12 Jun 2012 09:42:11
Natasha Trethewey, a 46-year-old poet whose work "digs beneath the surface of history" to "explore the human struggles that we all face", has been named America's 19th poet laureate.
An English and creative writing professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Trethewey is the first African American to hold the post since Rita Dove in 1993, and the first southerner since Robert Penn Warren. She won the Pulitzer prize for her third collection, Native Guard, which explores the racial legacy of the American civil war as well as the author's own childhood as the daughter of a black woman and a white man in "Mississippi, state that made a crime // of me –mulatto, half-breed, native – / in my native land, this place they'll bury me".
The poet succeeds Philip Levine as laureate, joining an impressive roster of former laureates which also includes Charles Simic and Louise Glück. Librarian of Congress James Billington called her "an outstanding poet/historian", whose "poems dig beneath the surface of history – personal or communal, from childhood or from a century ago – to explore the human struggles that we all face".
Trethewey's first collection, Domestic Work, was published in 2000, based on photographs of poor black Americans at work in the pre-civil rights 20th century, as well as her own family memories. A 1902 picture of washerwomen saw Trethewey write:
But in this photograph,
women do not smile,
their lips a steady line
connecting each quiet face.
They walk the road toward home,
a week's worth of take-in laundry
balanced on their heads
lightly as church hats. Shaded
by their loads, they do not squint,
their ready gaze through him,
to me, straight ahead.
The debut won her the inaugural Cave Canem poetry prize, and Dove wrote of it that "Trethewey eschews the Polaroid instant, choosing to render the unsuspecting yearnings and tremulous hopes that accompany our most private thoughts – reclaiming for us that interior life where the true self flourishes and to which we return, in solitary reverie, for strength".
The writer first turned to poetry when she was in college, after her mother was killed by her stepfather. "I started writing poems as a response to that great loss, much the way that people responded, for example, after 9/11," she told the Associated Press.
"People who never had written poems or turned much to poetry turned to it at that moment because it seems like the only thing that can speak the unspeakable." She writes in the poem Myth: "In dreams you live. So I try taking // you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning, /my eyes open, I find you do not follow. / Again and again, this constant forsaking."
Trethewey's fourth collection, Thrall, is out later this year. "I heard in her voice a classical quality that can speak to the widest possible audience," Billington said. She will take up her post this autumn, and will live in Washington DC from January to May when she will work in the Library of Congress's poets room, the first laureate to do so since the position was created in 1986.
