Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Tretheweyis an American poet who was appointed United States Poet Laureate in June 2012; she began her official duties in September. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and she is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth26 April 1966
CountryUnited States of America
begin
When you begin to think about the past, you realize how much of it is lost to us.
encouragement
My father is a poet, my stepmother is a poet, and so I always had encouragement as a child to write.
divorced time
My mother and my father divorced during the time that my father was getting his Ph.D. at Tulane.
black illegal married ohio white
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.
correct people period time
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.
became poems poet speaking tables ways
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.
haunts historical history intimate relationships ways
'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.
adult both conversation difficulty intimate love public relationship
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.
work
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.
believe early education helped life metaphor poetical traumatic
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.
admirable best deeply genuine poems seems selves writers
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.
born marriages people understanding
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.
convinced dared fiction good graduate mine poems point school took
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.
beyond experience felt found invite poems poetry point speak understand
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.