She’s the first southern poet laureate since the original laureate, Robert Penn Warren, and she’s also the poet laureate of Mississippi. Our state has no shortage of literary talent, and I am especially excited to claim Natasha Trethewey as a native daughter.
Her poetry masterfully confronts her personal history surrounding race, while also giving a voice to the historically voiceless members of a racially charged south. Domestic workers tell their story in her first volume of poetry, Domestic Work. The imagined story of Ophelia, a mixed-race prostitute and subject of photographer E. J. Bellocq in early 20th century New Orleans, beautifully unfolds in Bellocq’s Ophelia:
Bellocq
-April 1911
There comes a quiet man now to my room-
Papa Bellocq, his camera on his back.
He wants nothing, he says, but to take me
as I would arrange myself, fully clothed-
a brooch at my throat, my white hat angled
just so- or not, the smooth map of my flesh
awash in afternoon light. In my room
everything’s a prop for his composition-
brass spittoon in the corner, the silver
mirror, brush and comb of my toilette.
I try to pose as I think he would like-shy
at first, then bolder. I’m not so foolish
that I don’t know this photograph we make
will bear the stamp of his name, not mine.
Her Pulitzer-prize-winning Native Guard focuses on the stories of the Louisiana Native Guard, a black regiment in the Union Army (mostly former slaves) that guarded Confederate prisoners of war.
Last but not least, Trethewey’s memoir Beyond Katrina describes the heart wrenching after-effects of Katrina on her family and the community she grew up in on the Mississippi coast.
Check out these two great articles about Trethewey’s appointment as poet laureate:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/07/books/natasha-trethewey-is-named-poet-laureate.html?_r=1
http://www.npr.org/2012/06/10/154584917/two-poems-from-the-nations-new-top-poet
by Anna
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