Natasha Trethewey Quotes & Sayings (Page 5)

“My parents had to go to Ohio to get married in 1965 because it was still illegal in Mississippi. My white father and black mother.”

“Often people would mistake me for white when I was younger, and I didn't correct them; there would be a period of time that they just thought I was.”

“Poetry's a thing that belongs to everyone.”

“When you begin to think about the past, you realize how much of it is lost to us.”

“'Memory.' 'Race.' 'Murder.' That's what they say about me. I am an elegiac poet. I have some historical questions, and I'm grappling with ways to make sense of history; why it still haunts us in our most intimate relationships with each other, but also in our political decisions.”

“When I was born here in Gulfport in 1966, my parents' interracial marriage was still illegal, and it was very hard to drive around town with my parents, to be out in public with my parents.”

“When I was growing up there, North Gulfport was referred to as 'Little Vietnam' because of the perception of crime and depravity within its borders - as if its denizens were simply a congregation of the downtrodden.”

“When I'm actually writing by hand, I get more of a sense of the rhythm of sentences, of syntax. The switch to the computer is when I actually start thinking about lines. That's the workhorse part. At that point, I'm being more mathematical about putting the poem on the page and less intuitive about the rhythm of the syntax.”

“As much as we love each other, there is some growing difficulty in my adult relationship with my father. Because we're both writers, we're having a very intimate conversation in a very public forum.”

“Because I'm a younger laureate, it seemed important to me to do something - not to just accept the honor of the position, but actually to make it useful. It's hard though, I think, to come up with a good, meaningful project, because my predecessors have done amazing projects: Robert Pinsky's 'Favorite Poem' project is one of my favorite projects.”