Natasha Trethewey Quotes & Sayings (Page 4)

“The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.”

“When kids look at broccoli, they call it 'little trees,' because they see it not just for the word 'broccoli.' They see it for what it looks like, the image. We, as adults, forget to think like that. We forget to think figuratively and have to be reminded.”

“Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it.”

“I want to be the best advocate and promoter for poetry that I can be.”

“I've been most happy to be an advocate for the kinds of grassroots things that people are doing who care about poetry.”

“It took me years of attempts and failed drafts before I finally wrote the elegies I needed to write.”

“My mother and my father divorced during the time that my father was getting his Ph.D. at Tulane.”

“From the catbird seat, I've found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in America.”

“I find myself frequently introducing myself to someone, saying that, you know, I've grown up black and biracial in the United States.”

“My father is a poet, my stepmother is a poet, and so I always had encouragement as a child to write.”