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" For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure. "
Natasha Trethewey
Long Time
Long
Been
Related Quotes:
" 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. "
Natasha Trethewey
Speak
Think
Experience
" 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. "
Natasha Trethewey
Conversation
Father
Love
" '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
Decisions
Me
Memory
" 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
I Am
People
History
" 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
Myself
Mother
Grief
" 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. "
Natasha Trethewey
Time
Writing
Doing
" 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. "
Natasha Trethewey
Woman
Life
Looking
" I find myself frequently introducing myself to someone, saying that, you know, I've grown up black and biracial in the United States. "
Natasha Trethewey
You
Saying
Black
" 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
Moment
Know
Find
" My father is a poet, my stepmother is a poet, and so I always had encouragement as a child to write. "
Natasha Trethewey
Always
Father
Encouragement
" 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. "
Natasha Trethewey
Black
White
Parents
" 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. "
Natasha Trethewey
War
Day
Marriage
" Poetry's a thing that belongs to everyone. "
Natasha Trethewey
Thing
Poetry
Everyone
" 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. "
Natasha Trethewey
Child
People
Children
" 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. "
Natasha Trethewey
Reading
I Am
History
" 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
Memory
People
Problem
" I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it. "
Natasha Trethewey
Think
Poetry
Everyone
" 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.' "
Natasha Trethewey
Side
Want
Always
" '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. "
Natasha Trethewey
Poetry
News
End
" 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. "
Natasha Trethewey
Me
I Am
Science
" 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. "
Natasha Trethewey
First
Years
Day
" 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
School
American
Focus
" 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
Self
Myself
You
" 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. "
Natasha Trethewey
Find
Try
People
" 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
Identity
Life
People
" I want to be the best advocate and promoter for poetry that I can be. "
Natasha Trethewey
I Can
Advocate
Best
" 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
I Am
Experience
Writing
" 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. "
Natasha Trethewey
World
Writing
Myself
" 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. "
Natasha Trethewey
Up
American
Always
" 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. "
Natasha Trethewey
Looks
Forget
Think