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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Natasha Trethewey Quotes

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

– Natasha Trethewey

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

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

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

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

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.

– Natasha Trethewey

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

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

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

– Natasha Trethewey

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

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

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

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

– Natasha Trethewey

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

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

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

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

– Natasha Trethewey

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

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

– Natasha Trethewey

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 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

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

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