McHaney: That reminds me how important
narrative is within your lyric poems. What do you
find that poetry can do when you want to tell a
story? Why poetry then, and why not fiction?
Trethewey:Because of those elegant enve-
lopes of form that poems are. Because of the
music and lyricism and density and compression,
poems can be memorable in a way that a long
piece of fiction isn’t. Not that the language of the
novel or story isn’t memorable, but the ease with
which we might memorize a poem and carry it
with us in our heads is appealing to me. The way
a poem has a smaller space to fit into, and
because that density and compression of a
poem crystallizes and intensifies image, emotion,
idea, sound.
McHaney: You have said that writing in form
helps to avoid sentimentality, that refrain and
repetition allow emotional restraint from excess
or provide emphasis. Can you speak of your use of
form, the ghazal ‘‘Miscegenation,’’ the pantoum
‘‘Incident,’’ the villanelle ‘‘Scenes from a Docu-
mentary History of Mississippi, 1. King Cotton,
1907’’?
Trethewey:I had been reading the late Sha-
hid Ali’s anthologyRavishing Disunities: Real
Ghazals in English.The introductory essay is so
illuminating about what a ghazal is, the qualities
of the ghazal. The particular one is the idea of
disunity, the idea that these are closed stanzas
that don’t necessarily support or aim to support
narrative or even linear movement, that they are
separate, that in the juxtaposition of one stanza
to the next is some sort of tension, and excite-
ment can happen. And movement. And also that
it is a form that is a kind of call and response—if
the form is done traditionally, audiences know,
based on where the rhyme appears, when the
refrain comes and they say it with the poet.
That is an interesting collective thing happening.
Also, that the poet is supposed to invoke her own
name in the final stanza is the thing that made
that poem get written for me. I was thinking
about all these disunified things. They were all
connected but they were things that I didn’t
think I could write about in a straight narra-
tive—my Jesus year or my parents breaking
laws in Mississippi. These things are part of the
same story, but I couldn’t imagine a kind of
linear narrative poem being able to put all of it
together. So it was the idea of ‘‘ravishing dis-
unity’’ that allowed me to do it.
McHaney: I reread the poem looking at each
stanza to have it be its own separate unit as you
said, and it does; it works perfectly. What about
the pantoum,‘‘Incident.’’
Trethewey:Oh, I loved figuring out that that
poem should be a pantoum and that it was sug-
gesting itself to me. At first, it was an extremely
different poem. I showed it to my students at
Chapel Hill because I was talking to them
about revision. I brought in a copy of two
poems. One of them was ‘‘Incident,’’ and the
other was called ‘‘Target,’’ one of its horrible
pedestrian titles. I was trying to write about the
cross burning, and I was writing bad poems
about it because I was focusing on the narrative
of it, the story of it, trying to tell the story and
then figure out what the story meant. Ultimately
I knew that poem wasn’t working, and I mined it
for what seemed to work of the narrative. In
doing so, I got the first four lines:
We tell the story every year—
how we peered from the windows, shades
drawn—
though nothing really happened,
the charred grass now green again.
In those first four lines, I get the scene of us
peering from the windows while this cross is
being burned, but also the lasting effect that it
had on us, that need to retell the story, to keep
the memory of this event alive. What is exciting
about the pantoum or the villanelle, some of
those forms, is the kind of mathematical way
that they work. They allow you to see other
possibilities. That was exciting. I knew I had to
pull out those two lines and place them in the
next stanza and then to write around them. It
freed me from what can be the trap of linear
narrative and it allows the poem to circle back
on itself. A lot of the poems inNative Guard
circle back on themselves. My impulse is to tell
a story; it was form that made me do something
different with storytelling.
McHaney: What is that trap of linear
narrative?
Trethewey:When it is not working well, then
that story just goes to an end and that end isn’t
really anywhere.
McHaney: Just a teleological impulse which
is to get to the end, whereas your impulse is to
circle back because you get a different view from
every edge of the circle?Native Guard