of the group. And being biracial but also being black in a predominately white school marked me as different.