Trethewey:Yes, and to transform the mean-
ing by circling back.
McHaney: I also read that in a pantoum the
poet tells two stories, lines two and four become
lines one and three in the subsequent stanza and
the first two lines of each stanza build one story or
theme and lines three and four another theme. In
‘‘Incident’’ the first two lines are the story, the
cross itself, what was seen, and the other story is
light, and shedding light and looking for under-
standing of what that was. So the pantoum was
successful in form and in meaning both. What of
your villanelle, ‘‘Scenes from a Documentary His-
tory of Mississippi, 1. King Cotton, 1907’’?
Trethewey:When I am using a photograph,
I begin describing literally what I can see before I
move toward any interpretation. And in that
first poem in ‘‘Scenes,’’ ‘‘1. King Cotton, 1907,’’
I saw the flags and the archway made of bales of
cotton; I saw clearly those two things in contrast
to each other. And I saw how symbolic this was
of that historical moment:
From every corner of the photograph, flags
wave down
the main street in Vicksburg. Stacked to
form an arch,
the great bales of cotton rise up from the
ground
McHaney: You have been writing sonnets and
blues poems since your first book; has your use of
those forms changed over time?
Trethewey:I admire the sonnet form, little
envelopes of small space, ten syllables in four-
teen lines. You are forced to get rid of the
unnecessary, the things that might try to trick
you. There’s no room for anything extra. You
have to select, and what you select you must
infuse with meaning. What is kept has energy,
offers the right amount of story. Sonnets are
traditionally written in iambic pentameter, the
equivalent of the natural English voice, and in
rhyme. Somehow, I didn’t want to impose such a
voice or such rhyme onto the speaker in ‘‘Native
Guard.’’ I am thinking also about the poems of
Agi Mishol and Elizabeth Alexander who write
about historical erasures in their cultural experi-
ences. Mishol’s poem ‘‘Woman Martyr’’ tells the
story of the suicide bomber Andaleeb Takatka,
but Mishol says it is not about Takatka, that
poetry is always about language.
Rita Dove referred to a ‘‘syncopated atti-
tude of the blues’’ in the poems ofDomestic
Work.I thought that sounded really wonderful
and then I realized the real insight of Rita’s com-
ment. ‘‘Syncopate,’’ in its simplest definition,
means to shorten, usually by omitting some-
thing, like I described leaving out the unneces-
sary. But when you talk about syncopation in
music, it is putting the stress on the typically
unaccented note, putting the accent in an unex-
pected place, and in poetry, infusing the poems
with a syncopated rhythm would be putting
emphasis where one would not only not expect
it, but would not want it—on the historical era-
sures, the bi-raciality, the circumstances of the
Louisiana Native Guards who could read and
write better than their white prisoners...
Source:Pearl Amelia McHaney, ‘‘An Interview with
Natasha Trethewey,’’ inFive Points: A Journal of Liter-
ature and Art, Vol. 11, No. 3, September 2007, pp.
97–115.Ange Mlinko
In the following review, Mlinko discusses the three-
part structure ofNative Guard.
But what of elegiac works that reject the
premise of art’s enchantment? At barely fifty
pages,Native Guardnevertheless aspires to mon-
umentality, memorializing both Trethewey’s
mother, murdered at the hands of her stepfather,
and the Louisiana Native Guards, one of the
first black Civil War regiments.
Native Guardis structured like a dialectic, in
three parts: the autobiographical as thesis, the
historical as antithesis, and the intertwining of
the personal and the historical as synthesis. First
she limns her relationship with her mother, who
dies; then she imaginatively reconstructs the
experience of the Native Guards in the 1860’s;
finally, in the strongest section, she combines the
personal and the historical in recollections of her
childhood in the South in the explosive sixties.
The dialectic is used to allegorize her very per-
son: Trethewey is a synthesis of a black mother
and white father. Their marriage was illegal in
Mississippi, and her birth thereby illegitimate.
But the illegitimate daughter refuses to give up
her legacy, which encompasses the land and its
history, its mess and its murderousness. She
comes back again and again, rooted to the
source of trauma, and in an act of equal parts
reconciliation and defiance, creates a tribute for
the Native Guards, whom the state has neglected
to memorialize whatsoever.Native Guard