Letting her 'Guard' down

Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey, Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair of Poetry, sat down recently with President Emeritus Bill Chace (below), professor of English, for discussion of the craft of writing. Read all about it right here.

Natasha Tretheway won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry this spring for her latest collection of poems, Native Guard. Since receiving the award in April, Trethewey’s calendar has been understandably full. So, when Loose Canons, the English department’s newsletter, wanted to interview her, the publication aimed high, recruiting President Emeritus and Professor of English Bill Chace. The two spoke over the summer and their conversation went like this.

Bill Chace: First of all, congratulations on winning the Pulitzer for poetry this year. May I ask if that wonderful achievement will make a difference in the poems you will write next?

Natasha Trethewey: I hope I can avoid bringing either what critics consider my “success” or my “failures” to the desk. To allow outside voices, the voice of critics, either laudatory or negative, to determine my future would be wrong. I used to read reviews; I’m not going to do so anymore. I will remain curious about them, but I think I will stop paying attention to them.

BC: You prefaced your [first post-award] reading at Emory with poems by W.H. Auden, Lisel Mueller, and Rita Dove. Can you tell me what those poets mean to you and why you brought them to mind?

NT: Rita Dove: I have spent a lot of time reading her 1987 volume, Thomas and Beulah, which also won the Pulitzer Prize. My identification is with works telling a family history, in this case an African-American family, and with how the individual struggles within a larger historical context.
            Mueller: Her 1997 book, Alive Together (which also won the Pulitzer Prize). Her poetry allowed me to share my mother’s death with her, for her mother died in the month of June, as did mine. And that poem made me see how indifferent the world can be to death.
            Auden: And that cosmic indifference connects with the Auden poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” which has moved me for a long time because I am someone who loves the kind of poem that can both describe a work of art, in this case a painting, and make it signify anew.

BC: Do the writers evoked in Native Guard—Charles Wright, Walt Whitman, Allen Tate, and Robert Herrick (and perhaps Nina Simone)—form a constellation of muses, provocations, or allies, in your poetic mind?

NT: It was a very careful choosing of those poets, and don’t forget Robert Penn Warren. He’s there, too. I wanted to situate myself as a poet, a Southern poet, within a larger tradition. I wanted to connect to a place that I both love and hate. And I wanted to also to respond to the notion that if you are black or biracial, you necessarily must hate the South. Black Southerners know that is not the case; you can also love it.
            And there are other poets not specifically named in the book who are, in fact, present there. I was able to read, thanks to our colleague Ron Schuchard, [Goodrich C. White Professor of English], all of the drafts of Seamus Heaney’s poem, “North.” And that poem has a lot to do with the last poem, “South,” in my book. His poem is richly situated in the place he comes from; so is “South.” And another poet, another Irish poet, not mentioned by name in my poems, but nonetheless present, is Eavan Boland, particularly from her book, In a Time of Violence. She expresses a great sense of physical and psychological exile from the homeland, and she knows much about the intersection between public and private history.

BC: Your poems in Native Guard are mostly unrhymed, but with exceptions such as “Myth” and “Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi.” What are your thoughts and feelings about the utility of rhyme?

NT: I don’t decide if the poem rhymes; the poem decides that. The formal issue of repetition is what is prominent in this book. Since the book is about things that have been forgotten, repetition seemed to be the right method to follow. I wanted to inscribe, or reinscribe, the past as it is reborn organically.

BC: Am I right in thinking that there is no use of the future tense in any of the poems in Native Guard, no verbs in the future?

NT: There’s only one. In the very first poem, “who you were—/will be waiting when you return.” But even there, it is not really in the future. It is about something in the future that has already occurred. And in the last poem in the book, I resisted the future tense.

BC: Do you hear a prevailing music to your poems? Are there chords and musical patterns governing them?

NT: Yes, in one poem, “South.” When that poem first came to me, I was jogging and in my head, there was a prevailing rhythm I was trying to measure my footfall against.

BC: Your attitude toward history and memory seems to me, to this one reader, most boldly stated in “Theories of Time and Space,” in which you say: “You can get there from here, though/there’s no going home.” Are you saying that history is both accessible and inaccessible; memories both powerful and yet elusive; time past gone yet present?

NT: Yes, in one place I talk about “being late.” We are “late” for history, and there is no going back to it. It is elusive; we try to harness and keep it, but much of it is not available to us.

BC: In “Myth,” you seem to be trying to keep your mother alive, while you know she is dying, in an “erebus.” Why is her place of “safe-keeping” so dark, so far from Earth and so close to Hades?

NT: There is a sense in the poem, and in my thinking, that I sent her there. The poem has an undertone of guilt, as in the first line, “I was asleep while you were dying,” and in that interval she was gone. So it seemed to me as if she were in a kind of Purgatory, not free to go where she might want to go, as if I were keeping her there.
            Before my mother was killed by my stepfather, he had come to a game where I was a cheerleader. I saw him and smiled at him, even though I knew my mother had gone to a battered-woman’s shelter to get away from him. He later told a psychiatrist that he had come to kill me but since I had smiled at him, he decided he would not kill me. But he did kill my mother. Perhaps, had he killed me instead, my mother would have lived. I am here, and she is not.

BC: You mother is, of course, the most important and most haunting presence in many of your poems. We see her only in bits and pieces, sometimes young and full of promise and hope and at other times gone from you and dead. In two poems, the life she had is marked by violence—“stepfather’s fist” in “Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971” and “fleeting bruises” in “What is Evidence.” Is the violence inflicted upon her linked to the violence of the Civil War that is the subject of many of the later poems in Native Guard?

NT: I think they are connected. My mother’s death was caused by “internal violence.” But the Civil War was also a case of “internal violence,” one part of the house against the other. Perhaps all violence, domestic and military, is “civil.” The two, her death and the [Civil] War, are linked in powerful ways.

BC: Your father seems so distant a presence in the poems. We learn in “Miscegenation” that he was reading Tolstoy when he gave you the name “Natasha” and that when you became 33 years old, he said that it was “your Jesus year.” But he otherwise seems an obscure figure in the poems, why?

NT: I have been asked that question many times. In fact, he appears quite often in the book, both explicitly and implicitly. He is there in so many places. But this book is about my mother. My father does appear in my other books, and an earlier book of mine is dedicated to him. He is huge in my life, but, because of divorce, he was absent much of the time as I grew up.

BC: There is a presence—“God”—in several of the poems, “What the Body Can Say” and “Elegy for the Native Guards.” Does religious belief color or define any of your poems.

NT: I think of myself as a secular person who grew up with a religious background. I was raised next to my grandmother’s church, a church her sister started as an arbor. I grew up listening to “The Lord’s Prayer” being chanted in that church. It is all a big part of my life, yet I am a secular person. There is always the question of my grandmother’s faith butting up against my father’s agnosticism.

BC: Thank you very much. On behalf of all our colleagues in the [English] department, I wish you the very best as you continue to write and teach.

This story appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Loose Canons, the newsletter of the Department of English, and is reprinted with permission.