Natasha Trethewey

Poet

1966-04-26

Quotes by Natasha Trethewey

• ArtifactAs long as I can remember you kept the rifle--your grandfather's an antique you called it-in your study, propped against the tall shelvesthat held your many books. Upright,beside those hard-worn spins, it was anotherbackbone of your pas, a remnant I studiedas if it might unlock-- like the skeleton keyits long body resembled-- some door i had yetto find. Peering into the dark muzzle, I imagined a bulletas you described: spiraling through the boreand spinning straight for its target. It did not hit methen: the rifle I'd inherited showing mehow one life is bound to another, that hardshipendures. For years I admired its slender profile,until-- late one night, somber with drink--you told meit still worked, that you kept it loaded just in case,and I saw the rifle for what it is; a relicsharp as sorrow, the barrel hollow as regret.

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• I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing--I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to fix a poem.

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• ArtifactAs long as I can remember you kept the rifle--your grandfather's an antique you called it-in your study, propped against the tall shelvesthat held your many books. Upright,beside those hard-worn spins, it was anotherbackbone of your pas, a remnant I studiedas if it might unlock-- like the skeleton keyits long body resembled-- some door i had yetto find. Peering into the dark muzzle, I imagined a bulletas you described: spiraling through the boreand spinning straight for its target. It did not hit methen: the rifle I'd inherited showing mehow one life is bound to another, that hardshipendures. For years I admired its slender profile,until-- late one night, somber with drink--you told meit still worked, that you kept it loaded just in case,and I saw the rifle for what it is; a relicsharp as sorrow, the barrel hollow as regret.

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• I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing--I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to fix a poem.

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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.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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