A READING BY NATASHA TRETHEWEY

Thank you all for coming. I see a big row of family here, so I’m really pleased about that. Extra ones I didn’t know were coming. I want to start by saying that in writing this collection of poems, what I wanted to do was to sort of set out to record and document often-forgotten and buried histories, those histories that are both public and personal. And that way, I think that these poems become a kind of pilgrimage to that lost past and an elegy for the people and places that make up what I call home.

So I’m going to begin with reading some poems in an elegiac mood. These are poems for my mother. Before I start there, though, I’d like to actually start with a poem that feels very strange to me now. It’s the first poem in the collection, written a couple years ago. What’s strange about it now is that it’s very much about a return to my home town. And my home town is Gulfport, Mississippi. And this was a poem that was very elegiac when I wrote it but of course the place was still there when I wrote it.

[“Theories of Time and Space,” by Natasha Trethewey, from Native Guard: Poems, published 2006 by Houghton Mifflin.]

Some of you might know that the Southern Crescent was the name of an old train. I think they kept the name of the train even though Amtrak took over. But part of its route was between New Orleans and Atlanta.

[“The Southern Crescent,” by Natasha Trethewey, from Native Guard: Poems, published 2006 by Houghton Mifflin.]

This next poem has an epigraph from Robert Herrick, “Fair daffodils, we weep to see / You haste away so soon.”

[“Genus Narcissus,” by Natasha Trethewey, from Native Guard: Poems, published 2006 by Houghton Mifflin.]

This next poem is a blues sonnet.

[“Graveyard Blues,” by Natasha Trethewey, from Native Guard: Poems, published 2006 by Houghton Mifflin.]

This next poem relies a bit on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

[“Myth,” by Natasha Trethewey, from Native Guard: Poems, published 2006 by Houghton Mifflin.]

In making this pilgrimage and this elegy back to those places, to the place that my mother is buried, to the place of my early childhood, my own history, the place that I returned to, I actually did have to go there and this next poem is called “Pilgrimage,” Vicksburg, Mississippi.

[“Pilgrimage,” by Natasha Trethewey, from Native Guard: Poems, published 2006 by Houghton Mifflin.]

This next poem is a poem in four parts about four photographs. It’s called “Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi.”

[“Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi,” by Natasha Trethewey, from Native Guard: Poems, published 2006 by Houghton Mifflin.]

I can’t read “Flood” now without thinking about some of those images from New Orleans, too. This next poem has a sort of borrowed final line from Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!

[“Pastoral,” by Natasha Trethewey, from Native Guard: Poems, published 2006 by Houghton Mifflin.]

My first job was at Auburn University, and I went there in 1997. But just a year before that, a year or two before that, the state had finally put to a vote whether or not to remove the anti-miscegenation laws from the books. And they voted, and they did vote to remove it, although forty-some percent of the population wanted to keep it, wanted to prevent parents like mine from getting married and people like me from being born legitimately, at least symbolically, in the state. This is a ghazal, and it’s called “Miscegenation.”

[“Miscegenation,” by Natasha Trethewey, from Native Guard: Poems, published 2006 by Houghton Mifflin.]

[“My Mother Dreams Another Country,” by Natasha Trethewey, from Native Guard: Poems, published 2006 by Houghton Mifflin.]

[“Southern Gothic,” by Natasha Trethewey, from Native Guard: Poems, published 2006 by Houghton Mifflin.]

[“Incident,” by Natasha Trethewey, from Native Guard: Poems, published 2006 by Houghton Mifflin.]

And a hurricane poem. This is “Providence.”

[“Providence,” by Natasha Trethewey, from Native Guard: Poems, published 2006 by Houghton Mifflin.]

I’m going to finish up with three poems. This next poem, I was telling my mother-in-law, Carmen, about this before coming here tonight, and she asked a really good question, and that was, “Why is it that these elegies for your mother are in this book which is also very much about Mississippi history and there’s a Civil War section in it?” And I told her that I had been thinking about buried history. About what was lost or forgotten, and I thought I was writing things that were separate until I went to visit my mother’s grave and came face to face with the fact that twenty years later, I had not yet put a monument there. And so she had become somehow part of this buried history that had been erased from the landscape. And I thought it was all about its black Union soldiers. So this is “Monument.”

[“Monument,” by Natasha Trethewey, from Native Guard: Poems, published 2006 by Houghton Mifflin.]

I mentioned those black soldiers, the black soldiers that give the title to this collection. The Louisiana Native Guards were the first officially sanctioned regiment of African American soldiers in the Civil War. They were stationed off the coast of my home town, on Ship Island at a fort, called Fort Massachusetts. Their primary duty once they got out there was to guard Confederate prisoners of war.

The island is still intact though it has lost some mass. During Hurricane Camille, the center of the island washed out, which is where all the graves had been. And so even Mother Nature is complicit in sort of washing away and erasing certain parts of history.

I went out there this past April, on the anniversary of Appomattox, to shoot a little documentary. And the black re-enactors were actually there. And even though they were about twenty yards away, I watched several of the park rangers (the park is run by the National Park Service) give tours, and throughout the tour they never mentioned anything about the black population on the island. They were just twenty feet away.

This poem has an epigraph from Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” that reads, “Now that the salt of their blood stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea.”

[“Elegy for the Native Guards,” by Natasha Trethewey, from Native Guard: Poems, published 2006 by Houghton Mifflin.]

This last poem has an epigraph from E. O. Wilson that reads, “Homosapiens is the only species to suffer psychological exile.”

[“South,” by Natasha Trethewey, from Native Guard: Poems, published 2006 by Houghton Mifflin.]

Thank you.  

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