POEMS

I do not read enough poetry. I really have no good reason why. It has simply been by default, as I love and relish novels so much. But this week, I was intrigued by an interview with our country's newly named poet laureate, Natasha Trethewey, in Garden & Gun Magazine.

First things first, though. You will do well to seek out and read this publication if you have not already. Do not let the name of this periodical fool you; it is about far more than gardens and guns. The title aptly encompasses the magazine's focus on all we can appreciate about living in the South: good food, clean, quiet living, the sporting life, and the outdoors. I never believed it would be possible for me to love a magazine, but this one is a treasure. Everything about it smacks of the highest quality, from the paper it is printed on to the level of writing and the stunning photography found on every page. Just when you think it is getting ready to cross the line into haughty pretentiousness, you will come across something that delves into the complexities of the South in an unadulterated way, while at the same time expressing completely the very deep sense of place that connects people in this part of the country. And they cover it all--arts, books, music, food, travel, even current and weightier issues of conservation and environmentalism. The arrival of each new issue to our mailbox always brings me to the same conundrum. Do I devour it right away or mete it out a little at a time in order to savor it?

You can explore Garden & Gun and read the article about Natasha Trethewey here. What stood out for me were a couple of her responses that spoke to many of the things I have written about here of late regarding the natures of memory and fiction.

It's so necessary to try and record the cultural memory of people. To set it down for generations to come. To better understand where we are headed. The problem is, a good portion of what we choose to remember is about willed forgetting. Which we all do, I believe, to protect ourselves from what is too difficult.
 

Even as I think of myself as a rememberer, I also know my memory is probably doing all this work to reconstruct a narrative where I come off better. In my new book, Thrall, there is a poem, "Calling," where I am dealing with these ideas. Why not make a fiction of the mind's fictions? My earliest memory from childhood, I don't know whether it is real or a conglomeration, and I have to challenge the nature of it. And explore why I've kept what I've kept.
 

Some things get rehearsed. Some get revised. What part is something I know myself? And what part has been given to me? It is wise for people to acknowledge that. That what we think we know as fact is probably not. And that's where some of the best writing comes from. You try to convince, but even as you are doing the convincing, you recognize that you are untrustworthy.
 

The same day I read her interview, I went to the library to find as much of Trethewey's work as I could. In reading her collection called Bellocq's Ophelia, in which she imagines the letters and words of a mulatto prostitute in New Orleans at the beginning of the twentieth century, I was reminded of the gifts poetry gives us. One of those gifts is something I love most about literary fiction--the possibility of stumbling upon a unique marriage of words otherwise unimagined. Things like this from her poem February 1911,

Only my shivering
and the chattering of my teeth
jar me back, my skin gooseflesh,
the Braille text of my future.
 

Or a small phrase like " . . . dredges the silt of my memory . . ." from another, an example of the ability of ordinary words to be molded together to form something entirely new and exceedingly vivid. There is also, of course, the unstructured freedom poetry offers for exploring the unlimited and magical possibilities of rhythm in language. Reading Trethewey's work has allowed me to renew once again my appreciation for the craft of writing--the seemingly simple act of arranging and rearranging letters into words into sentences into a living, breathing whole, something that we could not see before.