Poet Tretheway entertains, enlightens at reading

Natasha Tretheway
Tretheway

Despite an escalating snowstorm Feb. 25, the lure of Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry packed Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall with faculty and students. The Robert Chasen Memorial Poetry Reading featured Natasha Tretheway, renowned author of "Domestic Work," "Bellocq's Ophelia" and "Native Guard," which won her the 2007 Pulitzer for poetry.

Students responded enthusiastically to the reading, and to Tretheway's artful intersection of personal memory and national memory.

"I like most how accessible her poetry was. It was encouraging how natural her writing seemed, even though it was all in form," said Than Le, A&S '10. "It was incredible how she was able to step into the skin of people whose lives she has never experienced, and yet was able to take us with her."

Kristine Heiney, Engineering '10, was impressed with how applicable Tretheway's words and work were to her own studies, particularly in Reading As Poets, a class taught by poet Alice Fulton.

"I liked being able to hear the background of her poems," Heiney said. "It's also refreshing to hear a poet read her own work, to hear how they were meant to be intoned."

Tretheway read primarily from "Native Guard," a complex tripartite work that links seamlessly between sections. The first section explores the loss of her mother at an early age, exemplified by the elegiac poems "Genus Narcissus" and "Graveyard Blues," among others.

The second section contends with historical erasure, the leaving out of details from history. The titular poem "Native Guard" is a crown of unrhymed sonnets, an epic undertaking describing units of black soldiers serving in the Civil War, a forgotten history in both the North and South. The final section deals with living biracially in the South, including the unsettling pantoum poem "Incident," an account of a Ku Klux Klan cross-burning outside of Tretheway's "miscegenated" household.

Tretheway is at ease with complex forms, relying heavily on repetition and refrain to put missing pieces back into the cultural memory of the nation.

"I would argue that although a lot of this is connected to the South, it's not just Southern history; it's American history," Tretheway said. "Telling a history that's lesser-known or forgotten or left out is an attempt to inscribe it or re-inscribe it to those places where it has been erased or lost. The way to do that is not simply to say a thing, but to say it again."

The reading was part of the Spring 2010 Creative Writing Reading Series.

Jennifer Wholey '10 is a writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.

 

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