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Tretheway served two terms as the 19 Poet Laureate of the United States from 2012 to 2014. Her poetry is influenced by her passion for preserving the past, and her goal is to bring truth and reconciliation to the world of poetry.
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\u201cI added the reconciliation part because that\u2019s the hope of an attempt to communicate something to other people,\u201d Tretheway said. \u201cIf we tell the truth about ourselves\u2014if we tell the truth about history\u2014maybe the things that divide us will no longer divide us.\u201d
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Tretheway\u2019s work pulls heavily from her own search for truth and reconciliation. Many of her poems revolve around her mother\u2019s untimely death at the hands of her stepfather, and her own struggle to come to grips with her new reality.
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Another common theme in Tretheway\u2019s poems is racial inequality and African American history. She was born in Mississippi to a Caucasian father and African American mother in 1966, when interracial marriage was illegal. Tretheway said in the interview with Dr. Gleason that she hopes her work will help readers remember the past that would otherwise be forgotten, and give them an opportunity to interact with history.
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\u201cThat\u2019s what monuments do,\u201d Tretheway said. \u201cThey\u2019re not these sort of cold, lifeless things, because any time we read them, we interact with them and actually remember.\u201d
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\u201cNative Guard,\u201dwhich won her the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2007, focuses on the recognition of African Americans in history. Other poems in her catalog relate Southern culture and Tretheway\u2019s struggle to feel at home where she was born. Her strong feelings about the issue brought her to tears several times while speaking at Bryan.
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Tretheway tries to keep her written works easy to read in order to make that message accessible. She wants to write in such a way that every person can read her poems and understand them. She also is careful to write multiple levels of meaning into her lines to give them different interpretations.
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\u201cThere was a review years ago written about my book \u2018Native Guard\u2019 in which the writer said that \u2018Natasha Tretheway writes as if modernism never happened.\u2019 That\u2019s a choice,\u201d Tretheway said. \u201cI wanted to write such that the women in my grandmother\u2019s church, who may not read poetry, could understand my poems.\u201d
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Tretheway took questions from students during her lecture in the afternoon. She often reinforced her responses by reading from her latest book Memorial<\/em>. One of the subjects Tretheway addressed was the concept of stimulating her creativity. When she cannot think of how to continue, Tretheway said she goes first to research. A primary tool she uses when writing is the Oxford English Dictionary<\/a>, from which she finds the extra levels of meaning for her poetry. She also frequently researches in libraries and consults historians.
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