>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
[ Silence ]
>> James Billington: Hello and good evening.
I begin with the inevitable please turn off your cell phones.
We have extraordinary evening a waiting for us.
We appreciate that.
And it's my pleasure on behalf of the entire Library of Congress
to welcome you here this evening as the librarian.
This spring as we began searching
for the 19th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library
of Congress, created, as you know, by the Congress itself
to name a Poet Laureate of the United States, we asked a great deal
of people and I thought of the poets if I was to take on the position,
many such as W.S. Merwin, [inaudible] had been appointed
in later stages of their careers.
Others such as Rita Dove and Robert Hass have had many decades
of poems ahead of them after the concluded the laureateship.
However, all the Poets Laureate I've selected in my 25 years as Librarian
of Congress have one thing in common.
A voice that not only expands the position and the art form
but helps us better understand ourselves, who we are as people,
individuals, together and so forth.
Tonight [inaudible] we'll open up our Literary season
with poems that do just such work.
It is not her first time on this stage.
In 2010 she joined novelist Isabella Allende and Ken Follett
and staring Gregory Wood in our gala event
for that year's National Book Festival.
It was the perfect company for Natasha to join.
Her poems tell stories of loss and reckoning both personal
and historical and deepen our own ability to connect to the past
as we make sense of the present.
Like our previous, immediate previous Poet Laureate,
Philip Levine, also chosen in the later years
of his productive career, Natasha elevates voices
that have been often forgotten in the narrative of our country.
I first appreciated this effort when I heard her
at 2004 National Book Festival in the Poetry tent which is always
such an important part of this annual celebration
of reading on the National Mall.
She read the [inaudible] Sequence with the respective
of the Mississippi Native Guard, African American soldiers who fought
in the Civil War and the buried
with un-marked graves off the coast of her home town.
Natasha had researched and written the Sequence during many visits here
to the Library of Congress and it was to become the central part
of her Pulitzer Prize winning third collection.
One passage definitely describes how her poetry connects with the past
as the narrator states, and I'm just quoting much more, much less well
than she would do herself.
"This [inaudible] near full with someone else's words overlapped now,
cross hatched beneath mine on every page,
his story intersecting with my own."
Well, her story can intersect with all of ours.
In free verse and the neared of classical forms,
Natasha creates a central intersections
between the lives she sings of and the lives of her readers.
Her poems do not shy away from the personal
but greatly face the most [inaudible] challenges
and tragedies, and so doing they give her poetry
as an empowering act both for the speaker and the subject.
Natasha's charmed [inaudible] can certainly
and powerfully showcase the personal and the historical in bold new ways.
She's the first laureate to take up residence here in the Library
of Congress starting in January of 19, oh 19 my goodness.
[Laughter].
I'm getting carried away talking about history.
But she's starting in January of 2013.
Her presence here in this building in the library's poetry room,
sometimes described as the catbird seat, will be a great boost
for our poetry and literature center
as it celebrates its 75th anniversary
as the first national literary program created by the Congress,
and although this will be a [inaudible] perspective on the past
in this coming year, it's happily program directed by a very young
and dynamic new leader for this program, Rob Casper,
who many of you have met and many of you [Applause].
So we're looking for an ever expanding future
for this magnificent art form and has so many wonderful voices
in our country and throughout the world.
But at the same time we'll be looking to the future
and he will be our esteemed leader.
Now, Natasha will be the first laureate
who will actually serve concurrently as a State Poet Laureate
for her home state of Mississippi entirely,
an independent panel also named her the Poet Laureate.
It's a testament to the importance of the Laureateship as established
by the Congress and implemented here at the library and of poetry
in general in America, that 40 of the 50 states,
as well as the District of Columbia,
have appointed poet laureates of their own.
We know that Natasha Trethewey will stand as an example
to her fellow poets as she joins the great ranks of those who've served
as the Library's consultants in poetry and poets laureate.
She helps us champion the arts enduring, meaning it's ever widening
and deepening meaning for all of us in times where we all look
for the poetic voices that can lift us up in the world we live in.
Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming the Poet Laureate
of the United States, Natasha Trethewey.
[ Applause ]
>> Natasha Trethewey: Thank you so much.
I feel so honored and I'd
like to say what you just did honors poetry more
than it honors me, so thank you so much.

[Applause] I'm so delighted to get to address you tonight
and I thought I would read from my newest collection, Thrall,
which was just released last month.
Thrall is very much a book about knowledge,
so it seems that it makes sense to read it here.
But it's also about the ongoing presence of the past
and a meditation on the difficult history of ideas
about race across time and space.
In it, I examine notions of inherent difference,
notions that are manifest in larger public discourses and even
in smaller intimate relations within families.
By considering historical figures, photographs and paintings
from the 17th and 18th centuries, religious imagery on alter pieces
and in narratives dating back to the 13th century, I try to make sense
of our shared history, what we've all inherited from the past as well
as my personal history with my black mother and white father,
a story that is quintessentially American.
This has been the most difficult book yet for me to write.
But I was reminded this morning in an email
by another poet what we have always know.
That poetry, whether we are writing it or reading it,
helps us to realize the better angels of our nature.
And as my father, Eric Trethewey,
has said a generous thought is the idea of justice taking root.
[ Silence ]   "Ellogy. For my father.

I think by now the river must be thick with salmon.
Late August I imagine it as it was that morning,
drizzle needling the surface, mist at the banks like a net settling
around us, everything damp and shining.
That morning, awkward and heavy in our hip waders,
we stalked into the current and found our places.
View upstream a few yards and out far deeper.
You must remember how the river seeped in over your boots
and you grew heavier with that defeat.
All day I kept turning to watch you how first you mimed our guides
casting, then cast your invisible line slicing the sky between us.
And later, rod in hand, how you tried again and again to find
that perfect arc, flight of an insect skimming the river's surface.
Perhaps you recall I cast my line and reeled
in two small trout we could not keep.
Because I had to release them I confess I thought about the past.
Working the hooks loose, the fish writhing in my hands,
each one slipping away before I could let go.
I can tell you now that I tried to take it all in.
Record it for an ellogy I'd write one day when the time came.
Your daughter, I was that ruthless.
What does it matter if I tell you I learned to be?
You kept casting your line and when it did not come back empty,
it was tangled with mine.
Some nights, dreaming, I step again into the small boat that carried us
out and watch the back receding.
My back to where I know we are headed."

This next poem takes as its starting point the Mexican Costa paintings
from Colonial Mexico across the 18th century.
These were paintings that represented the mixed blood unions
that were taking place in the colony.
They began always with the white Spaniard father and were done
in series of 16, with all of the different blood mixtures,
and the various taxonomies created to name the mixed blood children.
The paintings always had both parents and then the offspring
as well as those taxonomies right on the painting.
If you were born with mixed blood
in Colonial Mexico your name was recorded in the book of Costas.
One of the things that interested me about these paintings,
before I realized I was looking at images of my own family,
and was compelled by the because of that,
was the idea in Colonial Mexico that indigenous blood
over a few generations could be purified to whiteness,
but that the taint of African blood was irreversible.
This is after a series by Juan Rodriguez Juarez circa 1715.
"Taxonomy, one.   [Foreign Language].

The canvas is a laden sky behind them, heavy with words,
gold letters inscribing an equation of blood.
This plus this equals this as if a contract with nature,
or a museum label, ethnographic, precise.
See how the father's hand beneath its crown of lace curls
around his daughter's head.   She's nearly fair as he is.

Calidad, see it in the broach at her collar, the lace framing her face.
An infant, she is born over the servants left shoulder bound
to him by a sling.
The plain blue cloth knotted at his throat.
If the father, his hand on her skull,
divines as the physiongnomist does,
the mysteries of her character discursive,
legible on her light flesh in the soft curl
of her hair, we cannot know it.
So gentle the eye he turns toward her.
The mother glancing sideways toward him, the scarf on her head,
white as his face, his powdered wig gestures with one hand a shape
like the letter C. C she seems to say what we have made.
The servant, still a child, cranes his neck,
turns his face up toward all of them.
He is dark as history.   Origin of the word native.

The wait of blood, a pale mistress on his back, heavier every year.

Two. [Foreign Language].
Still the centuries have not dulled the sullenness
of the child's expression.
If there was light inside him it does not shine through the paint
that holds his face in profile.
His domed forehead, his eyes nearly closed beneath a heavy brow.
Though inside the boy's father stands in his cloak and hat.
It's as if he's just come in or that he's leaving.
We see him transient rolling a cigarette, myopic, his eyelids drawn
against the child passing before him.
At the stove, the boy's mother contorts, watchful,
her neck twisting on its spine, red beads yoked at her throat
like a necklace of blood.
Her face so black she nearly disappears into the canvas.
The dark wall upon which we see the words that name them.
What should we make of any of this?
Remove the words above their heads, put something else in place
of the child, a table perhaps upon which the man might set his hat,
or a dog upon which to bestow the blessing
of his touch, and the story changes.
The boy is a palmist of paint, layers of color,
history rendering him that precise shade of in between.
Before this, he was nothing, blank canvas.
Before image or words, before a last brush stroke fixed him in his place.
Three. [Foreign Language].
How not to see in this gesture the mind of the colony.
In the mother's arms, the child hinged at her womb,
dark cradle of mixed blood call it Mexico, turns toward the father,
reaching to him as if back to Spain, to the promise of blood alchemy,
three easy steps to purity.
From a Spaniard and an Indian a Masteso.
From a Masteso and a Spaniard, a Castiso.
From a Castiso and a Spaniard a Spaniard.
We see her here one generation away.
Nearly slipping her mother's carful grip.

Four. The book of Castas.
Call it the catalog of mixed bloods or the book of not.
Not Spaniard, not white, but Malato turning backwards or hold yourself
in mid-air and the Mariska, the Lobo, the Chino, Sambo, Albino,
and the no te intiendo, the I don't understand you.
Guide book to the colony, record of each crossed birth,
it is the typology of taint, of stain, blemish, Selene spot,
that which can be purified, that which cannot Canen's black fate,
how, like a dirty joke it seems.
What do you call that space between the dark geographies of sex?
Call it the taint as in it taint one and it taint the other.
Illicit and yet naming still what is between.
Between her parents, the child, Malato,
returning backwards cannot slip their hold.
The triptych their bodies make, in paint, in blood, her name written
down in the book of Castas.   All her kind enthrall to a word."

[ Silence ]
Many of you must know that my father is also a poet,
and so in some ways these poems have, there are a lot of poems
of our own work that have been in conversation over the years,
and so this is a poem that uses a line from one of his.
It has an epigraph that reads,
"After a chalk drawing by J.A. Haslehorst 1864.



Whoever she was she comes to us like this.
Lips parted, long hair spilling from the table like water from a pitcher.
Nipples drawn out for inspection.
Perhaps to foreshadow the object she'll become a skeleton
on a pedestal, a row of skulls on a shelf.
To make a study of the ideal female body, four men gather around her.
She is young and beautiful and drowned.
A Venus de Medici, risen from the sea sleeping.
As if we could mistake this work for sacrilege,
the artist entombs her body in a pyramid of light.
A temple of science over which the anatomous presides.
In the service of beauty to know it, he lifts a flap
of skin beneath her breast as one might draw back a sheet.
We will not see his step by step parsing.
A translation.   Mary or Catherine or Elizabeth.

To corpus, areala, vulva.
In his hands instruments of the empirical, scalpel, pincers,
cold as the room must be cold.
All the men in coats trimmed in velvet or fur,
soft as the down of her pubis.   Now one man is smoking.

Another tilts his head to get a better look.
Yet another, at the head of the table, peers down as if enthralled.
His fists on a stack of books.
In the drawing, this is only the first cut.
A delicate wounding, and
yet how easily the anatomous blade opens a place in me.
Like a curtain drawn upon a room in which each learned man is my father
and I hear again his words.   I study my prospering child.

Misnomer and taxonomy, the language of zoology.
Here he is all of them.
The preoccupied man, an artist, collector of experience,
the skeptic angling his head,
his thoughts tilting toward what, I cannot know.
The marshaller of knowledge, knuckling down a stack of books.
Even the dissector.
His scalpel in hand like a pen poised
above me aimed straight for my heart."
[ Silence ]
This next poem is about the miracle of the black leg.
And the miracle of the black leg is the myth
of the miraculous transplant performed by physician Saints Cosmus
and Damien, involving a black donor and white recipients,
in narratives dating back to the 12th century,
and pictorial representations dating back to the mid-14th century.
These representations appear, for example, in a Scottish poem,
in Greek narratives, and in paintings and alter pieces
in several countries, including Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria,
Belgium, Switzerland, France and Portugal.
A few of these paintings have made their way here and are
in a few museums around the United States.
"Miracle of the Black Leg.
One. Always the dark body hune asunder.
Always one man is healed, his sick limb replaced placed
in the other man's grave.
The white leg buried beside the corpse or attached
as if it were always there.
If not for the dark appendage you might miss the story beneath
this story.
What remains each time the myth changes.
How, in one version, the doctors harvest the leg
from a man four days dead in his tomb at the church of a martyr.
Or in another desecrate a body fresh in the graveyard
at Saint Peter in chains.
There was buried, just today, an Ethiopian.
Even now, it stays with us when we mean
to uncover the truth, we dig, say unearth.

Two. Emblematic in paint, a signifier of a body's lacuna,
the black leg is at once a graphtive narrative, a redacted line of text
and in this scene a dark stocking pulled above the knee.
Here, the patient is sleeping, his head at rest in his hand.
Beatific, he looks as if he'll wake from a dream.
On the floor, beside the bed, a dead moor.
Hands crossed at the groin, the swapped limb white
and rotting fused in place.
And in the corner, a question, poised as if to speak the syntax
of sloughing a snake's curved form.
It emerges from the mouth of a boy like a tongue, slippery
and rooted it the body as knowledge.
For centuries this is how the myth repeats.
The miracle in words or wood or paint, is a record of thought.
Three. See how the story changes.
In one painting the Ethiop is merely a body featureless
in a coffin, so black he has no face.
In another, the patient at the top
of the frame seems to writhe in pain.
The black leg grafted to his thigh.
Below him, a mirror of suffering, the black amore,
his body a fragment arched across the doctors lap
as if dying from his wound.
If not imminence, the soul's bright anchor, blood passed from one
to the other, what knowledge haunts each body,
what history what phantom ache.
One man always low in a grave or on the ground,
the other up high closer to heaven.
One man always diseased the other a body in service, plunders.
Four. Both men are alive in the oldest carving.
Entwined relief they hold the same posture, the same pained face,
each man reaching to touch his left leg.
The black man on the floor holds his stump.
Above him the doctor restrains the patient's arm as if
to prevent him touching the dark amendment of flesh.
How not to see it.
The men bound one to the other symbiotic,
one man rendered expendable, the other worthy of this sacrifice.
In version after version, even when the Ethiopian isn't there,
the leg is a stand in, a black modifier against the white body.
A piece cut off as in the origin in the word comma,
se zura in a story that's still being written."
[ Silence ]
This is after a photograph of the American's by Robert Frank.


When I see Frank's photograph of a white infant in the dark arms
of a woman who must be the maid, I think of my mother
and the year we spent alone, my father at sea.
The woman stands in profile,
back against the wall, holding her charge.
Their faces side by side, the look on the child's face,
strangely prescient, a tiny furrow in the space between her brows.
Neither of them looks toward the camera nor do they look
at each other.
That year, when my mother took me for walks,
she was mistaken again and again for my maid.
Years later, she told me she'd say I was her daughter
and each time strangers would stare
in disbelief then empty the change from their pockets.
Now I think of the betrayals of flesh.
How she must have tried to make of her face an inscrutable mask
and hold it there as they made their small offerings,
pressing coins into my hands.
How like the woman in the photograph she must have seemed carrying me
each day, white in her arms as if she were a prop, a black backdrop,
the dark foil in this American story."
[ Silence ]   "Mano Prieta.


The green drapery is like a sheet of water behind us,
a cascade in the backdrop of the photograph, a Russian currant
that would scatter us, carry us each away.
This is 1969 and I am three.
Still light enough to be nearly the color of my father.
His armchair is a throne and I am leaning into him propped
against his knees, his hand draped across my shoulder.
On the chair's arm, my mother looms above me, perched at the edge
as though she would fall off.
The camera records her single gesture.
Perhaps to still me she presses my arm with a forefinger,
makes visible a hypothesis of blood, its empire of words,
the imprint on my body of her lovely dark hand."

This is another poem about a Costa painting.
The epigraph reads, "After [foreign language] from Albino
and Spaniard a return backwards is born.


Tourna Atras.
The unknown artist has rendered the father a painter and so we see him
at his work, painting a portrait of his wife,
their dark child watching nearby,
a servant grinding colors in the corner.
The woman poses just beyond his canvas and cannot see her likeness,
her less than mirror image, coming to life beneath his hand.
He is rendered her homely, so unlike the woman we see in this scene,
dressed in the late century fashion, a cheek adore mark of beauty
in the shape of a crescent moon affixed to her temple.
If I say his painting is unfinished, that he has
yet to make her beautiful, to match the elegant sweep of her hair,
the graceful tilt of her head, has yet to adorn her dress with lace
and trim, it is only one way to see it.
You might see instead that the artist perhaps
to show his own skill, has made the father a dilatant,
incapable of capturing his wife's beauty, or that he cannot see it.
His mind's eye reducing her to what he's made as if
to reveal the illusion eminent in her flesh.
If you consider the century's mythology of the body
that a dark spot mark the genitals of anyone with African blood,
you might see how the black moon on her white face recalls it.
The Rosita she passes to her child marking him Tourna Atras.
If I tell you such words were born
in the enlightenments hallowed rooms, that the wages
of empire is myopia, you might see the father's vision
as desire embodied in paint.
This rendering of his wife, born of need to see himself as architect
of truth, benevolent patriarch,
father of uplift ordering his domain.
And you might see why to understand my father.
I look again and again at this painting.
How it is that a man could love and so diminish what he loves."
One of my greatest memories
from childhood was all the stories that my father told me.
He would recite poems to me at bedtime, read stories,
many of them from mythology or classical narratives.
One of the favorites, of course, was my father recited "Beowulf",
he would recite the scene of Grendel going into the mess hall door,
right before I went to sleep.   [Laughter].

"Mythology.   One. Nostos.

Here is the dark night of childhood.
Flickering lamp light, odd shadows on the walls, giant and flame,
projected through the clear frame of my father's voice.
Here is the past come back as metaphor.
My father as if to ease me into sleep,
reciting the trials of Odysseus.
Always, he begins with the Cyclopes, light at the cave's mouth bright
as knowledge, the pilgrim honing a pencil sharp stake.

Two. Questions posed by the dream.
It's the old place on Jefferson Street, I've entered a girl again,
the house dark and everyone sleeping,
so quite it seems I'm alone.
What can this mean now, more than 30 years gone, to find myself
at the beginning of that long hallway,
knowing as I did then what stands at the other end.
And why does the past come back like this?
Looming a human figure formed as if it had risen from the gulf
of the crushed shells that paved our driveway.
A sharp edged creature that could be conjured only by longing.
Why is it here, blocking the dark passage
to my father's bookshelves, his many books.
Three. Siren.
In this dream, I am driving a car strapped to my seat like Odysseus
to the mast, my father calling me from the back,
luring me to a past that never was.   This is the treachery of nostalgia.

This is the moment before a ship could crash onto the rocks,
the car's back wheels tip over a cliff.
Steering I must be the crew.
My ears deaf to the sound of my father's voice.
I must be the captive listener cleating to his words.
I must be singing this song to myself."

One of the only artifacts that remains from a trip that we took
when I was a child, my parents and I, to Mexico,
there's a photograph of me sitting on a mule.
There's a little irony in that too.
I'm not going to say what it is, but you know.
"Calling. Mexico 1969.
Why not make a fiction of the mind's fictions?
I want to say it begins like this.
The trip a pilgrimage, my mother kneeling at the altar
of the black virgin enthralled.
Light streaming in a window, the sun at her back,
holy water in a bowl she must have touched.
What's left is palimpsest, one memory bleeding
into another overwriting it.   How else to explain what remains?

The sound of water in a basin I know is white, the sun behind her,
light streaming in, her face as if she were already dead,
blurred as it will become.
I want to imagine her before the altar, rising to meet us,
my father lifting me towards her outstretched arms.
What else to make of the mind slick confabulations?
What comes back is the sun's dazzle on a pool's surface, light filtered
through water, closing over my head.
My mother, her body, between me and the high sun,
a corona of light around her face.   Why not call it a vision?

What I know is this.
I was drowning and saw a dark Madonna.
Someone pulled me through the water's bright feeling
and I rose initiate from one life into another."
[ Silence ]
Some of you may know the symbol, the fouled anchor
that means hardship that's worn on the arms of the Canadian Navy,
officers I think, in the Canadian Navy.
"Fouled. From the next room I hear my father's voice.
A groan at first, a sound so sad I think he must be reliving a catalog
of all the things lost.
All the dead come back to stand ringside, the glorious body
of his youth, a light heavyweight fight ready and glistening,
that beauty I see now in pictures.   Looking into the room,

I half imagine I find his shadow boxing the dark,
arms and legs twitching as a dog runs in sleep.
Tonight, I've had to help him into bed.
Stumbling up the stairs, his arm a weight on my shoulders
so heavy it nearly brought us down.
Now, his distress cracks open the night.
He is calling my name.
I could wake him, tell him it's only a dream that I am here.
Here is the threshold I do not cross.
A sliver of light through the doorway finds his tattoo.
The anchor on his forearm tangled in its chain.
Rotation. Like the moon that night my father, a distant body,
white and luminous, how small I was back then,
looking up as if from dark earth.
Distant his body white and luminous, my father stood in the doorway,
looking up as if from dark earth I saw him outlined
in a scrim of light.
My father stood in the doorway as if to watch over me as I dreamed.
When I saw him outlined, a scrim of light,
he was already waning, turning to go.
Once he watched over me as I dreamed.
How small I was.
Back then, he was already turning to go,
waning like the moon that night, my father."
I'm going to finish up now with two poems.

About 20 or 25 years ago, my father took me,
for the first time, to Monticello.
And last year when I was trying to finish this book,
I knew that if I could take him back there,
if we could go there again together, I could finish it.
I could write a poem that perhaps, I hoped,
would bring things all together.
One of the things we noticed that was different on this last trip,
was that now, that Thomas Jefferson fathered some
of Sally Heming's children,
is part of the foundation's official position, and so it's one
of the first things that the docent mentioned to us when we walked
into the house, which had not been part
of the narrative so many years ago.   "Enlightenment."

>> [Inaudible Audience Comment] [Laughter]
>> Natasha Trethewey: Now that's what you hope for.
Somebody gets the joke even before you start the poem.
[Laughter] "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 contract 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 of necessity,
my father says, had to own slaves.
That is 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 follow my father from book to book, gathering citations,
listened as he named as 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 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 quad rune 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.

[Laughter].
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.
Illumination.
Always there is something more to know.
What lingers at the edge of thought awaiting illumination?
As in this second hand book, full of annotations, daring the margins
in pencil, a light stroke as if the writer
of these small replies meant not to leave them forever,
meant to erase evidence of this private interaction.
Here a passage underline, there a single star on the page
as in a night sky, cloud swept and hazy,
where only the brightest appears a tiny spark.
I follow its coded message.
Try to read in it the direction of the solitary mind,
the thought to pencil in a jagged arrow.
It is a bolt of lightning.
Where it strikes, I read the line over and over
as if I might discern the little fire set,
the flames of an idea licking the page, how knowledge burns.
Beyond the exclamation point, its thin agreement, angle of surprise,
there are questions, the word why.   So much is left untold.

Between the printed words and the self-conscious scrawl,
between what is said and not, white space framing the story.
The way the past unwritten eludes us.
So much is implication.
The actor image of measured syntax, always there, ghosting the margins
that words their black lined authority do not cross.
Even as they rise up to meet us, the white page hovers beneath,
silent, incendiary, waiting."   Thank you.

[ Applause ]
>> Bob Casper: Thank you to our 19th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry
for a stunning and powerful kickoff
to the Poetry Literature Center's reading season.
I'm Bob Casper, head of the center,
and I want to let you know we have many,
many more events this coming year, including a reading on January 30th
by Natasha Trethewey as part of our Civil War Exhibit,
The Civil War in America, which will be kicking off this fall
in the Jefferson building.   To find out more about our events,

you can check our website www.loc.gove/poetry
and there's also a page on Natasha and the Poets Laureate.
Tonight we hope you will join us for a reception and a book signing
in the Great Hall which is just out the door and up the stairs.
Ms. Trethewey will be happy to sign your books and we do have books
for sale, but we ask that you limit yourself to three copies
so that the line can move in an orderly fashion.
We've also implemented a new policy, we have post it notes and pens
and if you would like your books dedicated, please get a post it note
and a pen from one of our assistants and just put the name you'd
like the Natasha to dedicate the book to, on the page you'd like it
to be dedicated to so she can open it up and sign.
Thanks again to our new Poet Laureate, we could not prodder
of her and of the laureateship and of poetry on this great evening,
and thank you so much for coming out.
We hope to see you again very, very soon.
Take care.   [ Applause ]

>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.