The Best American Newspaper Narratives of 2012

The Nation’s Poet

The Nation’s Poet Atlanta JournalConstitution By Rosalind Bentley The National Book Festival along the Mall in Washington is thronged with readers and authors who've come to revel in the written word on this fall day in 2004. Just three years old, the festival has been forged by first lady Laura Bush and the Library of Congress in the belief that literature is a living thing, that the right words, composed in just the right way, can push a life forward. To the podium steps poet Natasha Trethewey. Her work illuminates people in the shadows: a seamstress stitching her way through segregation; an early 20th-century prostitute so fair skinned 182 TheBestAmericanNewspaperNarrativesof2012 she can pass for white; a dock worker's wife who keeps her husband's supper warm as she waits for him well into the night. Into some of her poems she has woven her own complex story: the blending of the black and white blood that made her; her blood tie to her native Mississippi; the blood of her mother, cruelly spilled. What binds the characters? It is that in the body of American letters, they have routinely been pushed to the edge of the page by other protagonists deemed more "universal." This day Natasha reads poems that bring their marginalized stories to the center. "We peered from the windows, shades drawn, at the cross trussed like a Christmas tree, the charred grass still green. Then we darkened our rooms, lit the hurricane lamps." In the audience is Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. He is intrigued. Here is a beautiful woman, reading an elegant poem about the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross in her family's yard. Her poems are accessible, classic in structure, at turns gentle then brutal. Not often does Billington seek out a poet's work after a reading. With Natasha, he does. 2012: It's May. Natasha is the incoming chair of the creative writing program at Emory University and the newly minted poet laureate of her home state of Mississippi. She gets an unexpected call from the Library of Congress. Billington and his colleagues have been following her work since her first reading at the book festival. They are impressed with her 2007 collection, Native Guard. They are also taken with Beyond Katrina, her 2010 meditation on the psychological and structural wreckage dotting Mississippi's Gulf Coast landscape years after Hurricane Katrina's landfall . Billington believes the time for this kind of poet is right now. She is only 46 and in the prime of her artistic life. This will signal that the library Atlanta Journal-Constitution 183 is looking forward. He offers her the highest United States honor a poet can achieve, poet laureate of the nation. Saying yes isn't hard, though the honor humbles her, even makes her a little nervous. The laureateship, officially the poet laureate consultant in poetry, is a congressionally mandated position of one to two years. Once a figurehead, anyone in the position now is encouraged to develop a program that interjects poetry into our daily lives. Make the nation care about poetry? What has this 46-year-old gotten into? The shorthand of Natasha's life reads like words plucked from a free verse poem: Native Mississippian. Black mother. White father. Poet father. Poet daughter. Atlanta and DeKalb public school student. "A" student. UGA head cheerleader. Trauma survivor. Big sister. Decatur resident. Meticulous housekeeper. Proud wife. Exacting professor. Historical poet. Nobody's pushover. She has publicly sketched the arc of her life in her poems, yet she is intensely protective of its sweetest moments. People can parse her work, even parse her appearance, but she will not tolerate parsing of the inner world she retreats to each evening with her husband. "This is not a reality TV show," she says. Fellow poets warn her about giving in to the relentless demands of the media as she moves forward. If she does, it will cripple her ability to create the art that got her here. They have also cautioned her about the pains, intended or not, that will be inflicted by critics. It galls Natasha that the press calls her a poet of race or memory. "Memory. Race. Murder. That's what they say about me," she says. "I am an elegiac poet. I have some historical questions and I'm grappling 184 TheBestAmericanNewspaperNarrativesof2012 with ways to make sense of...