Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I want to be the best advocate and promoter for poetry that I can be. "

Natasha Trethewey

Related Quotes:

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Natasha Trethewey

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

Natasha Trethewey

" 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

" 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. "

Natasha Trethewey

" 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. "

Natasha Trethewey

" 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. "

Natasha Trethewey

" 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. "

Natasha Trethewey

" 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

" 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

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

Natasha Trethewey

" 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

" The experience of poetry could bring my mother back to me. Poetry offers a different kind of solace - here on earth. "

Natasha Trethewey

" 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

" 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. "

Natasha Trethewey

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

Natasha Trethewey

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Natasha Trethewey

" 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

" 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

" 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

" My father is a poet, my stepmother is a poet, and so I always had encouragement as a child to write. "

Natasha Trethewey