Saturday, 9 June 2012

New U.S. poet laureate is Hollins University alumna - www.roanoke.com

As a child, when Natasha Trethewey grew restless during a long drive, her father had a unique way of alleviating boredom. He'd tell her to take some notes about what she saw and write a poem.

"Poetry was always a way that he was getting me to examine the world," she said.

On Thursday, the Library of Congress appointed Trethewey, 46, the 19th U.S. Poet Laureate. She's already the poet laureate of Mississippi, and she'll be first person to serve as a state and national laureate at once.

"It seems even more exciting than when she won the Pulitzer," said her father, Eric Trethewey, an English professor at Hollins University.

Natasha Trethewey earned her master's degree in creative writing at Hollins in 1991, and this past spring she returned to the campus as the 2012 Louis D. Rubin writer-in-residence.

"The students were totally over the moon to be able to work with her even before this happened," said Cathryn Hankla, director of the university's Jackson Center for Creative Writing.

Trethewey is the first Hollins alumna to become the U.S. poet laureate, and one of three to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Hankla characterized Trethewey's poetry as concerned with memory, "both personal and cultural."

In announcing her appointment, Librarian of Congress James Billington said Trethewey's poems dig deep into communal history, and her own history, to "explore the human struggles that we all face."

It's hard to imagine a more dramatic history than the Trethewey family's story.

Eric Trethewey met Gwendolyn Turnbough while they were both college students in Kentucky. She was black, he was white, and it was illegal for them to marry. They wed in Cincinnati and returned to the South, eventually moving to Mississippi, which also barred interracial marriage. Eric Trethewey has said the Ku Klux Klan once burned a cross on their lawn.

They divorced when Natasha still was a child. Her mother moved to Atlanta, her father to New Orleans. He came to Hollins in 1984.

In 1985, when Natasha Trethewey was a freshman at the University of Georgia, her mother was shot and killed by her stepfather. She turned to poetry as a way to cope with her loss.

"When you're wounded in some deep place, the pain has to go somewhere and frequently it goes into writing," her father said.

Accounts of her career commonly credit her mother's death as the turning point that made her a poet. The truth is more complex, she said. "I was writing poetry long before I had to turn to it find the eloquent language I needed to deal with my grief."

"When she was a little girl, even in grammar school, she was writing poems, winning awards, getting published," her father said. An accomplished poet himself, he wanted her to follow in his footsteps. "I did everything in my power to make it happen," including urging her to enroll in the Hollins creative writing program.

"My time at Hollins has meant absolutely the world to me," she said. "It was the place that I think made me a writer."

While there, she took her father's poetry class. Even though he'd been encouraging her to write poems all her life, she benefited even more learning from him formally, she said.

Since then, she has written four books of poetry that take unflinching looks at the history of race in America, including "Native Guard," which won the 2006 Pulitzer for poetry, and "Bellocq's Ophelia," which Hollins Theatre director Ernie Zulia and English professor T.J. Anderson adapted into a stage play that debuted at the university in February.

A professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Trethewey loved having the chance to return to Hollins for the play. "It was like just going back to that wonderful, magical place ?? it feels like both a homecoming and a place I've never really left."

At the Lex Allen Literary Festival at Hollins in March, she read poems from her forthcoming collection, "Thrall," which directly addresses being a child of mixed race with a white father. Eric Trethewey said that though some of the poems were uncomfortable for him to listen to, both he and she try to make their poems "as true as possible."

They share the same approach to poetry. "We both are firmly agreed that poems ought to make sense, they ought to be lyrical, they ought to be intellectually accessible and emotionally moving to the reader," he said.

Natasha Trethewey couldn't tell her father about the laureate appointment until Wednesday when he arrived in Atlanta for a visit. She's known since May 9 but was sworn to secrecy. "It's been killing me."

When her term starts in September, she'll be the first poet laureate to reside in Washington, D.C., and work out of the library's Poetry Room. She said that she looks to previous laureates such as Robert Pinsky and Billy Collins as models for what she'll do in the post.

Pinsky created a "Favorite Poem Project" that asked people to record themselves reading and discussing poems, while Collins created "Poetry 180" that brought poetry readings to high schools. "I am hoping to come up with something that best suits my abilities to bring poetry to a larger audience," she said.

Her father said his daughter "has a powerful sense of having a responsibility as a poet, a moral and political responsibility to speak out about important things. I think we'll hear a lot from her in this position."

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