Welcome to another episode of Poetry on the Page. In this month's discussion, WNIJ’s Yvonne Boose and Northern Illinois University English Professor Amy Newman explore a bit of history, a type that you may not normally find in a history book.
YB
Hi, Amy, how are you?
AN
I'm fine. Yvonne, how are you doing?
YB
I am well. Thank you so much for joining me in another episode of Poetry on the Page. What do you have for me today? What books are you reading? Or book, I should say, are you reading?
AN
Well, what I like about poetry is that it often tells stories you wouldn't otherwise hear. And the book I wanted to talk about today is Natasha Trethewey’s book, Native Guard, published by Houghton Mifflin, in which she explores the relationships between public history, personal history and actual history in the legacy of the poet's Deep South, where she grew up biracial in Mississippi.
The book's in three sections. The first section introduces us to a mother whose marriage to a white man was illegal in Mississippi in 1960s. Her mother was murdered by her second husband in 1985 and both section one and three have to do with Trethewey’s trying to reconcile her past with those legacies.
The title of the book, Native Guard, is also the title of the middle section central long poem in the form of a crown of sonnets. The phrase “native guard” refers to the Black regiment whose role in the civil war has been largely overlooked by history, these regiments of Black soldiers, who had been slaves before fighting on the union side. The major poem has extensive notes, and readers will learn the nearly erased history of the brutality at Ship Island, Mississippi, in the same way that the speaker in that poem finds a journal in an abandoned house and writes his own words crosswise over the journal page, a practice Trethewey identifies as cross hatching. Trethewey's speaker tells the actual history of Ship Island, which is brutal in ways more illuminating about the past treatment of these soldiers than the stories you'll read in history textbooks. It's worth your time to read.
Central to this poetry book is the question of why certain stories are told in American history while others are overlooked, or, more likely, erased. This book aims to undo this erasure.
I'm going to read a poem from the third section where we return to the poet's own life, impacted in countless ways by her personal and the public history. Trethewey uses many received forms in this book, and this poem “Incident” is a pantoum. You're going to hear some repeated lines. In the pantoum form the second and fourth lines of each stanza recur as the first and third lines in the succeeding stands, and it's kind of a perfect form for going over something in your mind as meaning shifts and emerges like in a memory. In this case, the speaker recalls images that suggest a Christmas tree and angels but emerge to become the memory of the KKK burning a cross on their lawn.
YB
That already sounds very interesting. You haven't even gotten into the poem, no. And I like the way you say that this, this book and some poems really give you a history lesson that we might not get anywhere else.
AN
That's one of the things I love about poetry these days is we're getting a lot of those. And this book, whenever I use it, my students say 'I didn't know that story.' And it's a great thing that poetry books can do.
Here's “Incident.”
Video of Trethewey reading "Native Guard."
AN
It's a really beautiful poem about a really terrible memory.
YB
Amy, thank you so much for taking the time and sharing that with us today. Amy Newman, English professor at Northern Illinois University.
AN
Thank you. Yvonne.
