>> Carla Hayden: Hello.
I'm Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress.
Welcome to our ceremony for the 2020 Rebekah
Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry.
This prize carries a $10,000 award and
recognizes a recent American book of poetry
or the lifetime achievement of an American poet.
This year, both honor are being awarded
for third time in the prize's history.
This prize is particularly special to me.
During the 1930s, Lyndon B. Johnson's sister,
Rebekah, met O.P. Bobbitt when they worked
in the cataloguing department
here at the Library of Congress.
The two were poetry lovers in every sense.
O.P. wooed Rebekah with poems typed on cards.
His taste in poetry must have been pretty
good because the two were soon married.
And in memory of Rebekah, O.P. and his
son, Philip, established this prize,
which has been awarded at the
Library of Congress since 1990.
I'm grateful to Philip Bobbitt for
his continuing support of this prize,
and I'm pleased that he could join us today
to tell us more about the prize's back story.
>> Philip C. Bobbitt: Thank you, Dr. Hayden.
This is the 30th year of the Rebekah
Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry.
It came about in this way.
After my mother's death, I discovered in
her writing desk a cache of old index cards
with holes drilled through them with
scraps of poetry and lofty quotations.
My father explained that these were exchanged
as surreptitious notes under the eyes
of a watchful supervisor
at the Library of Congress
where my parents worked their
way through college.
These notes were really origin of this prize.
For 16 evenings, we have met at the Library
to honor my mother and the splendid winners,
and I have spoken a bit about my family and
the prize, which this year I must do remotely.
When life returns to something like normal, I
have no doubt that there will be two somewhere
in the building exchanging notes, probably
by email or Zoom, evading their supervisors,
and I like to think that
the prize honors them too.
>> Carla Hayden: Thank you.
I'm now honored and thrilled to bestow the
2020 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize
for poetry on two of our nation's finest poets,
Terrance Hayes, for the best book of poetry
in 2018, 2019, and Natasha
Trethewey, for lifetime achievement.
I'd like to thank the distinguished
jurors who helped me reach my decision.
Former Indiana Poet Laureate, Adrian Matejka,
along with poet and former executive director
of the Poetry Society of America, Elise Paschen,
selected by current Poet Laureate Joy Harjo,
and scholar, Betty Sue Flowers,
selected by the Bobbitt family.
I want to extend a special thanks to
Betty Sue, who has generously served
on every Bobbitt prize jury since 2008.
The Bobbitt jury declared that Terrance
Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past
and Future Assassin" published by Penguin books
in 2018 transforms the classic art in poetics
in unexpected and timely ways that transform our
understanding of both our history and ourselves.
American Sonnets received the 2019
Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award
for Poetry and was a finalist
for numerous prizes.
Terrance's other honors include a National
Book Award, the Whiting Writers Award,
and NAACP Image Award for Poetry, and a
Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism as well
as fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Our second honoree for lifetime
achievement is Natasha Trethewey.
We know Natasha very well because she served
as the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2012 until 2014.
She is receiving the Bobbitt Lifetime
Achievement Award for her extraordinary body
of work, including five collections
of poetry and two books of nonfiction.
She served two terms as the 19th Poet
Laureate of the United States during
which she launched her signature project
where poetry lives with the PBS News Hour.
Natasha's latest book is Memorial
Drive, a Daughter's Memoir.
The Bobbitt jury noted that Natasha's
latest poetry collection, Monument,
Poems New and Selected, reveals
the arc of her poems
as a poignant and compelling new narrative.
This 2018 collection illuminates her
far-reaching range while also serving
as a testament to the integrity
of her poetic vision.
Congratulations to Terrance Hayes and Natasha
Trethewey for your well-deserved honors.
The conferring of the Bobbitt
prizes always includes a reading.
Just because we're in a virtual world doesn't
mean we will break with that tradition.
Natasha, can we pleased hear some
poems from throughout your career?
>> Natasha Trethewey: Over the
course of my career this far,
I've been guided by my abiding obsessions,
which arise from two existential wounds
bound together by history and place.
In his memorial to William Butler Yeats, W.H.
Auden wrote, "Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry."
Likewise, my native land, my south,
my Mississippi with its brutal history
of racial violence and oppression, the ongoing
manifestations of our nation's original sins
of slavery and white supremacy hurt me
into poetry, inflicting my first wound.
When I was born in Mississippi in
1966 on Confederate Memorial Day,
exactly 100 years to the day that
holiday glorifying the lost cause
and white supremacy was first celebrated, my
parent's interracial marriage was illegal there
and as many as 20 states in the
nation, rendering me illegitimate
in the eyes of the law, persona non grata.
My deeper wound came later when I was 19.
I'm going to read a few poems that trace the arc
of my inextricably linked concerns,
the bedrock of why I write.
As Federico Garcia Lorca wrote, "the duende
has to be roused from the furthest habitations
of the blood and in trying to heal the wound
that never heals lies the strangeness."
This is 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 moved 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.
I wrote my retrospective Monument.
Putting it together was a way for me
to make sense of this arc of my career
and the things that made me a writer.
And so, it begins with this poem.
It's called Imperatives for
Carrying On in the Aftermath.
Do not hang your head or clench your fists when
even your friend, after hearing the story, says,
My mother would never put up with that.
Fight the urge to rattle off
statistics that, more often,
a woman who chooses to leave is then murdered.
The hundredth time your father
says, but she hated violence,
why would she marry a guy like that?
Don't waste your breath explaining,
again, how abusers wait, are patient,
that they don't beat you on the first date,
sometimes not even the first
few years of a marriage.
Keep an impassive face whenever you hear
Stand By Your Man, and let go your rage
when you recall those words
were advice given your mother.
Try to forget the first trial, before she was
dead, when the charge was only attempted murder;
don't belabor the thinking or the sentence that
allowed her ex-husband's release a year later,
or the juror who said, It's a domestic
issue -- they should work it out themselves.
Just breathe when, after you read
your poems about grief, a woman asks,
do you think your mother was weak for men?
Learn to ignore subtext.
Imagine a thought cloud above your head,
dark and heavy with the words you
cannot say; let silence rain down.
Remember you were told, by your famous
professor, that you should write
about something else, unburden
yourself of the death of your mother
and just pour your heart out in the poems.
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.
This next poem is a poem that
I dedicated to my father.
I had to have a very difficult conversation
with my father in a very public way
in the only language that he would listen
to, and that is the language of poetry.
Enlightenment.
In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs
at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned,
his forehead white with illumination -- a
lit bulb -- the rest of his face in shadow,
darkened as if the artist meant to contrast
his bright knowledge, its dark subtext.
By 1805, when Jefferson sat for the portrait, he
was already linked to an affair with his slave.
Against a backdrop, blue and ethereal, a wash
of paint that seems to hold him in relief,
Jefferson gazes out across the centuries,
his lips fixed as if he's
just uttered some final word.
The first time I saw the painting, I listened
as my father explained the contradictions,
how Jefferson hated slavery, though
-- out necessity, my father said --
had to own slaves; that his moral philosophy
meant he could not have fathered those children,
would have been impossible, my father said.
For years we debated the
distance between word and deed.
I'd follow my father from book to book,
gathering citations, listening as he named --
like a field guide to Virginia -- - each flower
and tree and bird as if to prove a man's pursuit
of knowledge is greater than his
shortcomings, the limits of his vision.
I did not know then the subtext of our story,
that my father could imagine Jefferson's
words made flesh in my flesh --
the improvement of the blacks in body and
mind, in the first instance of their mixture
with the whites -- or that my father
could believe he'd made me better.
When I think of this now, I see how the past
holds us captive, its beautiful ruin etched
on the mind's eye, my young father, a
rough outline of the old man he's become,
needing to show me the better measure of his
heart, an equation writ large at Monticello.
That was years ago.
Now, we take in how much has
changed, talk of Sally Hemings,
someone asking, how white was she?
Parsing the fractions as if to name what
made her worthy of Jefferson's attentions,
a near-white, quadroon mistress,
not a plain black slave.
Imagine stepping back into the
past, our guide tells us then --
and I can't resist whispering to my
father, this is where we split up.
I'll head around to the back.
When he laughs, I know he's grateful I've made
a joke of it, this history that links us --
white father, black daughter -- even
as it renders us other to each other.
And this last poem is the
last in my retrospective
in which I tried to say it plainly.
It's after a painting, Miguel Cabrera's
portrait of Saint Gertrude from 1763.
Articulation.
In the legend, Saint Gertrude
is called to write after seeing,
in a vision, the sacred heart of Christ.
Cabrera paints her among the instruments
of her faith, quill, inkwell, an open book,
rings on her fingers like Christ's many
wounds, the heart emblazoned on her chest,
the holy infant nestled there
as if sunk deep in a wound.
Against the dark backdrop,
her face is a wafer of light.
How not to see, in the saint's image, my
mother's last portrait, the dark backdrop,
her dress black as a habit, the bright edge
of her afro ringing her face with light?
And how not to recall her many
wounds, ring finger shattered,
her ex-husband's bullet finding her temple,
lodging where her last thought lodged?
Three weeks gone, my mother came to
me in a dream, her body whole again
but for one perfect wound, the singular
articulation of all of them, a hole,
center of her forehead, the size
of a wafer, light pouring from it.
How, then, could I not answer her life
with mine, she who saved me with hers?
And how could I not, bathed in the light
of her wound, find my calling there?
Thanks.
>> Terrance Hayes: I really almost
just want to talk about Natasha.
It's such a great honor to be here with her.
She started reading, and I was
like, okay, what am I going to read?
And then, that voice, you know, it just
always lures you back in to its power.
So, I could just listen to you all day, Natasha.
So, okay, so let me talk about this book.
I want to say, first of all, you
know, I mostly am just trying to write
to get, you know, get the day down.
So, I'm not always happy to write about
the distractions that keep me from just,
you know, listening to the world.
So, about four years ago in November, the
election certainly was a volume that hit me
that made me start writing these
poems that have been honored here,
and so, I'm going to read some of them.
This first poem that I'm going to read
you, which is on the back of the book,
is the poem I wrote right around this time.
I think I had written a few.
I literally started the day after the
election was called, but at some point,
I began asking myself, you
know, what is it that I'm doing.
And so, I have a series of
poems over this two-year period
where I just kind of define why I'm doing this.
So, this is the one that I put on the back
of the book to kind of signal its role.
It's really trying to define
the American Sonnet.
American Sonnet from My Past
and Future Assassin.
I lock you in an American sonnet that
is part prison, part panic closet,
a little room in a house set aflame.
I lock you in a form that is part music box,
part meat grinder to separate the
song of the bird from the bone.
I lock your persona in a dream-inducing
sleeper hold while your better selves watch
from the bleachers.
I make you both gym and crow here.
As the crow, you undergo a beautiful catharsis
trapped one night in the shadows of the gym.
As the gym, the feel of crow shit dropping to
your floors is not unlike the stars falling
from the pep rally posters on your walls.
I make you a box of darkness
with a bird in its heart.
Voltas of acoustics, instinct and metaphor.
It is not enough to love you.
It is not enough to want you destroyed.
So, all of the poems are really trying to get
at that kind of ambiguity that I think many
of us maybe feel all the time in the country,
certainly recently, whatever your recent is,
if that's four years, two years, one year, 2020,
that question of should it be
destroyed, should it be rebuilt.
The ambiguity that comes from a place which you
feel like you have some deep relationship to
and also just deeply confused
by a lot of the time.
So, the poem that I put in the front of the book
that opens the book, also called American Sonnet
from My Past and Future Assassin and going
at that ambiguity of the love gesture
in a sonnet toward someone who
seems to be trying to wipe you out.
And again, you can hear maybe the ambiguity
in this one, but this too is also trying
to define what is it I'm trying to do in
this period of these poems being written.
American Sonnet from My Past
and Future Assassin.
The black poet would love to say his century
began with Hughes or, God forbid, Wheatley,
but actually it began with all the poetry
weirdos and worriers, warriors, poetry whiners
and winos falling from ship
bows, sunset Bridges and windows.
In a second I'll tell you
how little writing rescues.
My hunch is that Sylvia Plath
was not especially fun company.
A drama queen, thin-skinned, and skittery,
she thought her poems were ordinary.
What do you call a visionary who
does not recognize her vision?
Orpheus was alone when he invented writing.
His manic chatter, his manic
drawing became a kind of writing
when he sent his beloved a sketch of
an eye with an X struck through it.
He meant I am blind without you.
She thought he meant I never
want to see you again.
It is possible he meant that, too.
So, In this context, maybe you hear, again, this
question, sort of reading between the lines,
trying to do things from different
angles, and even sort of going
against certain kinds of
expectations in the poems.
So, this too is another of those attempts
in me trying to define what it is.
I think I'm just going to
jump around a little bit
and end up with another one
of those sorts of poems.
Maybe I'll read you like three more here.
Here's one, actually this
is another one of them too.
I guess I can read you that one.
Actually, you know what?
Let me read you this one.
American Sonnet from My Past
and Future Assassin.
Maxine Waters, being of fire, being
of sword shaped like a silver tongue.
Cauldron, siren, black as tarnation, black as
the consciousness of a black president's wife,
black as his black tie tuxedo beside his
black wife in room after room of whiteness.
My grandmother's name had
water in it too, Water maker.
I have wept listening to Aretha
Franklin sing Precious Lord.
I have placed my thumb on the tongue of
a black woman with an unbreakable voice.
I love your mouth, flood gate, storm door,
you are black as the gap in Baldwin's teeth,
you are black as a Baldwin speech.
I love your blackness leaves them in the dark.
I love how even your sound bite leaves a mark.
You know, some days I was just trying to
write, you know, towards heroes, you know,
and saying sometimes too, like a kind of courage
will kill me, a kind of beauty can kill me.
So, when I think about the kind of
sprawl of the book that just allows me
to not always be struggling with kind
of like trying to see the [inaudible]
but like just fully embracing it
and then turning that thing around.
So, one of those things would be just,
you know, the face of James Baldwin.
So, I think one day I just woke up and
I just thought about that face all day.
American Sonnet from My Past
and Future Assassin.
Seven of the ten things I love in the face
of James Baldwin concern the spiritual
elasticity of his expressions.
The sashay between left and
right eyebrow, for example.
The crease between his eyes like a tuning
fork or furrow, like a riverbed branching
into tributaries like lines of rapturous
sentences searching for a period.
The dimple in his chin narrows
and expands like a pupil.
Most of all, I love all of his eyes.
And those wrinkles, the feel and color of
wet driftwood in the mud around those eyes.
Mud is made of simple rain and earth,
the same baptismal hills and spills
of dirt James Baldwin is made of.
I thought I had these things marked better.
American Sonnet from My Past
and Future Assassin.
It was discovered the best way to combat
sadness was to make your sadness a door.
Or make it an envelope of
wireless chatter or wires pulled
from the radio tape recorder your
mother bought you for Christmas in 1984.
If you think a hammer is the only way to hammer
a nail, you ain't thought of the nail correctly.
My problem was I'd decided
to make myself a poem.
It made me sweat in private selfishly.
It made me bleed, bleep and weep for health.
As a poem I could show my children the man
I dreamed I was, my mother and fathers,
my half brothers, the lovers I lost.
Just morning, as a poem, I asked
myself if I was going to weep today.
And also, again, trying to say why I think that
poems are the place for working these questions
out or wrestling with the questions
even when they don't show up as answers.
And so, the ambiguity becomes just a
little bit less when you have it in front
of you written out, revised,
reseen, turned around.
I think that's, you know, kind of in these too.
All right, American Sonnet from
My Past and Future Assassin.
Our sermon today concerns the dialectic
blessings in transgression and transcendence.
We're on the middle floor where the darkness
we bury is equal to the lightness we intend.
We stand in the valley and go
down on our knees on the mountain.
One rope pulls a body down and into
earth, the other pulls up and after stars.
To be divided is to be multiplied.
Let us ponder how it is that
you and I have remained alive.
Mississippi and all the seas bound to sky by
rain, the root and reach of all the trees.
When the wound is deep, the healing is heroic.
Suffering and ascendance require the same work.
Our sermon today sets the beauty
of sin against the purity of dirt.
And this is the last one.
American Sonnet from My Past
and Future Assassin.
The song must be cultural,
confessional, clear but not obvious.
It must be full of compassion and
crows bowing in a vulture's shadow.
The song must have six sides
to it and a clamor of voltas.
The song must turn on the compass of language
like a tangle of wire endowed with feeling.
The notes must tear and tear.
There must be a love for the minute and minute.
There must be a record of witness and daydream.
Where the heart is torn or feathered and
tarred, where death is undone, time diminished,
the song must hold its own storm and drum,
and shed a noise so lovely it is sung
at sunset weddings, baptisms,
and beheadings henceforth.
>> Carla Hayden: I'd just like to
engage both of you about the possibility
that poetry can help us better
understand the present.
And Terrance, why don't you start?
>> Terrance Hayes: Well, I was just talking to a
group of poets this morning, and I said to them,
I think poetry just sort of helps you
develop a kind of emotional intelligence.
So, it's a place to work out those confusions,
and it's not a place to solve them so much
as like a place to record them, you know.
And it just gives you a shape to deal
with these that seem very chaotic.
So, that's language, but it's also feelings.
Yeah, that's just a thing I talk to them about.
I think certainly that's what you're
exercising, like what is the muscle,
what is the theme being developed by thinking
very intimately about language and its power,
it's a kind of emotional intelligence.
>> Carla Hayden: Natasha, what do you think?
>> Natasha Trethewey: Yeah, I agree.
I think it also offers us the opportunity
for an intense and close observation.
I think we have to slow down, not only to
pay attention to the language in a poem,
but it also asks us to slow down and look
at the world, and that's one of the ways
that we make sense of the world that
we're in and make sense of the present,
because we're taking time to really
observe it and to think about it deeply.
And also, just the ability to hear in
the intimacy of a poem another voice,
which allows us to see a world that may not be
exactly as we see it, but we learn something
through empathy about how someone else does.
>> Carla Hayden: And what about the historical
tie-ins and being able to use the power of words
to get people to reflect and even bring in the
past too, as they're thinking about the present?
>> Natasha Trethewey: Well, you know, I write
a lot about the past, but whenever I'm writing
about the past, I'm always
also writing about the present.
You know, for example, monuments.
Monuments tell us as much about the present
moment, how we're responding to them,
as we've seen recently with issue arising around
the Confederate monuments across the South,
but it also tells us about the
moment in which they were erected.
So, you know, poems exist in that way
too, to tell us both about this moment
and moments moving forward and backward.
>> Carla Hayden: And Terrance, you mentioned
you were talking to a group from the UK.
So, it sounds like poetry is
almost a universal language,
even though the languages might be
different, but it's a way of connecting.
>> Terrance Hayes: Yeah, and there's
something that happens in that intimacy,
whatever happens when people get together and
just start talking about language, really.
Because my answer is like, you know, it's
different if I'm a teacher or if I'm a poet,
because if I'm a teacher, I'm
saying, let's look at the world,
let's look at the poetry that's in the world.
Can I help us through these moments,
consume that power, and just,
you know, bring that wisdom back out.
But if I'm a poet, I'm saying to people,
I think you want to be trying to write it.
I think you want to be trying to make this
poem, you know, you're bringing it sort
of inside out versus the outside in.
And so, part of what we're trying to do
is make people who aren't poets understand
that this is a power that everybody can access
mostly, but for me, so much of it is about,
you know, you got to do it to
understand it if you really want
to know what these poems
are going to do for you,
whatever they are, and whatever the subject is.
The act of writing is really when a
power happens, I think, as a poet.
>> Carla Hayden: [inaudible] yeah, and the
poets, and both of you are able to bring
that inside out [inaudible] the
outside in and get people to reflect.
And both of you do so many wonderful readings
with live audiences and connecting with people.
Do you ever have people come up to you
afterwards and ask you how they could start
to write poetry or start to express themselves.
>> Natasha Trethewey: Yeah.
You know, usually, I think when people
come up to me to say something like that,
they're already trying to write poems, or
they're already secretly writing poems.
And this is one of the things that I learned
very powerfully when I was at the Library
of Congress as the Poet Laureate.
And I think every out Laureate has learned this
same lesson, that more people are writing poetry
than we know about, and they're
often doing it in secret.
And I've found that people wanted to be able to
reveal that, and that if they found audiences,
groups of people, communities where they could
share their own work, then it wasn't something
that they had to hide as they
were from their family members
or their coworkers or something like that.
And so, I think often people are just
looking for not just to start writing poems
but to enter a community in which they can share
poems with each other, reading and writing.
>> Terrance Hayes: Absolutely agree.
I also tell people when they come up
and say that, I say, no adjectives.
So, you want to write a poem, that poem,
experimental poem, spoken word poem, poem.
And so, you know, there is such a thing as
poems, I mean there are things that you want
to be thinking about to do it,
but essentially no adjectives
because the bad poems can be revised, you know.
So, even failure in this kind
of activity is a good thing.
So, that means anybody can come to you.
My mom could say, I think I want
to try to write a poem tomorrow.
I'd be like, go right ahead, go right ahead.
Don't put no adjectives in it.
Just say you wrote a poem, and
that enough, you know, it's enough.
>> Carla Hayden: You wrote it,
and you don't have to hide it.
>> Terrance Hayes: That's right, that's right.
>> Carla Hayden: And the fact that both of
you are not hiding and need to be celebrated,
and the Bobbitt prizes really exemplify that,
because we want to keep highlighting your work
and what you do that helps other
people understand the power of words.
So, congratulations, again, and
I want to encourage everyone
to read and be inspired by your work.
>> Natasha Trethewey: Thank you, Dr. Hayden.
>> Terrance Hayes: Thank you.
It's a great honor.
I feel you're doing such important
work, you've been doing it for so long.
So, any acknowledgement from what you
represent is always a good thing, a good moment.
Thank you.
>> Natasha Trethewey: Absolutely.
>> Carla Hayden: Thank you.
Once again, congratulations
on your Bobbitt prizes,
and I encourage all of you
to explore their work.