What is remarkable about Tretheweys approach to these issues is the emotional distance she maintains from the incredibly personal subject matter.

Enlightenment natasha trethewey meaning. And winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry on Feb. Ive made a joke of it. Rita Dove noted in her introduction for Domestic Work that Trethewey had resisted the lure of autobiography.

Trethewey the daughter of a white father and a black mother turns to Jeffersons presence and ideas in Enlightenment a poem near the end of Thrall that culminates reflections on taxonomy bookending the volume. This poem is also about Tretheweys identity crisis due to her biraciality. This moment is staged as a tourist visit she and her father take to Jeffersons eighteenth-century home Monticello outside of Charlottesville Virginia.

She remembers the first time they visited Monticello and her fathers attempts to justify Thomas Jeffersons participation in the institution of slavery. Contemporary poets can offer urgency and enlightenment about our historical moment They help us to contend with the tumultuous times we now faceboth individually and collectively We need the truth of poetry and its beauty Trethewey concludes now more than ever The Best American Poetry 2017 xxv. In Beyond Katrina that lure is necessary to endow the story with authenticity and Trethewey embraces it with verve.

His forehead white with illumination. She is also the author of Beyond Katrina a narrative meditation about Hurricane Katrinas impact on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Tretheweys final reading Enlightenment returns to memories of her father.

For more information and to read other poems please visit our repository. You know I think Ive never actually said that the Enlightenment was male or racist I think that thats sort of the perception which might have come but when I introduce those poems and talk about the Enlightenment. How would you respond to those who feel you characterize the Enlightenment in poems like Enlightenment as a male dominated epoch that for all its intellectual and scientific advances was also racist.

Trethewey quite directly interrogates Thomas Je ersons taxonomies of race within broader systems of racial identification in the early Americas. Through the perspectives afforded by the windows of autobiography she accomplishes the yoking of narrative and metanarrative and explores the devastated but. Tretheweys language mirrors the way thoughts wander or turn towards a thread or the way our perspectives change from a more distant retrospective view to a more intimate examination of a specific moment in time.