and then the ones that become the elegies for your
mother Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough. When did you
realize the confluence of the two projects? When did
you realize that these personal poems could success-
fully frame the public poems about the Louisiana
Native Guards?
Trethewey:That took a long time for me to
recognize. When I went to Radcliffe on a Bunt-
ing Fellowship in 2000, I was still thinking about
the soldiers. And I was doing a lot of the research
about historical memory, the Civil War, and the
idea of what gets memorialized in the form of
monuments. It seems to me [it] should have
alerted me to something that was on my mind,
but it didn’t. I was writing, at the same time as
these poems, about my mother. Sometimes they
would be just a portion of a poem that I wouldn’t
finish until years later. But I started writing some
of them and putting them away in a drawer
because I thought, well that’s for another thing,
another time. I couldn’t see how, at the time,
they would have anything to do with this larger
project that was only about something histori-
cal. And maybe because I was coming off the
heels ofBellocq’s Ophelia,still thinking only
about a kind of public history, I didn’t see the
connections, even though what I do inBellocq’s
Opheliais to find a way to weave a personal
history into what is my imagined history for her.
McHaney: Ophelia moves from in front of the
camera, being objectified, to behind the camera,
choosing what she takes a picture of, what she
sees. It is a similar kind of movement.
Trethewey:Right, the same kind of journey
I was taking, but I didn’t know that. I did start
publishing a lot of those elegies, but I was still
thinking they didn’t belong. I think I remember
at one point feeling that I was coming close to
having a new book, and there I was writing all of
those things, and I started to think, well, could
they go together? But I still didn’t know.
McHaney: Didn’t know that you would be
able to have a first section that were the elegies
to your mother and that at the same time they were
leading to the Native Guards poems and then that
they would be so interwoven by the third section?
Trethewey:Well, I started thinking that a
poem like ‘‘Miscegenation’’ and some poems
that I was writing about my own personal his-
tory as a biracial person growing up in the deep
South had a connection to the history of the
Native Guards because I saw that the umbrella
over them was something about the South. I still
hadn’t connected those elegies for my mother. In
the meantime, I was living here in Atlanta.
Returning to the landscape that was haunted
by the tragedy of my mother’s death made me
write these elegies. I wrote a poem for the book
early on called ‘‘Graveyard Blues’’ after jogging
through the little Decatur cemetery and being
overwhelmed by all the names of the dead. I am
one of those people who can’t just walk through
a graveyard. I feel like I have to read every single
name that presents itself to me, and it seemed
like a good metaphor for the insistence of his-
tory, or for the insistence of people to be heard or
their stories to be told, or even their names to be
registered or spoken. And so even seeing those
names, I was still thinking: this is about history.
But the poem I wrote was about the memory of
the day we buried my mother. The final image in
the poem, the final two lines, reads:
I wander now among names of the dead:
My mother’s name, stone pillow for my
head.
That’s an image of hard, or cold comfort.
I might want to lie my head down on my mother’s
stone and that would be a kind of comfort, but
one that was stone and cold. A few months later,
I could not, I could not simply deal with the fact
that I [had] written those two lines in that poem
because I felt that whatever obligation I have to
truth was being sacrificed by the poem. So I
started writing another poem to undo the lie
that I told in ‘‘Graveyard Blues.’’ My mother
does not have a stone or any marker at all.
There’s no marker, no memorial at her grave,
and so I started writing the poem ‘‘Monument’’
because I wanted to tell the reader that I had lied
about this. It was stunning to me when I realized
that I had, for the sake of one poem, told a lie and
needed to fix it in another one. But it was the
realization that I needed to fix the lie that made
me realize exactly why those elegies to my mother
should be in the same book with the Native
Guards. Like them, she had no marker.
McHaney: You arrived at it through a kind of
journeying; it evolved in a very natural way.
Maybe that is one aspect of your genius, the weav-
ings and stitchings and cross-hatchings all
together. That was the work that you had to do.
Trethewey:Well, perhaps it is the genius of
poetry. Robert Frost said, ‘‘No surprise for the
writer, no surprise for the reader.’’ It is abso-
lutely true that I didn’t set off knowing exactly
what I wanted to say, and when I figured it out, itNative Guard