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" 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
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" 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
" For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure. "
Natasha Trethewey
Long Time
Long
Been
" 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
" 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
" 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'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
" 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
" 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 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" '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
" 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 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 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
" 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
" 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 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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