Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Turning pain into poetry
Mother’s murder fueled Natasha Trethewey’s literary career
NATASHA Trethewey should be celebrating. Her new book, “Monument: Poems New and Selected,” made the long list for a prestigious National Book Award. But she repeatedly wiped away tears during a recent interview.
Her new book tackles many topics, but the main focus is the murder of Trethewey’s mother when the poet was 19, a loss that haunts Trethewey.
“I think of myself as someone who has lived in a state of bereavement my whole adult life,” the 52-year-old said. “And that’s why the first poem ends, ‘You carry her corpse on your back.’ But it’s nothing I want to put down. You don’t want to put down that grief. It’s part of who I am. It’s part of what made me.”
‘Carrying On in the Aftermath’
“Monument” combines new and previously published poems, some about obscure black soldiers and domestic workers, many rooted in Trethewey’s native Mississippi, where her father, who was white, and her mother, who was black, lived as a married couple before interracial marriage was legal. There’s a poem about a cross burning outside their home, and one about the racist language that Trethewey encountered as a child. All of this is essential to Trethewey’s work, as is the African-American history she repeatedly references.
“How could I not write about my geography, my Mississippi, my South? How could I not write about the history that one inherits coming from a particular time and place?” said Trethewey, a professor of English at Northwestern University.
“Me being born in Mississippi on the 100th anniversary of Confederate Memorial Day, the child of miscegenation, when my parents’ marriage was still illegal
Solace in stanzas
By Natasha Trethewey (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26) — that’s not a personal history; that’s a national history.”
But in “Monument,” Trethewey shifts the emphasis, using new poems to spotlight her mother’s murder by her second exhusband, Trethewey’s stepfather, after what Trethewey describes as years of domestic violence.
The first poem in the collection, “Imperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath,” a showstopper in which roiling grief is distilled into jewel-like irony, begins, “Do not hang your head or clench your fists / when even your friend, after hearing the story, / says, My mother would never put up with that. / Fight the urge to rattle off statistics: that, / more often, a woman who chooses to leave / is then murdered.”
That poem is a lens through which to view the rest of the collection, Trethewey said. Her mother’s murder, even more than racism, is the wound that made her a poet.
Trethewey, daughter of poet and professor Eric Trethewey and social worker Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, said she wrote her earliest poems in third grade and even then was writing about African-American history: “I can remember writing a poem about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”
By high school, she was focused on fiction, and with the exception of a single poem written in the aftermath of her mother’s death, she didn’t really come back to poetry until graduate school. She had recently started a master’s degree program in fiction at Hollins University when she told a poet friend what a terrible poet she would make.
“No, I don’t believe that. I think you could write a poem,” her friend told her.
She sat down and did, just to prove him wrong. But the poem wasn’t that bad, she said. She put it in her fiction professor Marianne Gingher’s mailbox, and the next time Trethewey saw Gingher, her professor was running down the hall in her direction, saying, “Oh Tasha! You’re a poet!”
Trethewey won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2007 book, “Native Guard,” and served two terms as the U.S. poet laureate.
“Monument” springs from a memoir that Trethewey is writing about her mother. When writing got painful, Trethewey turned to poetry — the only thing, she said, that gives her any kind of relief from her grief. As time went on, she had 11 poems stemming from the memoir, a set of distinct works that didn’t fit into her ongoing poetry manuscript. She pitched a collection of new and old poems to her editor, and reordered the poems to create a new narrative arc.
The book is framed by two poems, the haunting first piece and “Articulation,” a lyrical kick in the teeth: “And how / not to recall her many wounds: ring finger / shattered, her ex-husband’s bullet finding / her temple, lodging where her last thought lodged?”