In Which I Discuss the Poet Laureate

Natasha Trethewey is the US Poet Laureate for 2012-2013; she was named in June of this year. In April, she came to Iowa City as the Poet Laureate of Mississippi, as a Pulitzer Prize winner, and I attended a reading she gave.I liked her poetry, her smooth Southern drawl. But it took finding out that she had been named US Poet Laureate to get me to read some of her work. I picked up Native Guard, the collection of poems for which she was awarded the Pulitzer at a reading last night. I started reading after my 10:30 class finished--I read it through, then read it through again. I did not think it possible to say so much so coherently in only 46 pages--26 poems--3 sections--one remarkable work. Trethewey weaves her process of grieving the death of her mother into the narrative of a group of freed slaves who join the Union Army during the Civil War and produced a biting commentary on the tensions of race in Mississippi. There is one particular poem that floored me. It is in the third section, after she cleans out her mother's house, after the hard slog of the Native Guard. The repetition of the line ends is haunting. Is it too much? Or is exactly right? What exactly does her name mean to her, in the context of where she was born, where she lives now? Look at the consonance in the sixth line: slaves, slicing, glaze, leaving. The 'l' is a harsh sound here, not rolling or slick. Harsh and melancholy. And when the punctuation changes in the fifth stanza. Both lines are complete ideas. Are those facts, when she was born and how she was named, really certain? I would say that the use of self-enclosed lines tries to make it so, tries to convince us, but everything is thrown off by the last stanza. Natasha--the Russian name, meaning Christmas child, even in Mississippi. That throws a whole new layer of uncertainty over the identity of the poem's persona... I love that this gives me something beautiful to chew on...

Miscegenation

In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;
they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.

They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name
begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong--mis in Mississippi.

A year later they move to Canada, followed a route the same
as slaves, the train slicing the white glaze of winter, leaving Mississippi.

Faulkner's Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus, given his name
for the day he was left at the orphanage, his race unknown in Mississippi.

My father was reading War and Peace when he gave me my name.
I was born near Easter, 1966, in Mississippi.

When I turned 33 my father said, It's your Jesus year--you're the same
age he was when he died. It was spring, the hills green in Mississippi.

I know more than Joe Christmas did. Natasha is a Russian name--
though I'm not; it means Christmas child, even in Mississippi.

Natasha Trethewey
From Native Guard