Natasha Trethewey

Photo by Nancy Crampton / Emory University Creative Writing Program

Today on The PEN Pod, we spoke with former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Natasha Trethewey. Her first collection of poems, Domestic Work, debuted two decades ago, and drew on the lives of Black working people in the American South. She’s published four collections since. Natasha joined us to talk about her new book, Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir. We spoke with her about her impetus for writing the book, how to find one’s voice as a writer, the importance of questioning the narratives we grew up with, and why she still believes in the saving power of poetry.

Your book deals with such a momentous time of your life, the tragic murder of your mother. What drew you to write this text now? How does her legacy continue to inform your work?
 I don’t think I ever intended to write a book of prose about this event in my life, because there were oblique ways that I think I covered my loss, my feelings of bereavement and grief that I’ve lived with these last 35 years in poems. But what happened to me in the aftermath of winning the Pulitzer Prize and becoming Poet Laureate was that, more and more, as I was written about in the media, my backstory was also included as part of the story. In the backstory, there was always a small mention of my mother as if she were simply a victim—“the murdered woman.” It really hurt me that she kept being this very small footnote, and not having the big place that she had in my life in terms of making me who I am and the writer that I became. So I decided that if she was going to be mentioned, then I was going to be the one to tell her story.

“When I was growing up in the Deep South, white people often said to me, if I did anything well, ‘Oh, that’s your white side,’ dismissing and diminishing the idea that what has driven me and made me a writer and the person that I am could indeed come from ‘my Black side’—my mother’s side. So I want to clear that up. I want it to be clearly understood that, whereas my father was a big and wonderful influence on me as a poet, someone who was telling me from an early age that I should be a writer, that I became one because of my mother.”

I feel like there are so many times when authors are put in the position of having to talk about their own lives and how it is reflected in their work, and that question comes more often to writers of color than for white authors. I wonder how you feel that this book will help inform how your work is interpreted by people more broadly.
 I think you’re right about that. I think that as a poet who clearly does write both from a position of historical research and historical cultural memory, but also personal memory and the autobiographical impulse, I understand why I get that question on the autobiographical side of my work. I think the thing that this book might help people understand is the role that my mother played in my life. It’s easy for people to sort of draw a line straight through my father to me, because he was also a poet. But it’s a little bit more insidious than that—my father was also my white parent.

When I was growing up in the Deep South, white people often said to me, if I did anything well, “Oh, that’s your white side,” dismissing and diminishing the idea that what has driven me and made me a writer and the person that I am could indeed come from “my Black side”—my mother’s side. So I want to clear that up. I want it to be clearly understood that, whereas my father was a big and wonderful influence on me as a poet, someone who was telling me from an early age that I should be a writer, that I became one because of my mother. That great loss, that existential wound. The two deepest wounds that I’ve suffered that have made me the writer I am are the loss of my mother when I was 19, and being born Black and biracial in Mississippi when my parents’ marriage was illegal and I was rendered persona non grata—in the eyes of the law, illegitimate. All of the history of oppression that Black Americans have faced in this country and the terrible difficult history that we share as Americans.

“Imagine if, instead of monuments to the lost cause, the lost war, the treason of the Confederacy, people who fought to maintain white supremacy and preserve slavery, the landscape were marked with monuments to the nearly 200,000 African American soldiers who fought for the Union in the Civil War, who fought to preserve the Union, who fought for their own freedom and won it? Wouldn’t we know so much more, and wouldn’t we be in a different place right now if that’s what we’ve been told all these years?”

You just had a piece in The New York Times talking about the Confederate battle flag and it finally coming down in your home state of Mississippi. You wrote, “The landscape of my childhood was overwritten with monuments too, and symbols of the Confederacy.” I wonder what it’s like to see at least some of those symbols finally falling.
 It’s tremendous. As I also say in that piece, I never thought I would see this in my lifetime. My native state is a place deeply entrenched. I think we’re seeing the ways, with some of the backlash of the pushback, that the whole country is invested in these narratives. But it means so much to see them coming down when you imagine the opposite—instead of a landscape that tells us a fiction about our history, one that tells a truer, more inclusive story about our history. Imagine if, instead of monuments to the lost cause, the lost war, the treason of the Confederacy, people who fought to maintain white supremacy and preserve slavery, the landscape were marked with monuments to the nearly 200,000 African American soldiers who fought for the Union in the Civil War, who fought to preserve the Union, who fought for their own freedom and won it? Wouldn’t we know so much more, and wouldn’t we be in a different place right now if that’s what we’ve been told all these years?

You served two stints as U.S. Poet Laureate, and we’re at this moment where I think we’re having this opportunity to reenvision the kind of American society that we want to live in. How do you think poetry can be our guide?
 It probably sounds like a Pollyanna thing to say, but I still believe, because of my own experience, that poetry can save us. It can, in many ways, unite us because of the sheer intimacy of a single voice that might reach someone. Not in the ways that rhetoric fails us so often, because there’s so much uncivil discourse in our rhetoric, but the intimacy and the musicality—the way that poetry touches, not only the intellect, but also the heart—it can be a guide. It is a kind of sacred living word.

“I still believe, because of my own experience, that poetry can save us. It can, in many ways, unite us because of the sheer intimacy of a single voice that might reach someone. Not in the ways that rhetoric fails us so often, because there’s so much uncivil discourse in our rhetoric, but the intimacy and the musicality—the way that poetry touches, not only the intellect, but also the heart—it can be a guide. It is a kind of sacred living word.”

Do you find that it’s hard to stay with the power of poetry after seeing what we’ve seen in these last few months?
 No, actually I think I was responding in my own head to myself thinking that someone’s going to say, “What the heck can poetry do? What does poetry ever do?” What I have literally seen in this moment, which is the intersection of this pandemic as well as social protests around the world, is that people have turned more and more to poetry, than ever. We saw this first after 9/11, when more people turn to poetry than had in a long time in this country. The readership since 2012 for poetry has been increasing. That says to me that people need it, and people are turning to it—whether it is to write it, or to read it, or both. I still believe in it, and I have even more reason now to believe in it.

What do you think young poets right now need to know, and how can their craft be guided at this moment so that they could follow in the footsteps of someone like you?
 I think young poets have to be fearless about writing what is given them to write. I’m quoting the great poet Phil Levine, who said, “I write what it is given me to write.” I think we do our best work, and we find a marriage between our material and our craft, when we are true to writing what we are given to write. Craft is a thing that we can develop and work on and learn by reading the work of poets that came before us. But the voice—the thing that is truest about you—is something that you can’t learn, but something you must be true to. Fiercely so.

Finally, what are you reading right now?
 Oh my god, my desk is a mess with books. I’m reading everything from Lynching and Spectacle, to the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, to memoirs—a new book by Dave Tell called Remembering Emmett Till, a new edition of Eudora Welty’s photographs is here because I keep looking at my Mississippi. The one thing that I’m reading and I keep going back to, that everyone should go back to again and again, is Jericho Brown’s The Tradition. It is a book for this moment. It is enduring; it will be enduring.

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