Quotes by Natasha Trethewey - Page 2

A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Identity
National Identity
Relation
Life History Me
Larger
Outward
Poem
Regional
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Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Daughter
Day To Day
Relevance
Basis
Endured
Introduced
Poem
Stepmother
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I think people turn to poetry more often than they think they do, or encounter it in more ways than they think that they do. I think we forget the places that we encounter it, say, in songs or in other little bits and pieces of things that we may have remembered from childhood.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Bits
Bits And Pieces
Childhood
Forget
Remembered
Encounter
Places
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'Memory.' 'Race.' 'Murder.' That's what they say about me. I am an elegiac poet. I have some historical questions, and I'm grappling with ways to make sense of history; why it still haunts us in our most intimate relationships with each other, but also in our political decisions.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Grappling
Historical
Intimate
Political Decisions
Haunts
Memory
They Say
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The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Grief
Losing
Turning
First Thing
Poem
So Many People
The First Thing
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My father, Eric Trethewey, is a poet, so I had one right inside the house. And on long trips, he'd tell me, if I got bored in the car, to write a poem about it. And I did find that poetry was a way for me, I think as it for a lot of people, to articulate those things that seem hardest to say.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Car
Poetry
Bored
Eric
Father
Hardest
House
Long
People
Inside
Things
Lot
Had
Me
Articulate
Did
Those
He
Find
Say
Got
Poem
Right
Seem
Tell
Trips
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I was always very aware of the nature of the place where I was growing up in Gulfport, Mississippi, how that place was shaping my experience of the world. I had to go to the Northeast for graduate school because I felt like I had to get far away from my South, be outside it, to understand it.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Far Away
Graduate School
Mississippi
Graduate
Northeast
Shaping
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I've been telling my students, 'Imitate, imitate.' And they say, 'Well, what if I plagiarize, or what if I'm not original? I want to be myself.' And I always tell them, 'Your self will shine through'... If you allow yourself to feel deeply and honestly, what you say won't be like anyone else.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Honestly
What If
Myself Always Yourself
Allow
Anyone Else
Original
Deeply
Imitate
Shine
Telling
They Say
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My mother was murdered by my step-father, my brother's father, who was also named Joel, twenty-five years ago. Whatever sadness or burden I've been living with since then, my brother's also been living with, but he's lived with the added burden of having the exact same name as our mother's murderer.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Brother
Burden
Mother
Sadness
Twenty Five
Years
Years Ago
Living
Since
Added
Named
Name
Whatever
Exact
Having
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Isolated and unincorporated, North Gulfport lacked a basic infrastructure: flooding and contaminated drinking water were frequent problems. Although finally incorporated in 1994 - not long after the arrival of the first casino - many of North Gulfport's streets still lack curbs, sidewalks, and gutters.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Drinking
Drinking Water
Flooding
Infrastructure
Isolated
Streets
Arrival
Casino
Contaminated
Frequent
Incorporated
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It is a tremendous honor to be named poet laureate, but one that I find humbling as well, because it's the kind of thing that makes me feel like - even as it's been bestowed upon me - I must continue to live up to what it means... Being the younger laureate in the age of social media is a new challenge.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Honor
Humbling
Social Media
Named
Bestowed
Tremendous
Laureate
New Challenge
Poet Laureate
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There are indeed all sorts of men/ who visit here: those who want/ nothing but to talk or hear the soft tones/ of a woman's voice; others prefer/ simply to gaze upon me, my face/ turned from them as they touch/ only themselves. And then there are those,/ of course, whose desires I cannot commit/ to paper.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Men
Desire
Voice
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In the early 1970s in Atlanta, I attended what had formerly been an all-white school but had become a black school after integration and white flight. Perhaps because of this, the teachers created a curriculum that included a focus on African American literature and history year-round, not just in February.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Teacher
American Literature
Atlanta
Curriculum
February
Flight
Focus
Integration
Literature
School
White
African
Year Round
Teachers
Attended
Created
Early
Included
Perhaps
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I started out in graduate school to be a fiction writer. I thought I wanted to write short stories. I started writing poems at that point only because a friend of mine dared me to write a poem. And I took the dare because I was convinced that I couldn't write a good poem... And then it actually wasn't so bad.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Dare
Graduate School
Good Me Bad
Fiction Writer
Graduate
Poem
Short Stories
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My obsessions stay the same - historical memory and historical erasure. I am particularly interested in the Americas and how a history that is rooted in colonialism, the language and iconography of empire, disenfranchisement, the enslavement of peoples, and the way that people were sectioned off because of blood.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Blood
Colonialism
Enslavement
Historical
Iconography
Memories
People
Rooted
Americas
History I Am People
Empire
Memory
Obsessions
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It's so necessary to try and record the cultural memory of people. To set it down for generations to come. To better understand where we are headed. The problem is, a good portion of what we choose to remember is about willed forgetting. Which we all do, I believe, to protect ourselves from what is too difficult.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Generations
Good Believe Better
Cultural
Forgetting
Headed
Memory
Portion
Willed
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Often as a poet I find that I am somewhat outside an experience I want to hold onto, consciously taking mental notes or writing them down in my journal - for fear that I will forget. It's not unlike being on a trip and taking pictures, your face behind a camera the whole time - the entire experience mediated by a lens.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Journal
Notes
Somewhat
Unlike
Lens
Mental
Onto
Trip
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When I'm actually writing by hand, I get more of a sense of the rhythm of sentences, of syntax. The switch to the computer is when I actually start thinking about lines. That's the workhorse part. At that point, I'm being more mathematical about putting the poem on the page and less intuitive about the rhythm of the syntax.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Intuitive
Lines
Mathematical
Rhythm
Sentences
Syntax
Page
Poem
Switch
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I know that my tendency is to be linear, and I'm trying to find ways to subvert that. And so in 'Bellocq's Ophelia' my device for subverting it was to tell the story and then to tell it again; it always circles back to this one moment, and it's not linear, but it's round in that way, and much of 'Native Guard' is like that.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Circles
Linear
Native
Device
Round
Guard
Subvert
Tendency
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I think the biggest thing that I have to do is to remind people that poetry is there for us to turn to not only to remind us that we're not alone - for example, if we are grieving the loss of someone - but also to help us celebrate our joys. That's why so many people I know who've gotten married will have a poem read at the wedding.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Wedding
Celebrate
Grieving
Loss
Biggest Thing
For Example
Gotten
Joys
Poem
Remind
So Many People
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Jesmyn Ward left her Gulf Coast home for education and experience, but it called her back. It called on her in most painful ways, to mourn. In Men We Reaped, Jesmyn unburies her dead, that they may live again. And through this emotional excavation, she forces us to see the problems of place and race that led these men to their early graves. Full of beauty, love, and dignity, Men We Reaped is a haunting and essential read.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Home
Men
Emotional
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First, I emptied the closets of your clothes, threw out the bowl of fruit, bruised from your touch, left empty the jars you bought for preserves. The next morning, birds rustled the fruit trees, and later when I twisted a ripe fig loose from its stem, I found it half eaten, the other side already rotting, or-like another I plucked and split open-being taken from the inside: a swarm of insects hollowing it. I'm too late, again, another space emptied by loss. Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Morning
Loss
Taken
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I was deeply moved by Richard Blanco's reading of his inaugural poem-a timely and elegant tribute to the great diversity of American experience. And now comes this fine meditation on his experience of coming to poetry, of making the poem and the months surrounding its making-a testament to the strength and significance of poetry in American culture, something not always seen or easily measured. Today Is For All of Us, One Today is a necessary intervention into the ongoing conversation about the role of poetry in public life.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Diversity
Meditation
Reading
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I used to come out here every Fourth of July as a child to picnic and to swim on the island, to tour the fort and wander through it. And all of that time, I never knew anything about the presence of black soldiers on the island. And so, for me, this was a way of trying to tell another history, a lost or a forgotten or a little-known history about these black soldiers who played an important part in American history.” Trethewey said. Coincidentally, she was born “exactly 100 years to the day that Mississippi celebrated the first Confederate Memorial Day, April 26, 1866.
Natasha Trethewey / Poet
Memorial Day
Children
Islands
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Natasha Trethewey Quotes - Page 2

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