Pulitzer Prize Winner Trethewey Discusses Poetry Collection

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: Well, I think it's the elegant form of it. For example, in this book, I used a lot of forms that had repetition or refrain, like the blues, the blues sonnet, or a pantoon, so that I could say the lines over and over again. It seemed to me that, in order to try to inscribe or to reinscribe what's been forgotten, I needed to say a thing and to say it again. And the repetition of form and poetry I thought was an elegant way to do that.

JEFFREY BROWN: Now, you also tied this larger collective history to some very personal and very painful history.

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: Your mother was killed by her second husband?

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: What were you trying to go back and express about that, about your mother?

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: Well, I wanted to erect a kind of monument to her life, because 20 years -- I was approaching the 20th anniversary of her death. And I'd started researching the Native Guards, because I thought that what I was interested in was that aspect of buried history, a collective American history. But what I came to realize, as I began researching and writing, is that I hadn't erected a monument to the life of my own mother and that I should be the native guardian of her memory, as well.

JEFFREY BROWN: You mean, in a sense her life had been erased, to use your word?

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: From the landscape, that's right. I hadn't put a marker on her grave just like those Native Guard soldiers on Ship Island.

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: I'd be happy to.

"Monument."

Today the ants are busy

beside my front steps, weaving

in and out of the hill they're building.

I watch them emerge and--

like everything I've forgotten -- disappear

into the subterranean, a world

made by displacement. In the cemetery

last June, I circled, lost --

weeds and grass grown up all around --

the landscape blurred and waving.

At my mother's grave, ants streamed in

and out like arteries, a tiny hill rising

above her untended plot. Bit by bit,

red dirt piled up, spread

like a rash on the grass; I watched a long time

the ants' determined work,

how they brought up soil

of which she will be part,

and piled it before me. Believe me when I say

I've tried not to begrudge them

their industry, this reminder of what

I haven't done. Even now,

the mound is a blister on my heart,

a red and humming swarm.

JEFFREY BROWN: "A reminder of what I haven't done," "everything I've forgotten," "a world made by displacement," all of the themes you're talking about.

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: Yes, trying to remember those things and to put it down in words, so that it stands up longer than my memory of it will.

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: This was not easy when you were a young child in Gulfport.

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: No, it was pretty difficult. And I've felt from an early age a kind of discomfort being in public with my parents, because I knew that people were staring at us. 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.

JEFFREY BROWN: And how did you come to poetry? Was poetry a way of seeking identity?

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: Well, 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.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, Natasha Trethewey, congratulations again. Thanks for joining us.

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: Thank you so much.