#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
I love this yellow flower; I feel this shy, often. We walked, early, over the trestle bridge to the Charles Link Trail, through meadows, by the river, it was cooler and the mosquitos were less aggressive. Yesterday I read a notice that poet Natasha Tretheway was speaking at the Mount tonight in Lenox, a two hour drive, and I thought, I'll go. Then, no, I won't, it's too far. Then I proposed the idea to my husband and we both stopped working early today, jumped in his car and drove to Lenox to hear Natasha read her poems for an hour, and it was well worth the trip. I bought her recent book, "Thrall," and had her sign it and thanked her and asked, shyly, for a photo, and she agreed. And I was so grateful to my husband for being such a good sport, always agreeable. Her poetry moves me deeply, her story, her experiences, the way she probes the meaning of her relationships, personally, with her parents, and how she weaves this into the way she probes, also, the history of the south, the history of black experience, and being born in a state that would not acknowledge her identity as a mixed race child of outlaw parents who crossed the border to marry as a mixed race couple. There's so much she explores in her work - and also, so moving, her poems and discussion about her mother's murder by a violent 2nd ex-husband, and the lack of understanding in our culture about victims of domestic violence, and, of course, the victim blaming. I'm just so glad we made the trip - this juicy, juicy evening with a powerful writer and reader and thinker.
“Always there is something more to know
what lingers at the edge of thought
awaiting illumination ”
Natasha Tretheway's reading tonight at The Mount in Lenox, MA
Pulitzer Prize-winner Natasha Trethewey, 19th Poet Laureate of the United States, reads a selection of her work. This event is sponsored by the Amy Clampitt Fund, a fund of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation.
Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of four collections of poetry, Thrall (2012), Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002); and Domestic Work (2000) which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, appeared in 2010. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. At Northwestern University she is a Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. In 2012 she was named Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi and and in 2013 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
