Tuesday, February 28, 2006. "Poetry and the (M)uses of History: Narrating Women's Lives," Natasha Trethewey.

MS. BRIZENDINE: Good morning. With great anticipation for our morning session, I'll offer the morning poem and then pass it on to Jill, who's doing the introduction.

This poem is by Sharon Olds, and it's from her first collection, called "Satan Says." It's called, "The Mother."

MS. MUTI: It's a distinct pleasure to be able to introduce Natasha Trethewey this morning. We have been honored already by hearing a piece of her work which was dedicated to Bodie, but Natasha is the author of "Bellocq's Ophelia," which was printed by Graywolf in 2002, and "Domestic Work," from 2000, which won the 1999 Cave Canem prize.

Her third collection, "Native Guard," is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the Bunting Fellowship program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

Her poems have appeared in such journals and anthologies as American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Best American Poetry 2000 and 2003.

An associate professor of English and creative writing at Emory University, she is the Lehman-Brady joint chair professor in documentary studies and American studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for this school year. Please welcome Natasha Trethewey.

MS. TRETHEWEY: Good morning. It's a pleasure really to have this opportunity to present some of my work today. I'm going to read from all three of my collections, including the new book, Native Guard, and talk a bit with you about my theme, "Poetry and the (M)uses of History: Scaffolding, Restoration, and Monument."

Writing about poetry, James Longenbach declared, "In addition to being many other things, poems are statements about our place in the world and like every other act of communication, they are historical."

Similarly, in his 1919 essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T.S. Eliot declared that the historical sense is indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his 25th year; and the historical sense involves a perception not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.

Both of these writers are suggesting a kind of scaffolding that history provides for poems -- not only as knowledge of the literature of the past and its influence upon us, but also as an awareness of history, of past events and their lingering effects on the present.

According to Joel Brouwer, however, in an essay entitled "Clio Rising," from Parnassus: Poetry in Review, "20th century American poets tend to write exclusively from their immediate experience and rarely admit a larger context, much less write on historical subjects."

By history, Brouwer means collective social public history. Citing several poets who are exceptions: Rita Dove, Carolyn Forche, Michael S. Harper, Andrew Hudgins, Philip Levine, Ellen Bryant Voigt, he reminds us that they were only exceptions. "As a rule," Brouwer concludes, "the muse of history wields little influence over contemporary American poetry."

In my own work, I see writing with the muse of history as a way of expanding subject matter, a way to move beyond immediate experience in order to discover the larger implications of our lives within the continuum of history, a way to enlarge the private moment by placing it in a broader context. And because I continue to be interested in the intersections and contentions between personal and public memory -- personal history versus public history -- I'm drawn to the ways in which public history can contextualize the exploration of issues of the self, of one's personal history.

When I set out to write my first collection, "Domestic Work," I was interested in trying to narrate the life of my maternal grandmother, Leretta Dixon Turnbough, who was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1916. She's an ordinary woman with what I think is an extraordinary story, particularly as it represents our American experience. That is, her history, to use the term that Ezra Pound coined, is highlighted by luminous details, those things which describe the transcendentals in an array of facts: Not merely significant nor symptomatic in the matter of most facts but capable of giving one a sudden insight into circumjacent conditions, into their causes, their effects, into sequence, and law."

Thus, when I was narrating her life in poems, I focused on the work she had done, all the jobs she had held, from domestic worker to elevator operator, mother to hairdresser, drapery seamstress in a factory to a self-employed seamstress in her own home. To under gird these poems as scaffolding, I did a foundational kind of historical research, mainly to locate each poem in the sequence within a particular historical moment. Sometimes this historical context is suggested by a date and/or a location, suggesting something about the lives of women and African-American workers in a certain time and place such as the Jim Crow South, the Civil Rights movement, the second wave of the feminist movement. The poems in "Domestic Work" also suggest a historical scaffolding through specific references, New Deal politics, segregation, the primitive blues.

I'm going to start by reading just a bit now from Domestic Work, those poems that try to narrate my grandmother's life. This is "Domestic Work," 1937.

And this last one from Domestic Work comes out of one of my favorite stories that my grandmother ever told me, because it represents kind of ordinary acts of resistance that people do who perhaps were not part of marching on Washington or riding with the Freedom Riders, but people who find other ways to demand the kind of treatment that they deserve.

This is "Drapery Factory," Gulfport, Mississippi, 1956.

It's true. He never checked their purses again.

With my second collection, Bellocq's Ophelia, the muse of history took me in a different direction, both in terms of writing and research. Whereas I had sought to narrate a personal family story in Domestic Work, in Bellocq's Ophelia, I was interested in recovery work, or restoration. I wanted to restore to our collective memory the narratives of women whose stories had been lost or forgotten, left out of the historical record. I chose the unnamed women from E. J. Bellocq's Storyville portraits -- photographs of women in the red-light district of New Orleans, circa 1912. Thus, Ophelia is the imagined name of a very white-skinned black woman, mulatto, octoroon, or quadroon, who would have lived in one of the few "colored" brothels, such as Countess Willie Piazza's Basin Street mansion or Lula White's Mahogany Hall, which, according to the Blue Book, was known as the "Octoroon Club."

When I first saw some of these photographs, I thought immediately there was one particular photograph that reminded me of John Edward Millais' painting of Ophelia from the cover of my ninth-grade ìHamletî text, and this is how it began for me, trying to imagine a voice for the unnamed women in Storyville. So I'm going to read a little bit now from her diary that I imagine that she would have kept over a period of about a year while living in Storyville.

In my new collection, Native Guard, the restoration of narratives that have been buried or forgotten -- left out of public memory -- still undergirded my writing and research. Indeed, the title comes from the name of the first officially sanctioned regiment of African-American soldiers in the Civil War, the Louisiana Native Guards, mustered into service in September, October, and November of 1862, the second regiment stationed just off the coast of my hometown, Gulfport, Mississippi. During the war, they manned the fort on Ship Island as a prison for Confederate soldiers. Visitors to the fort today will see first the plaque placed at the entrance by the Daughters of the Confederacy listing the names of the Confederate dead, the men once interred there. Nowhere is a similar plaque memorializing the names of the Native Guards, and if tourists don't know to ask about the history of these black soldiers, most likely the park ranger will overlook this aspect of the fort's history in his tour, mentioning only that this was a fort taken over by Union forces, and that Confederate prisoners were kept there.

Even the brochures leave out any mention that the troops stationed on the island were black. Their story has been erased from the landscape and from our public memory, as well. Even now, monuments all around the South serve to inscribe a particular narrative onto the landscape, while at the same time subjugating or erasing yet another. Thus, part of this collection is an attempt to reinscribe a narrative of those forgotten soldiers into our cultural memory, to create a monument in words to this aspect of our forgotten American history.

But since we're talking about narrating women's lives here, I'm not going to read to you from that section of Native Guard. I'm going to read instead from the first section of the book, a monument in words, elegies to my mother. And finally, a few poems from the final section that stand as monument to my own relationship to the landscape and history of my South, as well as my place in it. As James Baldwin has written, "History does not refer merely or even principally to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do."

And as Faulkner says, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."

Before Amtrak took over, some of you must remember how lovely train travel could be. My mother loved train travel, and there was a train called the Southern Crescent and part of its route was between New Orleans and Atlanta. I think they still use the name, but the train is not as lovely as it used to be.

This next poem has an epigraph from Robert Herrick's poem, "Faire daffadills, we weep to see you haste away so soone."

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

My parents met at Kentucky State College, which is one of the historically all-black colleges and universities. My mother, from Mississippi, a black woman, and my father, a white man from Canada who got out a Guide to American Colleges and Universities and found one that he could afford and that would give him a track scholarship. He hitchhiked all the way down there, not knowing that it was a black college, but he stayed and there he met my mother.

Of course, they couldn't get married in Kentucky, nor could they get married in Mississippi, my mother's home state. Just a few years ago, I think around 1996, the state of Alabama decided to put to a vote whether or not to remove the antimiscegenation laws from the books. They did remove them, but about 40-some percent of the population wanted to keep those laws on the books, so that, at least symbolically, parents like mine couldn't be legally married or people like me born legitimately. This is a ghazal, and it's called "Miscegenation."

When I started writing this collection, as I mentioned, I was thinking about forgotten or buried histories, and I began doing the research about the Louisiana Native Guard. At the same time, 20 years later -- this is the 20th anniversary of my mother's death -- I was also writing these other poems, and I didn't think that I was writing the same book. I thought I was writing two different books, until something struck me that made me realize indeed why all these things were thematically linked, and that is that, 20 years later, I have yet to put a marker on my mother's grave. And we can talk later about all sorts of reasons that one might do such a thing, but when I started to write this collection, what I wanted to do was create a lyrical monument in words, as well, for her, because she had become part of the landscape's buried history, with nothing inscribing her presence. So this is "Monument."

I'm going to finish up with two poems. The first has an epigraph from Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confeerate Dead" that reads, "Now that the salt of their blood stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea."

And this last poem has an epigraph from E. O. Wilson that reads, "Homo sapiens is the only species to suffer psychological exile."

Thank you.

MS. LEE: Natasha, that was absolutely glorious. What a morning. And I think we owe her another round of applause for reading through the construction. You'll be happy to know that since Bruce is a control freak, he finally got them to stop it.

MR. GALBRAITH: Actually, Kiki Johnson, a fellow executive director, part-time educator, helped me go down to the loading dock and fix that.

MS. LEE: If you have questions, now is the time to ask them. I'll be on this side and Bruce will be on this side.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: I noticed that you spoke of a couple of poems you wrote in some of these very complex line-repeating forms, and I noticed a number of contemporary poets are doing this, almost more so than traditional rhyme. Can you talk about why you use forms like the pantoum and why you think they're coming back, so to speak?

MS. TRETHEWEY: Well, the "Blue Sonnet" and a few other things, "Elegy for the Native Guards," which I read, was also a 24-lined traditionally rhymed poem, but with the pantoum there's also the ghazal, there's also a villanelle that I didn't read. And then the sort of invented form in my poem "Myth" that just goes backwards.

It occurred to me that what was important was to say that they need to say again, because I was trying to deal with grief, but also a transformation of grief, and so that by saying and saying again, my hope is that there is that kind of transformation. The way the line reads one way, when you hear it a second time, it moves away from that initial meaning to do something else.

I also felt that it was about the need to speak certain histories into the air, those that might be lost or forgotten, and so in repeating those, repetition became a way to get those things into our cultural memory.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: We're lucky that we work with kids who can relate to much of what you are sharing, but you picked the three toughest topics that our society doesn't seem to be interested in: History, race, and poetry. I'd be curious to hear how you view that, like salmon going upstream, how you view the work you care so much about in a society that doesn't seem to care about it.

MS. TRETHEWEY: To value any of those things, yes, that is tough. Well, you know, Phil Levine once said, "I write what I have been given to write."

And I feel very much the same way, that I can't shake off the burden of history, particularly because it does exist constantly in our contemporary moment, and I'm very afraid that if we are not constantly aware of history and its lasting effects, that we'll become a people adrift, without our historical sense. And it's true that not a lot of contemporary poets approach history. That there are lots of poems out there that are so deeply personal as to be cryptic, not accessible. And I'm always interested in exploring the self. You have to have a bit of that narcissism, I suppose, to even think that you'd want to listen.

But trying to place that self in a historical context gives me a way of touching people across time and space. So I try very hard to get my students, for one, to do that. And in doing that, we might be able to help people like poetry more, too. I think what Bodie does, reading poems, is so wonderful because there has been a time where people stopped thinking that they could read a poem and enter the world of the poem, because there were poems that were so difficult as not to be accessible. And there's a lot of that still going on, coming out in programs right now. But when you think about Pinsky's favorite poem project, for example, he went around the country and found people who had had poems memorized that meant something to them, because they could understand them, because they spoke to some particular issue that was important to them, they helped us to empathize with other human beings. I think if we can remind people that poetry does that, then more people will come to poetry.

Someone said to me, "Why do we teach poetry in the university or liberal arts college?" And he said, "I don't want the standard answer."

And I thought, well, but the standard answer is one of the reasons that we do it. So I said, "Well, think about 9/11 and that outpouring of poems around the country, hundreds of thousands of poems, many of them bad, but all of them necessary, because people turned to poetry because they had no other language to describe what they felt about what happened."

And I quoted the lines from William Carlos Williams' poem that say something like, "You can't get the news from poetry, but people die every day for lack of what is found there."

And he said, "You don't really believe that, do you?"

And I said, "Yes, of course I do."

Because indeed, it's in poetry that we find empathy, compassion, a connection through communication to other human beings. And race. That's a real hard one, too. Because lots of people are tired of talking about it, but they're also tired because we haven't fixed it yet. I get students these days who have learned that somehow the Civil Rights movement fixed it, we took care of that in the '60s, and now we're done. And I don't think that that's the case.

And so what I'm interested in is a little less issues of race and more about historical memory, cultural memory, cultural amnesia, historical erasure, because I feel that the stories that I tend to tell and to uncover belong to all of us. Not that the writing about the black soldiers means I'm writing about black history. I'm writing about American history, and I'm very interested in making sure that everyone understands that these narratives belong to all of us. They're all our history, all of our stories.

Being from the South -- and I thought about this. Here I am in Charleston, a place that loves the Confederacy, reading my poems. And in my home state of Mississippi I do not want to erase those narratives. I just want to tell a fuller version of the history, to aggregate that story with another story, so we know more about ourselves as Americans.

MR. GALBRAITH: I know you teach at one of our member schools in the summer. Can you talk about what you you're seeing in our young writers? Are there trends? What's important for you in a short time going to a group of young people?

MS. TRETHEWEY: Well, on the one hand, you might see a trend, you know, the new ellipticals, lots of imagery that doesn't particularly connect to anything. Sometimes poems where there's no "there" there. But at the same time, I get a sense from the students that they want to be free to write poems that have some "there" there. Sometimes in MFA programs, it's hard, because you're a young graduate student and you're kind of -- what's the word I'm looking for? But they're just trying to create these barriers around themselves, and people do this in poems. They use language, instead of as an act of communication, as a barrier to keep people out and to hide things about themselves. I think they like being given the freedom to actually risk sentimentality and to think about those things that have mattered and interactions between human beings for a long time.

So I try to get them to write those poems that are historically situated. So if you want to explore family history, you do it by also exploring the place, time period, something that again contextualizes their experience and allows for that kind of deeply important communication that leads to empathy.

Someone once said to me -- and I cringed when I heard this -- that he was offended by the idea that either the goal or the result of art could be empathy. And I thought, what do we have if we don't have that?

MR. GALBRAITH: Will you share, if you would, what are you writing right now? Where is your "there"?

MS. TRETHEWEY: I'm writing a little bit. I have a new book in mind, a new book project. At the very beginning of a book project, I do a lot of reading and research and storing up things for the poems. So I have written the first couple of poems in a new collection.

MR. GALBRAITH: And where can we get your books?

MS. TRETHEWEY: Just about anywhere, I think. The actual publication date of my new book is March 6, but it's out. It's in bookstores. You can order it. My first two books were on Graywolf, and Graywolf was a lovely press, but one of the things that Graywolf doesn't do is hard covers, because they don't think that poetry sells, to go back to what you were saying. So they only do paperbacks. And I ended up leaving to go to Houghton Mifflin for a hardcover, so this is my first hardcover. But it meant so much to me, because it is this monument to my mother, that it needed to feel more substantial. So if you will, you know, buy the hardcover. Shameless, I know.

MR. GALBRAITH: Other questions? And where will you read next? What's coming up.

MS. TRETHEWEY: Next I read at George Washington University.

MR. GALBRAITH: Tell us about your role this year. You're in a special chair at Duke?

MS. TRETHEWEY: Yes. Again, another sort of plus for poetry. Generally the Center for Documentary Studies brings in historians or documentary filmmakers, documentary photographers. They have actually brought in a couple of fiction writers. They had Alan Gurganus there last year. I'm the first poet to go there because the director, Tom Rankin, believes that poetry can do the work of documentary and history. So I'm very happy to be there and to be teaching a class called "Poetry and the (M)use of History." Students seem to be responding really well to it, too.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Can you share some thoughts about your mother's unmarked grave?

MS. TRETHEWEY: What's so wonderful about poetry, it makes you discover things, and that's the best, when you're writing it. No discovery for the writer, no discovery for the reader. I have discovered a lot in trying to write those poems.

It's going to sound really silly, but my mother was killed by her ex-husband 20 years ago. Not my father, but my stepfather. And when she died, she had his last name, and I did not want to put those words on a monument. And I can't believe how silly I was. And I didn't want to put my last name, my father's last name, because then that would have not acknowledged my brother, who was her second child, with the new husband, who had his last name. And I couldn't think of a way to do it until recently, I realized that I could say, you know, nee Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, and just put the name that she was born with. And so now I plan to go do that. But it took me 20 years to deal with that, and it was about words. It was about language and the words that I couldn't inscribe her presence on the landscape with.

MS. BENNETT: Bruce mentions you teach high school students, as well. And I'm interested in how young you teach, and what that experience is like, as compared to college graduate students.

MS. TRETHEWEY: Well, actually the summer program that Bruce mentioned is a program for adults, but it's at Idyllwild, although I have done lots of programs with high schools in the past. I did a year-long project with Lafayette High School, in Lafayette, Alabama. It was one of those public schools that's on alert status, so they spent most of the time, as you have probably heard about, practicing for the tests and everything.

But we chose students who were going to participate in a documentary project where they were going to write poems about their hometown, and to take photographs and to do some oral history. What I found was that they were so eager to do it. And I should tell you that Lafayette High School is a primarily black high school in a small town. This is a town that had what they called segregation academies, so that once integration happened, they built these other schools with Confederate names and sent the white children.

What came out in these students writing about their hometown, I would ask them to write what you love about this place, what you hate about it. It's a really poor community, too. What they hated about it was that they weren't with the other children; that they very much wanted to be together, and they knew that there was something not right about them not being together. And they found countless ways in what they were doing to talk about that.

MS. LEE: No more questions?

MR. GALBRAITH: Do you have an encore? A closing poem? Do you have a goodbye sendoff?

MS. TRETHEWEY: I have got a perfect one and I'll stand down here and read it. Just again about my obsession with history.

MS. LEE: Well, after all that beauty, I really don't want to say anything, but I have to tell you that Bruce would like your name tags back, if you're leaving, and I wish I could say this in poetry. We need you to fill out your evaluation forms.

Natasha, it just takes words away from the rest of us to hear you read, and we're so lucky that you said yes to our request. Thank you so much again.

We have a 30-minute break now. Please come back at 10:15.