Christian Teresi | December 2011

Natasha Trethewey

EXCERPT

Natasha Trethewey is the author of Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast; Native Guard, for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize; Bellocq's Ophelia, which was named a Notable Book for 2003 by the American Library Association; and Domestic Work. Her new book Thrall is forthcoming in the spring of 2012. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Her poems have appeared in such journals and anthologies as American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, the Southern Review, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry.Currently, she is Charles Howard Candier Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University.

Christian Teresi: Each of your books has an increased formal element. How much of your maturation as a writer played into your ability to progress formally?

Natasha Trethewey: I did not write, at first, in traditional forms as much as I do now-even though one of my first published poems, "Flounder," is a ballad. Early on, my father-who was one of my first teachers-would challenge me to write in certain forms. He'd pull out a copy of Roethke's "My Pappa's Waltz," for example, and say, "Can you write a poem like this?" I think my answer was to write "Flounder." I remember also being moved by the poems of Gwendolyn Brooks that I was reading in a graduate seminar, and her modification of form-how she would take certain traditional forms and revise them for her own purposes. That was really exciting to me, and it was the first kind of formal experimentation I did. There are poems in Domestic Work that were my attempt to do what I thought Brooks was doing.

Teresi: How much of it is a conscious decision? Particularly with the second and third book, which seem to have a more pronounced sort of formality.

Trethewey: I thought about formality a lot with Native Guard, especially moving from Bellocq's Ophelia in which I had written a sequence of unrhymed sonnets. I think the rhythm of those were in my head when I started writing Native Guard. The first thing I started writing for Native Guard was the long title sequence, the crown of unrhymed sonnets. I was a little worried that because it was coming straight out of my experience of writing Bellocq's Ophelia, I was doing a similar formal thing, and that's one of the reasons I decided to make it a crown-to add another challenge within the poem that would perhaps push it in a different direction. Once I did that, it occurred to me that the repetition involved in a crown, and the repetition involved in many of the other forms I use in Native Guard, was an important technique for addressing historical erasure. The use of repetition was a formal decision I made early on in the writing because what I was trying to do was to re-inscribe what had been erased, what was lost or forgotten-it was not necessary just to say a thing, but also to say it again.

Teresi: As someone who uses familial and communal photographs to explore various themes, what do you see as the dangers and benefits of writing ekphrastically in your work?

Trethewey: The benefit for me, and I think a benefit for others who would do it, is the given image, something that is concrete from which to start. So, for me, rather than starting with abstractions, I can begin with something that is already there to look at, and I think that is a good way to enter into whatever one's subject matter might be.

Teresi: Are there dangers?

Trethewey: Certainly there must be. Well, I write about photographs, but when you first said the word ekphrastic, I was immediately thinking about my work writing about paintings, and mainly that's because I'm writing a lot more about paintings now. Bellocq's Ophelia was about a series of photographs, but it starts with the painting Ophelia by John Everett Millais. I would think that a danger might be in misreading the work, which might cause a kind of historical anachronism I am trying to avoid. But I can also imagine that for some writers this would not be a danger at all: perhaps misreading an image would allow exciting things to happen; it could make the poem take off in a different direction. But because I am interested in history, I'm trying to avoid making interpretive mistakes. I'm trying not to impose my experience in the contemporary moment on a moment in history. A misreading of a painting or photograph could lead to that.

Teresi: The question for me comes from seeing all these books of poetry produced about visual art. I think a lot of people do take liberties, and either purposefully misrepresent or misrepresent because they aren't being careful.

Trethewey: I know what you're talking about. I've been trying to write about Renaissance paintings and ones with a lot of religious imagery. After I finished the MFA program at UMass, I was in a PhD program in American Studies, where of course one learns to read material culturally for what it reveals about a time and place and the people in it-just as in the study of art one has to learn the iconography. I could totally have fun and misread religious iconography in paintings, and that would be one way to make a poem, but I'm interested in learning the iconography so I can understand what those images meant to the people of the time when they encountered them in paintings or as altarpieces in churches.

Teresi: I think there are poets and academics so beholden to certain ideologies that as a consequence, their aesthetic standards suffer. You deal with a lot of sensitive issues in your own work, and it made me wonder how much you think about trying to make those issues resonate beyond your own personal beliefs?

Trethewey: I've been trying to do that since I was first learning to be a poet in graduate school. One of my professors was not very interested in experience. He was only interested in the imagination and thought that if something happened to you it probably wasn't worthy of being a poem. At the same time, I also knew that there were people out there who believed-and perhaps he believed it and didn't even know he believed it-that other people's experiences are of less interest to us. I felt like I was always being told, "No one wants to hear that anymore. No one wants to hear about those kinds of experiences." I had to try and find ways to make sense of the things I've been given to write about in such a way that it's bigger than me. I hope that's what I'm doing, which is why I turn to history over and over. The sensitive things I write about don't just belong to me. They belong to history, which means they belong to all of us. If I can remind people that what I'm writing about is a shared history, not merely a personal history, that my personal stake in it can resonate and connect across time and space to other people and their personal stakes in history, then I think I'm able to avoid the trap of my own personal ideology.

Teresi: Who do you think about when you think about audience?

Trethewey: I think about the world.

Teresi: That's funny because of what your professor said to you, and how much backlash there is against the lyric narrative. Yet all of the most recognizable poets in contemporary American literature have significant contributions to the lyric narrative.

Trethewey: I know. Isn't it strange? This same professor said to me, "Unburden yourself of being black. Unburden yourself of the death of your mother. Write about the situation in Northern Ireland." I tried to take that advice, but of course, what it did was make me read many more Irish poets and eventually write Native Guard-which is all about the very things I had been told to let go. Reading poets like Heaney and Boland and seeing the way that they claim Irish history and their places in it-their relationship to homeland and to ideas of exile showed me a way into my own material, not in Northern Ireland, but in Mississippi, in the deep South. Reading Heaney's North helped me to understand my relationship to my South.

Teresi: You have that line in Native Guard from "Pilgrimage," "The living come to mingle with the dead." Do you see the primary importance of a poet is to keep a record of the past and to not be working purely in an imaginative state?

Trethewey: I do, and I feel that at least one of the duties I want to take on is the work of recording and remembrance. My mind keeps to things poets have said about this. Like Keats's, "To sharpen one's vision into the heart and nature of man." For me, doing that means understanding something about the historical moment in which we live. As Faulkner says, "The past isn't dead, it isn't even past." It's always here. The dead are always here with us.

Teresi: So how important do you see keeping an accurate record of history is with regards to your own efforts? Do you actually see your work as a redressing of inaccuracies, not only within history, but also in your own community, background, and the culture around you?

Trethewey: Absolutely, and when you say it like that, I remember an essay Robert Hayden wrote that was very much about redressing the mistakes or the errors in history about African Americans. Growing up in the Deep South, I had a profound sense of exile. That exile came because of what I saw as historical erasure on the landscape, in the history books, in the erecting of monuments-all those places that are there to remind and tell us about the past, and about who we are. But of course, these monuments and things are never simply about the past. They are about who we are now, and what we think about ourselves right now. All I could see was what we thought about ourselves in the South then did not necessarily include stories about African Americans-particularly in the Civil War. I grew up-I think a lot of people grew up-having no idea that nearly 200,000 African Americans fought in the Civil War. It was accessible in the records, yet when some people wrote the history books, when they inscribed the landscapes with monuments and named roads and buildings and bridges, they told only part of the story. I wanted to redress that. I wanted to fill in what I saw as gaps everywhere.

Teresi: What makes people so willing to believe in an inaccurate history?

Trethewey: Well, it has to do with the narratives we need to tell ourselves about ourselves. Even sitting here and doing this interview, I'm very concerned about the story that I'm creating and that we'll create together about me or about this moment. I think we all want stories that present us in a better light. That's why memory is so flawed. The more you repeat memories to yourself, the more you might edit them or change them so that you might come off appearing a little bit better than you actually were. I think a lot of the revisions or omissions in Southern history are about people not wanting to end up on the wrong side of history, because once everything changed, once we had the Civil Rights Movement, it was clear that the events of the past were unjust. Who wants to be on the side of injustice when the world comes to acknowledge the horrors of it?

A good example of the inaccuracies of history is in the flag debate in the state of Georgia. The flag with the Confederate symbol on it that was changed in 2001 was not the original Confederate flag of the state of Georgia. It was the flag adopted in 1956 as a reaction to the Brown v. Board of Education decision, in protest of desegregation. Back then, ironically, the Daughters of the Confederacy were against the change because the flag that was already in place was proposed by their organization and adopted after the Civil War to represent the Confederacy. So all the people who are running around saying these issues are about heritage, not hate, are misrepresenting the history as evidenced by the historical documents. This is not unlike the people who want to insist the war was not about slavery-just states' rights. But states' rights to do what? Among other things, to determine whether or not its citizens can own slaves.

Teresi: How did you come to write Beyond Katrina? It made me think about erasure with regards to the books of poetry about Katrina. Inevitably, even in absolute earnestness, I think those books have to take one viewpoint over another. They never get at the totality of what they're talking about. I wonder if you think there is a way to go about a discussion of Katrina, or tragedy in general, that makes poems more responsible.

Trethewey: Beyond Katrina began as lectures I gave at the University of Virginia. The book's greatest influence and literary ancestor is Robert Penn Warren's Segregation, which is a very lovely, thin book, and, in a way, a travel narrative. Segregation represents a kind of reporting and interviewing, based on Warren's journey back to the South after the Brown decision to rethink his earlier position on the South from I'll Take My Stand. And I love that about him-that he undertook this project to reexamine his feelings. That's what I was trying to do when I went back to my home to consider what this storm meant and what was happening.

The people on the Gulf Coast already feel like their story has been subjugated beneath the story of Katrina in New Orleans. Katrina in New Orleans is a travesty, and it's clear why that story became the story in so many ways. It was about the horrors of the aftermath when the levees broke. But the storm made landfall on the Mississippi Gulf Coast where I'm from, and completely devastated many towns whose names people can't recall-Pass Christian, Waveland, and Bay St. Louis to name a few. I've found that when I travel around the country and ask people what they think of when I say Hurricane Katrina, it's always New Orleans.

Teresi: There is that moment in Beyond Katrina where a woman in Gulfport says to you, "There's a difference between a natural disaster and the man-made disaster of New Orleans. Don't forget about us."

Trethewey: Right. She just wanted people to remember. Like a lot of people, I sat there and cried watching what was happening to New Orleans, because I love that place too. But I wonder (and maybe this answers your question about responsible ways of dealing with tragedies that happen), how can we leave the ideology behind? Certain reprehensible ideological positions make some people feel that the suffering of one group of people is more deserving of our sympathy than the suffering of another. Buried under that is an idea about race and class that often goes unspoken, unacknowledged.

Even that narrative about Mississippi is a contentious one. There are some Mississippians who would like to tell you we fixed everything, but we didn't fix everything-not for the poorest citizens in the state. They are still suffering. They are still struggling. They have not seen their fair share of money because it has gone to businesses and wealthier citizens... I don't know. There is a responsible way to write about it. I just keep going back to the idea of trying to tell a fuller version of the story. I don't know how any one of us does that. I mean, I understand my own limitations when I'm trying to tell a fuller version of any story, and yet I think that by acknowledging my own limitations, I help to make room for another story rather than suggesting that the story I am telling is the only one. In writing Native Guard, I wanted to correct the misapprehensions in the narrative. I never wanted simply to erase or subjugate the narratives of the Confederacy that people hold dear to their hearts, but I would like to put them side by side with another story so that there are not two separate histories-two trains running on separate tracks- but stories intertwined in the way that our shared histories always are.

In writing Beyond Katrina, I wanted to make sure that the story of the Mississippi Gulf Coast wasn't completely forgotten, subjugated beneath the story of New Orleans. Early on, an editor asked me if I could make the book more about New Orleans. He said, "I think the problem is that people are going to see this title, Beyond Katrina, and think it's about New Orleans, and buy it, and then they'll return it when they see it's not." But that was the whole point I'd been trying to make. Mississippi had a story too-and it needed to be told.

Teresi: What was it like to go back there, to write that story?

Trethewey: The first thing I did was get out my Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to reread and rethink what it means to try to document the lives of struggling people. I also read George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier. This time, reading those things, I was profoundly uncomfortable with the lens through which each writer was looking at the people, even if the people were made noble in many ways as they are in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

When I went to Gulfport with the NPR producer who accompanied me, the first thing that occurred to me was the feeling that I was no longer an insider. This was the place and the people I had always felt part of, but when I came back, I was the documentarian with a lens I was turning on them, and that made me really uncomfortable. That's why the poems I wrote for the book, unlike the beautiful poems in VQR by Susan Somers-Willett about Troy, New York, ended up being as much about me as they are about the place. I could not help but interrogate the very project I was sent there to do and my position in it, which is why there's a poem about being a prodigal daughter. I felt like a prodigal going back there.

Teresi: Why did Road to Wigan Pier and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men make you uncomfortable?

Trethewey: It was particularly the Orwell book. You know Walker Evans and James Agee and Orwell went and stayed with the people they were writing about. They stayed with the sharecroppers, and Orwell stayed in a boarding house, a kind of flophouse place where these men who worked in the mines stayed. They inhabited these spaces, but even so they inhabited them as outsiders. When I went home in the past, I would go to my grandmother's house and write from in there. When I go back now, because her house was so damaged in Katrina, I stay in a hotel. So I wasn't even staying "in" in the same way Agee and Orwell were. What made me uncomfortable about Orwell was the ways he couldn't help-even in his generosity, with all his empathy-looking at them as other. There's a way that the people were so different from him that they were rendered other. An interviewer in South Korea once asked me: "Because there are problems people associate with writing about the marginalized or oppressed, how do you feel comfortable doing that?" I said, "I'm not writing about someone I'm not. These are the people from whom I have come." But then, when I finally went back to Mississippi to do this work, I realized I wasn't the insider I had been anymore.

Teresi: Was that part of the problem-that you felt uncomfortable by Agee and Orwell and thought you were going to do something different, but it felt like the same thing? How do you rectify that situation?

Trethewey: Well, I kept trying to turn the lens on myself, and not to navel gaze, but to indict. I was thinking about W.B. Yeats: "Of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric. Of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." I have to make the argument ultimately with myself, or all I'm going to be doing is finger pointing. That goes back to your earlier question about how to make these things I write about resonate beyond my own personal beliefs. The quarrel must be with myself-even if I have a bone to pick, or something to redress in history, or with the historians who have erased or been irresponsible about recording history-and I must understand my own complicity with such aspects of erasure that as human beings we can't help but be involved in.

Teresi: I wanted to ask you about your mother and the poems in Domestic Work about her that sort of hint, create mystery, and give glimpses about the tragic circumstances surrounding her death without ever fully disclosing the details of what happened. In the poems about her in Native Guard, you give more details, but again you never fully disclose, certainly not in the way you have in interviews. This made me wonder what it was about those details that were unnecessary in the poems, particularly when so much of your work is concerned with bringing to light forgotten history.

Trethewey: I think I have a natural reticence in poetry that I would call restraint. I'm not necessarily reticent about what happened. I'm quite willing to talk about it. I was going to say pleased, but that seems strange. There was a time in my life that being able to talk about my mother's murder was so necessary-that I could tell someone this, this thing that was weighing on my heart so much. I don't mind talking about it. I even think talking about it in interviews has been good, difficult, and bad at the same time. Good in that many women in domestic violence shelters and people all over the country heard it and, I think, were moved by it. People who might not have paid attention to the way poetry can address certain subjects were moved to pick up the book and write to me. At the same time, there would be these times when I would go to give a reading and someone-well-meaning, no doubt-would introduce me and say, "This book Native Guard is about three things: her relationship to the South, the forgotten history of black Civil War soldiers, and her mother's murder." Well, Native Guard is in no way about my mother's murder. The book is an elegy for forgotten people and lost places. The murder is the backstory in my own life. That's how she got to be dead, to say it plainly. I never meant to intentionally be cagey or tightlipped about it. I do remember writing a poem in graduate school that dealt actually with her murder, and the response I got in workshop was so odd. The assumption was I had written this sensational poem because I had read something in the newspaper. I was being accused of just creating this sensational thing. They had no idea, because I guess I don't wear it on my sleeve, that this was actually my experience.

From then on I said, "Well, hands off. No one wants to hear these sensational things that happened to you even if they did happen." I'm not interested in confessing. I don't think of my poems as confessional in that vein. I don't mean there is anything wrong with confessional poems. I just don't think that's the mode I'm writing in. I think that the details of how my mother died weren't important for the particular poems thus far. The poems in Native Guard, for example, are dealing with erasure-not how she died, but that she was gone and wasn't being properly remembered. Like those soldiers without a monument-nothing on the landscape inscribed her memory.

I started writing the poems about my mother at the same time I started writing about the Civil War, and I did not think of them as belonging in the same book. The poems about my mother were poems I had to write, to make sense of the grief I had been grappling with for years. They were bearing down on me because I was approaching my fortieth birthday, which was the last age my mother ever was. I had also lived as many years without her as I had with her. I had reached that midpoint anniversary. I was approaching the twentieth anniversary of her death. I had moved back to Atlanta, the physical location of her death-a place I thought I would never go back to-because I had a job at Emory. All of those things, the confluence of those things, made me start writing the poems, but I thought they were deeply personal. They were about my own grief, and I was putting them away in a drawer and working on this Civil War history that was the thing I thought I was really interested in.

Then one day, as I was jogging through the Confederate section of the graveyard near my house, I thought about writing a poem about this graveyard and the way that all the names on the tombstones seemed to be calling out to me to be spoken aloud and remembered in some way. When I got home, what I started writing, however, was about the day we buried my mother, which turned out to be a poem called "Graveyard Blues" in Native Guard. The final couplet of that poem reads, "I wander now among the names of the dead:/ My mother's name, stone pillow for my head." And it seemed an emotional truth to me in the poem to utter those lines, because I was thinking of the kind of cold comfort one might get by lying down on the tombstone, putting your head on it, and yet it was in that moment that I told a great lie in the poem.

I realized what this whole Civil War stuff had been about the whole time. Like those black soldiers, my mother doesn't have a stone on her grave so the erasure was that, and it was my doing. She had been in this place and on this land, and then she was gone, and there was no marker to remember that, nothing to inscribe her onto the landscape. The one whose duty was to remember her-her daughter-hadn't done it. That's the argument with myself. You'd think the argument was with the South, or my country for not remembering those black soldiers, but it was a bigger argument with myself for not doing the work of memory that I alone was charged with doing. And when I published Native Guard, I did it again, and it didn't occur to me until after all the attention the book got because of the prize, that I had created this monument to Natasha Trethewey's mother because of the dedication in the book "To My Mother"-and not Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough. So the same problem that had plagued me with the erasure on the landscape was stupidly enough that I didn't think I had language to name her on the landscape, because even though she was divorced, she died with my stepfather's last name, which was my brother's last name. I didn't want to put that on her stone. I couldn't put my father's name because that would not acknowledge my brother. It never occurred to me to put her maiden name, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, the name she was given when she entered the world, and so I had erased her, and then I erased her again in my own book.

That's the erasure I'm concerned with in Native Guard, and that's why the details of her death, which are sensational, are not part of the poems. I don't know if I would know at this point how to deal with them. I do think people often have an empathetic interest, but then there's also prurient interest too. I think there are writer's who can handle such material, but I don't know if I can tell that story, or what the value of it right now would be. What do the actual details of her murder mean that would make a poem do what I think a poem needs to do?

Teresi: What do the poems about your mother have to do?

Trethewey: I think they have to investigate loss. That is certainly a shared human emotion. When I read someone else's elegies, I read them because they show me back into my own heart. I hope my own might do that for someone else. I think poems are supposed to show us to each other, and in so doing show us ourselves.

Teresi: History seems to be the constant through the three books, but I wonder if you ever try to avoid discussions of history?

Trethewey: I don't think I try to actively avoid my obsession with history. I figure that's the only thing I know worth following. Sort of like the way George Orwell figures out it's the political purpose for him, that even though he has other impulses to write, he believes he knows which one is best for him to follow. I feel like that. I feel like the only way I'm going to write anything of consequence is if I follow my obsessions and allow them to guide me. What I try to avoid is approaching them in the same way. I have to try to find through form, or locale-the different locales I might investigate-a way of continuously pushing that investigation of history beyond where I left it the last time. I think the same obsessions undergird the poems always for me, but I hope to find something that makes the investigation different, that makes the poems sing a slightly different tune even though the baseline is the same.

I think if I weren't obsessed with history, I don't know what I would write about. I think if I didn't have this particular history, that I'd been given by birth, the fate of my geography, I don't know what I'd be doing. So that seems like the only thing worth sticking to, to see where it takes me.

Teresi: Do you know what your next book of poems is about?

Trethewey: It's about history-and, in many ways, my father. I'm a little uncomfortable knowing this as early as I do, because that feels false to me in some ways. Like if I know already, then I don't really yet know; I only know what has revealed itself. It could be a barrier rather than a path.

Teresi: Do you feel like it's superficial?

Trethewey: That could be the problem. I always approach history in order to remove the impulse to simply navel gaze and write only about my own feelings or my own experience. History is a way of doing that for me, of contextualizing my own place in the world.

This new book that I'm working on begins in that same way, with that historical investigation of the language and iconography of 18th-century casta paintings in colonial Mexico that showed the mixed blood unions and the offspring of those unions in the colony-the taxonomies of the children inscribed right there on the paintings. I became obsessed with these families-mother, father, and child-and always the white father, the black mother, and the mulatto child. Of course, there was a reason I was fascinated by that. I thought it was just this language or iconography, but indeed it's about my own family, and so the difficult thing I've learned is that these poems are about my father, and the history of colonization, and who the colonialist is, and who the colonial bodies are. That's why it's difficult, because my story is not just mine, but the way it's tied to the history of imperialism, colonization, power, and knowledge. Ways of knowing.

I think this is going to be difficult for my father.

Teresi: Your father must have some idea about how difficult some of this stuff is for you.

Trethewey: Yes. My father has this very lovely poem called "Her Swing" that he must have written when I was three or four years old. He wrote it, I think, to get at some of the difficulties he imagined I would face. Growing up, I heard my father read this poem a million times. Now, when we do readings together, standing side-by-side at the podium, and he gets to the line, "I study my crossbreed child," I feel like an exhibit in a museum of natural history. I've been living with that my whole life, and I never knew why something about the poem, as sweet as it is, never felt quite right to me. Now I think it's that he used the language of zoology, of animals, to describe his own child. No human being is a crossbreed. To be a crossbreed actually means to be born of different species. It's one thing to be named in the racial taxonomies of the Spanish casta paintings, in the language of census records in New Orleans, in the constitution of the state of Mississippi, or the state of Virginia, or the state of wherever, and yet another thing to be named and categorized-even for the purposes of a poem-by one's own father.

Teresi: In the loosest way of referencing, your father's background comes from a different part of the history of western civilization.

Trethewey: Yes, my father is Canadian-another connection to the British Empire. Our story is emblematic of how even in families it's impossible to escape some of the things that are embedded in history and are still having an effect on our day-to-day lives. When I was finishing up Native Guard, I looked up the word native in the dictionary and was surprised to see the first definition of the word. I thought the meaning would be as we use it most, as in "I'm a native of Mississippi." Or, "That tree is native to Connecticut." But what comes up instead is, "Someone born into the condition of servitude; a thrall." So it has this history of imperialism built right in: when we go there to conquer that land, and colonize those people, they are the natives. So the new book is called Thrall, but thrall gives me a lot of other possibilities. Not just the idea of being in bondage or captivity, but also of being enthralled, as I think we are to language, especially language that seeks to name us and thus make us occupy certain positions in society, in history. That's particularly relevant to me because of a word like miscegenation that entered the American lexicon during the Civil War, and then was written into the law books of so many states. There is legal language meant to define me, and also render me illegal, or illegitimate. Antonio Nebrija, in his 15th-century Castilian grammar book wrote, "Language has always been the perfect tool of empire." I'm interested in those systems of knowledge. Enthralled by them.

AWP

Christian Teresi's poems and interviews have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Copper Nickle, the Kenyon Review Online, Sou'wester, and the Writer's Chronicle, among other journals. He is the Director of Conferences at AWP.

Knowledge

-after a chalk drawing by J. H. Hasselhorst, 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 anatomist 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 Katherine or Elizabeth
to corpus, areola, 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 fist on a stack of books.
In the drawing this is only the first cut,

a delicate wounding: and yet how easily
the anatomist's 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 crossbreed 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.

"Knowledge" © Natasha Trethewey, first appeared in the NewEngland Review. Reprinted with permission by the author