Natasha Trethewey

ArtifactAs long as I can remember you kept the rifle--your grandfather's an antique you called it-in your study, propped against the tall shelvesthat held your many books. Upright,beside those hard-worn spins, it was anotherbackbone of your pas, a remnant I studiedas if it might unlock-- like the skeleton keyits long body resembled-- some door i had yetto find. Peering into the dark muzzle, I imagined a bulletas you described: spiraling through the boreand spinning straight for its target. It did not hit methen: the rifle I'd inherited showing mehow one life is bound to another, that hardshipendures. For years I admired its slender profile,until-- late one night, somber with drink--you told meit still worked, that you kept it loaded just in case,and I saw the rifle for what it is; a relicsharp as sorrow, the barrel hollow as regret.

The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.

I think people turn to poetry more often than they think they do, or encounter it in more ways than they think that they do. I think we forget the places that we encounter it, say, in songs or in other little bits and pieces of things that we may have remembered from childhood.

I've been most happy to be an advocate for the kinds of grassroots things that people are doing who care about poetry.

I think the biggest thing that I have to do is to remind people that poetry is there for us to turn to not only to remind us that we're not alone - for example, if we are grieving the loss of someone - but also to help us celebrate our joys. That's why so many people I know who've gotten married will have a poem read at the wedding.

I want to be the best advocate and promoter for poetry that I can be.

I think I felt at some point that I couldn't understand poetry or that it was beyond me or it didn't speak to my experience. I think that was because I hadn't yet found the right poems to invite me in.

'NewsHour' is very interested in poetry, but they're also interested in not just that something's cute to add on at the end of their programming, but something that actually is integrated into the news.

My father, Eric Trethewey, is a poet, so I had one right inside the house. And on long trips, he'd tell me, if I got bored in the car, to write a poem about it. And I did find that poetry was a way for me, I think as it for a lot of people, to articulate those things that seem hardest to say.

From the catbird seat, I've found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in America.

Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.

I think poetry's always a kind of faith. It is the kind that I have.

Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it.

Poetry's a thing that belongs to everyone.

The experience of poetry could bring my mother back to me. Poetry offers a different kind of solace - here on earth.

I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.

Growing up, my birthday was always Confederate Memorial Day. It helped to create this profound sense of awareness about the Civil War and the 100 years between the Civil War and the civil rights movement and my parents' then-illegal and interracial marriage.

I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing--I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to "fix" a poem.