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" 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
Related Quotes:
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 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
" 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
Nature
World
School
" 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. "
Natasha Trethewey
Myself
Memory
Know
" 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 poetry's always a kind of faith. It is the kind that I have. "
Natasha Trethewey
Think
Always
Faith
" 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
" 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
" For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure. "
Natasha Trethewey
Long Time
Long
Been
" 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
" 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
" The experience of poetry could bring my mother back to me. Poetry offers a different kind of solace - here on earth. "
Natasha Trethewey
Poetry
Earth
Experience
" 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
" Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it. "
Natasha Trethewey
Nothing
New
Easy
" From the catbird seat, I've found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in America. "
Natasha Trethewey
Seat
Poetry
Been
" 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