During her younger years, Natasha Trethewey wrote only fiction, not poetry. But that changed after her mother was murdered by an abusive second husband in 1985. Trethewey was 19 years old at the time.
“It seemed to me that poetry was the only way to reckon with that loss and what I was feeling.”
The poem “What is Evidence” is from “Native Guard,” the collection of Trethewey’s poems that earned her the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. It brings to mind images of the abuse her mother suffered before she was killed.
Not the fleeting bruises she’d cover
with makeup, a dark patch as if imprint
of a scope she’d pressed her eye too close to,
looking for a way out, nor the quiver
in the voice she’d steady, leaning/ into a pot of bones on the stove …
… Only the landscape of her body - splintered
clavicle, pierced temporal - her thin bones
settling a bit each day, the way all things do.
The Poet Laureate understands that many Americans think of poetry as overly complex, unclear, and self-involved. Growing up, she says, she did too.
“I couldn't enter the world of the poem and find myself inside of it. But then there was a particular poem that spoke to me at some point in my life and I realized it was just about finding the right poems.”
For Trethewey, the “right poem” was W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts.”
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2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
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2013-11-25