We enter into Natasha Trethewey’s extraordinary “Monument: Poems New and Selected” by way of these lines from “The Great City” by Walt Whitman: “Where no monuments exist to heroes but in the common words and deeds...”
Monuments have been in the center of much public debate recently, in particular monuments that glorify the Confederacy and/or uphold ideas of white supremacy. Recall the rancor surrounding the removal last year of the Stephen Foster statue in front of the Carnegie Museum in Oakland.
Right out of the gate, Ms. Trethewey asks the reader to reconsider what a monument is, what values it extols and whose ideology it serves. Walt Whitman served as a volunteer nurse in Washington, D.C., for several years during the Civil War. Statuary celebrating the deeds of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee probably would not rate highly with old Uncle Walt.
It is fitting that Ms. Trethewey was named the inaugural Duquesne University August Wilson House Fellow. Her work, much like Mr. Wilson’s plays, seeks to illuminate the lives of black Americans experiencing the pressure of historical forces over time. In her speech at the 22nd Heinz Awards she put it this way: “In my work I examine the intersections of public and personal history, cultural and historical memory, amnesia and erasure.”
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ($26).
Ms. Trethewey served two terms as United States Poetry Laureate from 2012 to 2014. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2007 for her collection “Native Guard.”
“Monument: Poems New and Selected” is divided into sections representing work from each of Ms. Trethewey’s previously published collections with a small offering of new poems at the end. She has chosen to post the poem “Imperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath” as a guard outside the main body of the book. Consider this poem a lens through which the reader is encouraged to understand all of the following work.
Ms. Trethewey was born in Mississippi to a white father and a black mother before the Loving v. Virginia ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws. The couple divorced when she was 6. Her mother was murdered by Ms. Trethewey’s stepfather in 1985.
“Imperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath” includes the lines “Try to forget the first / trial, before she was dead, when the charge / was only attempted murder” as well as:
Ask yourself what’s in your heart, that
reliquary — blood locket and seedbed — and
contend with what it means, the folk saying
you learned from a Korean poet in Seoul:
that one does not bury the mother’s body
in the ground but in the chest, or — like you —
you carry her corpse on your back.
The poems which follow question the systems both legal and cultural which failed her mother, and interrogate “that / reliquary—blood locket and seedbed” we call America.
Her poems range around through history, our shared story as a nation under threat from erasure. The poem “Southern History” directly addresses the whitewashing:
Before the war, they were happy, he said,
quoting our textbook. (This was senior-year
history class.) The slaves were clothed, fed,
and better off under a master’s care.
I watched the words blur on the page. No one
raised a hand, disagreed. Not even me.
Who has ownership over history is a theme which repeats throughout Ms. Trethewey’s work. It becomes uncomfortably personal in the poem “Duty” where her father controls a family story:
When he tells the story now
he’s at the center of it,
everyone else in the house
falling into the backdrop—
my mother, grandmother,
an uncle, all dead now—props
It’s not lost on the reader that the father is white, while the mother, grandmother, and uncle, the “props,” are black.
In that same speech from the Heinz Awards, Ms. Trethewey references W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” by quoting the line “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” She then says of herself, “Likewise my native land, my South, my Mississippi with its brutal history of racism, violence, and injustice inflicted my first wound.”
As the inaugural August Wilson Fellow, Ms. Trethewey will read her poems at PNC Recital Hall, Mary Pappert School of Music at Duquesne University at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, March 20, followed by a reception at 6 p.m. where she will sign copies of her book. It is free and open to the public.
Ms. Tretheway will read poems from “Monument” at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh-Hill District from 4-5 p.m. on Thursday. The event will be hosted by Terri Baltimore, Director of Community Engagement at the Hill House and PG columnist Tony Norman. This event is free and open to the public.
On Friday from 1-3 p.m., Ms. Tretheway will deliver a talk “You Are Not Safe in Science; You Are Not Safe in History; On Abiding Metaphors and Finding a Calling” at the Power Center Ballroom, Duquesne University. This event is free and open to the public, but an RSVP is required (https://form.jotform.com/90563667884978)
Kristofer Collins is the Books Editor at Pittsburgh Magazine.
First Published: March 19, 2019, 12:00 p.m.