Quotes from Natasha Trethewey

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.

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.

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.

I think that as a poet, I am always concerned about history and baring witness to history. But so often, it's through the research that I do, the reading.

'Memory.' 'Race.' 'Murder.' That's what they say about me. I am an elegiac poet. I have some historical questions, and I'm grappling with ways to make sense of history; why it still haunts us in our most intimate relationships with each other, but also in our political decisions.

I've been most happy to be an advocate for the kinds of grassroots things that people are doing who care about poetry.

You can get there from here, though there's no going home. Everywhere you go will be somewhere you've never been. "Theories of Time and Space

I think people turn to poetry more often than they think they do, or encounter it in more ways than they think that they do. I think we forget the places that we encounter it, say, in songs or in other little bits and pieces of things that we may have remembered from childhood.

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.

What is love?/ One name for it is knowledge.

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.

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.

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.

I find myself frequently introducing myself to someone, saying that, you know, I've grown up black and biracial in the United States.

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.

When kids look at broccoli, they call it 'little trees,' because they see it not just for the word 'broccoli.' They see it for what it looks like, the image. We, as adults, forget to think like that. We forget to think figuratively and have to be reminded.

It is a tremendous honor to be named poet laureate, but one that I find humbling as well, because it's the kind of thing that makes me feel like - even as it's been bestowed upon me - I must continue to live up to what it means... Being the younger laureate in the age of social media is a new challenge.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

You can get there from here, though there's no going home. Everywhere you go will be somewhere you've never been. Theories of Time and Space