Natasha Trethewey Quotes - 9quotes.com

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When you begin to think about the past, you realize how much of it is lost to us.
Written by Natasha Trethewey
I want to be the best advocate and promoter for poetry that I can be.
Written by Natasha Trethewey
Growing up, my birthday was always Confederate Memorial Day. It helped to create this profound sense of awareness about the Civil War and the 100 years between the Civil War and the civil rights movement and my parents' then-illegal and interracial marriage.
Written by Natasha Trethewey
Writers, particularly poets, always feel exiled in some way - people who don't exactly feel at home, so they try to find a home in language.
Written by Natasha Trethewey
From the catbird seat, I've found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in America.
Written by Natasha Trethewey
Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it.
Written by Natasha Trethewey
The experience of poetry could bring my mother back to me. Poetry offers a different kind of solace - here on earth.
Written by Natasha Trethewey
It took me years of attempts and failed drafts before I finally wrote the elegies I needed to write.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by Natasha Trethewey
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.
Written by Natasha Trethewey
On a very personal level, I have fond memories of spending a lot of time in the Library of Congress working on my collection of poems 'Native Guard.' I was there over a summer doing research in the archives and then writing in the reading room at the Jefferson building.
Written by Natasha Trethewey
My parents had to go to Ohio to get married in 1965 because it was still illegal in Mississippi. My white father and black mother.
Written by 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.
Written by Natasha Trethewey
I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.
Written by Natasha Trethewey
My name is Natasha Trethewey, and I was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966, exactly 100 years to the day that Mississippi celebrated the first Confederate Memorial Day, April 26, 1866.
Written by Natasha Trethewey
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.
Written by Natasha Trethewey
For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure.
Written by 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.
Written by Natasha Trethewey
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.
Written by 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.
Written by 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.
Written by Natasha Trethewey
When I write notes in my journal, I'm just trying to scribble down as much as possible. Later on, I decide whether to follow some of those first impressions or whether to abandon them.
Written by Natasha Trethewey
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.
Written by 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.
Written by Natasha Trethewey
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.
Written by Natasha Trethewey
The entirety of 'Bellocq's Ophelia' was a project, and I was interested in doing research and looking at photographs and writing about them, imagining this woman Ophelia and what her life was like and the kinds of things she thought about.
Written by 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.
Written by Natasha Trethewey
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.
Written by Natasha Trethewey
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.
Written by Natasha Trethewey

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