Natasha Trethewey Quotes

"I want to be the best advocate and promoter for poetry that I can be."

"When you begin to think about the past, you realize how much of it is lost to us."

"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."

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

"The experience of poetry could bring my mother back to me. Poetry offers a different kind of solace - here on earth."

"Growing up, my birthday was always Confederate Memorial Day. It helped to create this profound sense of awareness about the Civil War and the 100 years between the Civil War and the civil rights movement and my parents' then-illegal and interracial marriage."

"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."

"I think poetry's always a kind of faith. It is the kind that I have."

"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."

"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."

"I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it."

"It took me years of attempts and failed drafts before I finally wrote the elegies I needed to write."

"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."

"From the catbird seat, I've found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in America."

"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."

"Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"My mother and my father divorced during the time that my father was getting his Ph.D. at Tulane."

"One of two historically African American communities that sprang up along the Mississippi Gulf Coast after emancipation, North Gulfport has always been a place where residents have had fewer civic resources than those extended to other outlying communities."