>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. >> It is my great pleasure and honor to introduce Dr. James Billington, the Librarian of Congress. [ Applause ] >> James Billington: Well, it's a great pleasure to be with you all. We're wondering about possible clouds, but the clouds clear when it's time for our Poet Laureate. So I'm -- it's an unusual pleasure to introduce the 19th Poet Laureate, Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress and the Poet Laureate of the United States. In her first term as Laureate, Natasha gave an electrifying opening reading. I don't think there's ever been a larger and more appreciative audience for poetry in this city. I was the opening reading and a profound final lecturer. She also did something quite unusual. She spent five months in residence at the library with office hours, meeting anybody, members of the general public, and her second term as Laureate began on September 1st with just another great reading. And she launched, just in very recent days, her signature project for the second year, a new television series called "Where Poetry Lives," which debuted on the PBS News Hour. I'm sure many of you saw it. Now in all this work, Natasha has shown an extraordinary commitment to the position and to connect and celebrate poetry lovers of all kinds. She has shown how essentially and essential poetry is as part of our everyday lives, how it challenges, how it moves us, how it expresses things, that there's just no other way of putting into words. It gives voice to great questions, and it's a voice of great beauty to listen to, as well as to read in silence. First time I heard her read was at the 2004 National Book Festival. She read from the series of sonnets that she based on research at the Library of Congress, which later became the titled sequence of her Pulitzer Prize winning collection, "Native Guard," a great, really epic, moving poem, very appropriate for this 150th anniversary of the Civil War, in which we have an outstanding exhibit at the library right now. I was won over by her poetry the first time I heard it nine years ago, and we're now proud to have her back here as our Poet Laureate with -- it's amazing that she's taken on as this project, after having open office hours in effect, offering open office hours to the many cities that she will visit on this wonderful project with public broadcasting. So it was -- she gave the opening one -- took it to Alzheimer's, people suffering from Alzheimer's as they movingly recited poetry, which they knew from a bit of memory restored, so Natasha enriches and restores all our memory and is tackling another wonderful project throughout the country. So ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming our Poet Laureate extraordinaire, Natasha Trethewey. [ Applause ] >> Natasha Trethewey: Thank you [applause]. Thank you so much. Washington, D.C. I have missed you. I am so glad to be back here at the book festival. I've been back in Atlanta now since August -- actually no, since July 1st, so it's lovely to get to come back here and to see so many of you out today. A half century ago, writing "The Legacy of the Civil War," my Southern predecessor, Robert Penn Warren declared, "Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory. For if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake." My work has always been about the intersections of public and personal history, personal versus collective memory of our shared past as Americans and the individual and national myths we create. For me, books have always been at the heart of that necessary creation, so I'm going to read a bit today around the theme of books, history and mythology. When I was a girl, not long after my parents had divorced, and both had remarried. I was visiting my father and stepmother and raiding the bookshelves as usual when I came across Marilyn Robinson's "Housekeeping." When I opened it, I found it heavily annotated. They had read it together, writing comments in the margins about the story and addressing each other, a conversation played out that I could overhear in the spaces surrounding the printed text. I thought it was thrilling, the most romantic thing I've ever seen, a romance of the book and its power. This is a poem very much about the romance of books and power, and though I couldn't bring myself to say it in the poem, I say secondhand. This is actually some -- a book I discovered in a library. "Illumination," "Always there is something more to know. What lingers at the edge of thought 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 underlined 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 that 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 fires 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 afterimage 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, My relationship with my father has always been mediated by books, and the stories from "The Odyssey" or "Beowulf," the Greek mythology used as a primer for learning the ways of the world, its triumphs and its losses. Because of that, I've always written poems, in some ways, with the lens of mythology, always next to the lens of history. And it helps to illuminate something of that father and daughter relationship. This is "Mythology." "One, Nostos" Here is the dark night of childhood, flickering lamplight, 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 Cyclops, 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 quiet it seems I'm alone. What can this mean now, more than thirty 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 to 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 cleaving to his words. I must be singing this song to myself. Now, because of that early childhood education, in the language of myth, I could see quite early how the dreams I've had about my long dead mother were filtered through the lens of mythology and in particular, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, particularly that moment when Orpheus turns around only to see her vanish back into the underworld. I have a couple of dreams about my mother. One of them is more like that. The first kind is a kind in which I know that she's dead, and so the dream always feels like a lovely visitation. But in the other kind of dream, I don't know that she's dead or that anything has happened, and so waking up is like turning over and feels, I think, like Orpheus must've felt when Eurydice vanished back into the underworld. "Myth" "I was asleep while you were dying. It's as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow I make between my slumber and my waking, the Erebus I keep you in, still trying not to let go. You'll be dead again tomorrow, but in dreams you live. So I try taking you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning, my eyes open, I find you do not follow. Again, and again, this constant forsaking. Again and again, this constant forsaking, my eyes open, I find you do not follow. You back into morning, sleep-heavy, turning. But in dreams you live. So I try taking, not to let go. You'll be dead again tomorrow. The Erebus I keep you in, still, trying, I make between my slumber and my waking. It's as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow. Losing my mother is one of those things that hurt me into poetry, but also, as in Auden's memorial to Yeats," Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry." My native state, Mississippi, with its troubled and violent history, and it's terrible beauty hurt me also into poetry. To write about the place, I knew I had to journey back to try to sift history from myth, recorded in so many books. On one of those trips back, I went to Vicksburg. My intention was to go to the military park there and to consider the history of the occupied city, of course, because Vicksburg, when it fell to the Union, was occupied by 5000 U.S. colored troops, which always sounded me like a thing that must've been such a slap in the face to Vicksburg residents, to have people who were there former slaves come to occupy their city in a whole new way. I was interested in that. I was also interested in how, because of that, Vicksburg did not celebrate the Fourth of July for a long time. Instead, they invented Confederate Memorial Day. It first celebrated April 26, 1866. I was born exactly 100 years to the day later. "Pilgrimage, Vicksburg, Mississippi" Here, the Mississippi carved its mud-dark path, a graveyard for skeletons of sunken riverboats. Here, the river changed its course, turning away from the city as one turns, forgetting, from the past, the abandoned bluffs, land sloping up above the river's bend, where now the Yazoo fills the Mississippi's empty bed. Here, the dead stand up in stone, white marble, on Confederate Avenue. I stand on ground once hollowed by a web of caves. They must have seemed like catacombs, in 1863, to the woman sitting in her parlor, candlelit, underground. I can see her listening to shells explode, writing herself into history, asking what is to become of all the living things in this place? This whole city is a grave. Every spring, Pilgrimage, the living come to mingle with the dead, brush against their cold shoulders in the long hallways, listen all night to their silence and indifference, relive their dying on the green battlefield. At the museum, we marvel at their clothes, preserved under glass, so much smaller than our own, as if those who wore them were only children. We sleep in their beds, the old mansions hunkered on the bluffs, draped in flowers, funereal, a blur of petals against the river's gray. The brochure in my room calls this living history. The brass plate on the door reads Prissy's Room. A window frames the river's crawl toward the Gulf. In my dream, the ghost of history lies down beside me, rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm." Of course a lot of the history of Mississippi I learned in books. I learned it because of all the historical markers and monuments all across the state and all the across the South indeed, such that I've often thought that if you weren't from the South or from the United States, and you travel to your -- and went to the Southern United States for the first time, you might think that the South actually won the war [audience laughter]. "Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi." One, King Cotton, 1907. From every corner of the photograph, flags wave down the main street in Vicksburg. Stacked to form an arch, the great bales of cotton rise up from the ground like a giant swell, a wave of history flooding the town. When Roosevelt arrives, a parade, the band will march, and from every street corner, flags wave down. Words on a banner, Cotton, America's King, have the sound of progress. This is two years before the South's countermarch, the great bolls of cotton, risen up from the ground, infested with boll weevils, a plague, biblical, all around. Now, negro children ride the bales, clothes stiff with starch. From up high, in the photograph, they wave flags down for the President who will walk through the arch, bound for the future, his back to us. The children, on their perch, those great bales of cotton rising up from the ground, stare out at us. Cotton surrounds them, a swell, a great mound bearing them up, back toward us. From the arch, from every corner of the photograph, flags wave down, and great bales of cotton rise up from the ground. "Two, Glyph, Aberdeen 1913" The child's head droops as if in sleep. Stripped to the waist, in profile, he's balanced on the man's lap. The man, gaunt in his overalls, cradles the child's thin arm, the sharp elbow, white signature of skin and bone, pulls it forward to show the deformity, the humped back, curve of spine, punctuating the routine hardships of their lives, how the child must follow him into the fields, haunting the long hours slumped beside a sack, his body asking how much cotton? Or in the kitchen, leaning into the icebox, how much food? Or kneeling beside him at the church house, why, Lord, why? They pose as if to say look, this is the outline of suffering, the child shouldering it, a mound like dirt heaped on a grave. "Three, Flood" They have arrived on the back of the swollen river, the barge dividing it, their few belongings clustered about their feet. Above them the National Guard hunkers on the levee, rifles tight in their fists, blocking the path to high ground. One group of black refugees, the caption tells us, was ordered to sing their passage onto land, like a chorus of prayer, their tongues the tongues of dark bells. Here, the camera finds them still, posed as if for a school-day portrait, children lace fingers in their laps. One boy gestures allegiance, right hand over the heart's charged beating. The great river all around, the barge invisible beneath their feet, they fix on what's before them, the opening in the sight of a rifle, the camera's lens, the muddy cleft between barge and dry land, all of it aperture, the captured moment's chasm in time. Here, in the angled light of 1927, they are refugees from history, the barge has brought them this far, they are waiting to disembark. "Four, You Are Late" The sun is high and the child's shadow, almost fully beneath her, touches the sole of her bare foot on concrete. Even though it must be hot, she's takes the step. Her goal to read is the subject of this shot, a book in her hand, the library closed, the door just out of reach. Stepping up, she must look at the two signs, read them slowly once more. The first one, in pale letters, barely shows against the white background. Though she will read Greenwood Public Library for Negroes, the other, bold letters on slate, will lead her away, out of the frame, a finger pointing left. I want to call her, say wait. But this is history, she can't linger. She reads the sign that I read, you are late." This next poem is in some ways about who I was when I was born in the eyes of the state, in national custom as well as law, but it's also a kind of intellectual biography based on the books that also shed light on my being, my place in history, from "War and Peace" to Faulkner's "Light in August," Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and "The Bible." There were 20 states in the nation that anti-miscegenation laws still on the books when my parents got married, had to leave Mississippi and get married elsewhere illegally, and only -- I like to remind people, so that we don't think of it as ancient history, in the mid-1990s the state of Alabama vote to remove the anti-miscegenation laws from their books. And even though they did get rid of them, 42% of the population voted to keep them so that at least symbolically it could be said that parents like mine couldn't be married legally, and people like me couldn't be born legally in the state. "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." Now another of my predecessors, Robert Hayden, a former consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress once said in an interview that he wrote to correct some of the misapprehensions about African-American history. For a long time, books about Thomas Jefferson have perpetuated certain apprehensions and myths of plantation life at Monticello, but recent historians, such as Annette Gordon Reid, have helped restore the facts of history and have allowed me to win an argument I've had for years with my father. He took me to Monticello the first time about 20 years ago, and I took him back there in 2011 to write this poem in order to finish working on my most recent collection, "Thrall." Now a lot had changed since the Jefferson Foundation adopted the official position that Thomas Jefferson had fathered at least two of Sally Hemings children. Not only will the docent mention this when you walk in for the tour, but we also even heard people debating as if it mattered how much white blood Sally Hemings had. It made me think about the ongoing conversations that we as Americans have about race, and some of the deeply ingrained in unexamined notions of racial difference that plague us even now and plague the intimate discourses within families, "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 of 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, listen 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, it's 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. 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. A few years ago I published a book of non-fiction called "Beyond Katrina; A Meditation on Mississippi Gulf Coast." And there were a few poems in this book as well, I think because it seemed to me there were some things that couldn't be said in prose, which is why we turn to the elegant language of poetry, the elegant envelope of form to say some of the things that are hardest for us to say. One of the things I wrote about was the aftermath of Katrina and the attempts to rebuild the lives of some of the poorest citizens affected by the hurricane, my brother among them. Not long after the storm, after finally all of the jobs that had come there -- the jobs of clean up and rebuilding were done. My brother was left without work, and he made some very difficult and bad decisions and spent a year of his life in prison. While he was there I used to send him all sorts of things, necessities and the necessities were things like socks and boot insoles. He was on a work crew that worked on the roads in Mississippi, kind of a vision of a contemporary chain gang, but I also sent him music and books. Sometimes the books I had to send him were hardcovers. I gave him about two hardcover copies, but mostly he was able to receive Xeroxes or pages I could download from magazines and newspapers. And so I'd make thick packets of those things to him. Now there was a tradition in the prison where he was and the work facility, and that is someone will pass down things to you when they're getting out that they don't need. So it's very hot there. Someone had given him a fan. He had all the things that I had sent to him, and so when he was getting out, he also passed down most of those things. The only things he kept were those hardcover books. One of them was a book by another native Mississippian National Book "Benediction" "I thought that when I saw my brother walking through the gates of the prison, he would look like a man entering his life. And he did. He carried a small bag, holding it away from his body as if he would not touch it, or that it weighed almost nothing. The clothes he wore seemed to belong to someone else, like hand-me-downs given a child who will one day grow into them. Behind him, at the fence, the inmates were waving, someone saying all right now. And then, my brother was walking toward us, a few awkward steps, at first, until he got it, how to hold up the too-big pants with one hand, and in the other carry everything else he had." Thank you. [ Applause ] Thank you. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] Thank you. I think we have just a few moments for questions if anyone has them. Okay. This is when I need a plant in the audience so that I don't stand here looking desperate for someone to ask me anything [chuckles]. Oh, yes. >> Hi. I commend you for inviting people to come into your office over the past year, and I wanted to know what you learned from the young people who were in your office who are interested in poetry? >> Natasha Trethewey: You know, it's hard to separate out what I learned from the young people, from the general people who came, because I had people of all ages come, which was wonderful. And, you know, what I learned was nothing new, which is great. I was not too long ago reading a lecture that Josephine Jacobson gave when she was a consultant at the library in 1976, in which she says, "There is one thing I am certain of after having served as the consultant, and that is everyone in America -- or their sister, or brother, or an uncle, someone they're very close to reads or writes poetry." I think it is still true. I think it is as true now as it was then, and I found out that there were people who actually used the language of telling a dark secret or revealing something. A gentleman told me about going back to his 20th or 25th high school reunion and having conversations with some of the people he knew from then who'd gone on to very different careers, and he described talking to a woman who was one of the popular girls in school, someone you'd never imagine writing poetry I suppose. I can't imagine why [chuckles]. I think popular girls always write poetry [audience laughter], but anyway, he said that they got into a conversation and at some point, she kind of whispered and revealed to him that she'd been writing poetry. And then he revealed to her that he'd been doing it, too. I think there are a lot of people that you know who may say to you they've never done it, but I bet you they have [chuckles] [audience laughter]. Yep. Okay. You want this... >> [Inaudible] I have your new book. >> Natasha Trethewey: Thank you. >> And I've been reading it all day, and I was wondering if you would tell us what inspired you to go and find those old paintings and then write a poem for each one? I have seen them before I think, the Museum of Natural -- one of the museums here did a show years ago called. >> Natasha Trethewey: That's right. >> "Seeds of Change," and I think these pictures -- these portraits were in that -- because the last time I saw them. I was fascinated by the paintings and then shocked [chuckles]. >> Natasha Trethewey: Yes. >> To see that you wrote a poem for each one, and I just wanted -- if you would tell us what inspired you to do that. >> Natasha Trethewey: Well, thank you. You know, I love to do research when I write poems, and all of my books begin for me with a kind of historical question that I pose to myself, something that seems relevant in our contemporary moment that I'm trying to make sense of. The reason that I had to look at ideas about historical memory around the Civil War, or even the Civil Rights Movement, because those are battles that we're still facing in many ways. We're still having arguments about the nature of memory of the past. What I asked myself when I started writing "Thrall," and "Thrall" is a very intimate book in many ways. It's a conversation with my poet father, taking place in a very public forum in a book, but I wanted to ask because the personal question was, "How is it that my dear father, who is so beloved to me and feels the same about me, might also harbor some deeply ingrained and unexamined notion of racial difference?" Ones that are rooted in ideas of superiority, or supremacy, and inferiority. And so I started looking into history, and I looked at the enlightenment of all things and to discover that for all the good of the age of reason, we're also beginning to codify ideas of racial difference. Those are ideas that come to us out of the enlightenment that we inherit that inhabit our thinking at some dark level, even now. And so I thought how are these ideas represented across time and space. Surely, they'll appear in photographs. They'll appear in paintings. They'll appear in narratives from the 12th century, and indeed, they do. And I found them, and when I found those images from the 18th century of mixed race families and the kind of values that were suggested in paint. I knew I was figuring out something about what we've inherited even now that we still have to contend with. >> Thank you very, very much. >> Natasha Trethewey: Thank you. Well, I think that we might just be out of time. [Background talking] Okay. >> My mother was a tour guide at Monticello, so I really enjoyed that poem you had about Thomas Jefferson. >> Natasha Trethewey: Thank you. >> One of the questions she always got was, along with the one you mentioned about Sally Hemings being darn near white. >> Natasha Trethewey: Yeah. >> The other one was, "Was he kind to his slaves?" That's a question she often got. >> Natasha Trethewey: Yeah. >> So I was wondering what your answer to that would be? >> Natasha Trethewey: Well -- for -- to answer that I would have to point us to the historians. I mean the historians have done some amazing work. I mean even recent books that have come out that both -- that suggest two things at once, that Jefferson could both be kind to his slaves but also enslave them [chuckles]. And so I think that that's a way of seeing what's inherent in the debate about him. We can look at his own words from Notes on the State of Virginia, and we can compare them to what he offers in some of our nation's greatest documents. He is a man who is -- has in him a kind of twoness and that it is possible at once to do one kind of thing, but to do something else at the same time. I think that that's one of the reasons that my father loved Jefferson so much. I mean we loved Jefferson for different reasons, but my father, I think, struggled because of those deeply engrained and unexamined notions of racial difference I talk about, that he could believe in justice. He could believe in equality and yet also not, at the same time, which is a very hard thing. I think that's who Jefferson can be for us figuratively, but also that the pursuit of knowledge is a way to better ourselves. You know, if I think about whether or not one can be redeemed by trying to know. I would say yes. Well, thank you very much. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.