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" My mother and my father divorced during the time that my father was getting his Ph.D. at Tulane. "
Natasha Trethewey
Divorced
Getting
Mother
Related Quotes:
" 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
" 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
Growing Up
Growing
Crime
" 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
" From the catbird seat, I've found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in America. "
Natasha Trethewey
Seat
Poetry
Been
" It took me years of attempts and failed drafts before I finally wrote the elegies I needed to write. "
Natasha Trethewey
Wrote
Write
Finally
" 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. "
Natasha Trethewey
Group
Black
School
" 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
" I think poetry's always a kind of faith. It is the kind that I have. "
Natasha Trethewey
Think
Always
Faith
" 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
Think
Car
Father
" 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. "
Natasha Trethewey
Great
Writing
Work
" 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. "
Natasha Trethewey
Me
Time
Thought
" 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
Writing
Me
Back
" 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
Poetry
Say
Think
" '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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
Problems
Water
Long
" 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
" 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 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
" 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
" 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
" 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'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
" 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
" 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
" 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
Journey
Lost
Loss
" '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