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All Quotes by author - Natasha Trethewey

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure. "

" From the catbird seat, I've found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in America. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I find myself frequently introducing myself to someone, saying that, you know, I've grown up black and biracial in the United States. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I think poetry's always a kind of faith. It is the kind that I have. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" It took me years of attempts and failed drafts before I finally wrote the elegies I needed to write. "

" I've been most happy to be an advocate for the kinds of grassroots things that people are doing who care about poetry. "

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