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" 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
Doing
Care
Poetry
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
I Am
People
History
" 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
" When you begin to think about the past, you realize how much of it is lost to us. "
Natasha Trethewey
Lost
You
Past
" 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
Best
Person
Me
" 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
" 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
" 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
I Am
Think
Daughter
" 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
" For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure. "
Natasha Trethewey
Long Time
Long
Been
" 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
Mystery
Love
Reading
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
Celebrate
People
Alone
" 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
Page
Start
Writing
" 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
Own
Life
Education
" 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
Father
Sadness
Name
" 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
" Poetry's a thing that belongs to everyone. "
Natasha Trethewey
Thing
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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Writing 'Native Guard,' I didn't know I was working on a single book. I began writing that book because I was interested in the lesser-known history of these black soldiers stationed off the coast of my hometown. "
Natasha Trethewey
Writing
History
Know
" When I write notes in my journal, I'm just trying to scribble down as much as possible. Later on, I decide whether to follow some of those first impressions or whether to abandon them. "
Natasha Trethewey
Possible
Trying
Down
" 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
Hard
Drive
Marriage
" 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
" 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
Challenge
Me
Live
" 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
" 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
Good
School
Me