American - Poet | April 26, 1966 -
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
ExperiencePoetryMeSpeakThink
I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.
RelationshipPoetryThinkOutPoem
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.
MarriageParentsDriveBornHard
For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure.
TimeMemoryLongLong TimeBeen
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.
ChildrenChildPeopleWorldSaying
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.
LoveFatherRelationshipConversation
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.
FatherMeWritingBackPoetStarted
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.
WritingStartThinkingPageHand
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.
HistoryWritingBookBlackHometown
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.
MomentStoryTryingBackFindKnow
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.
FatherMotherBrotherSadnessName
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.
SchoolMeBlackThinkEnoughWhite
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Natasha Trethewey quotes