The Red and Black

Issue date: 1/17/08 Section: News

Media Credit: SARA GUEVARA 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey cheers on the Dogs before reading from her poetry book. Trethewey is a former captain of the University cheerleading squad. [Click to enlarge]

Media Credit: SARA GUEVARA Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey, a University alumna, reads from her book "Native Guard" on Wednesday in the Student Learning Center. [Click to enlarge]

Poets may no longer be celebrities in America, but 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and University alumna Natasha Trethewey stood before a crowded lecture hall on Wednesday to read from her latest collection, "Native Guard."

A woman on the front row stood to take Trethewey's coat as she entered the room. Several others approached her, shaking her hand and praising her work. Flashes from three different photographers flooded her with pulses of light.

Trethewey, who earned a bachelor's degree in English, was also the captain of the University Cheerleading Squad.

After completing her postgraduate studies, Trethewey held teaching positions at Auburn University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University. She holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair and is a professor of poetry at Emory University.

The reading was sponsored by the Georgia Review. Stephen Corey, the publication's editor, gave opening remarks and introduced Trethewey to the audience and welcomed her back to Athens, a place she said "meant a lot to me during my development as a poet."

The first poem Trethewey read was "Native Guard," the title poem of her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection. The poem is a series of journal entries written by one of Louisiana's Native Guard, the first officially-sanctioned black regiment of the Union Army. Though the character of this poem is fictional, the historical events he writes of, Trethewey made clear, are real.

She said a University history class she took as a freshman was one of her first inspirations.

"I became very fascinated with the intersection of our public and private histories," she said.

Trethewey's lyrical ability and passion for the past generates a hybrid of art and historical fact.

After finishing her first poem, she said, "In a way, this book is also about my relationship with myself."

"Theories of Time and Space," her second poem, discusses her birthplace of Gulfport, Miss., and her return home.

Many of the remaining selections focused on Trethewey's childhood in Mississippi.

In "Miscegenation," Trethewey reflects on her birth and how, in 1965, her black mother and white father broke two laws in the state of Mississippi simply by conceiving her.

She expressed the uncertainty and confusion felt by a biracial child growing up in a place that refused to acknowledge her legitimacy. The impact childhood in the South in the 1960s had on Trethewey was a consistent theme through her final readings, and the epitaph of her last poem was revealing.

She read words written by E.O. Wilson and printed above the beginning of the last poem, "Homo Sapiens is the only species to suffer psychological exile."

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools