Before I was ever a poet, my father was writing poems about me, so it was a turning of the tables when I became a poet and started answering, speaking back to his poems in ways that I had not before.
Natasha TretheweyRead
Often as a poet I find that I am somewhat outside an experience I want to hold onto, consciously taking mental notes or writing them down in my journal - for fear that I will forget. It's not unlike being on a trip and taking pictures, your face behind a camera the whole time - the entire experience mediated by a lens.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the poet's struggle to fully immerse in experiences while simultaneously documenting them.
Natasha Trethewey expresses the tension between experiencing life and capturing it through writing. She likens her poetic process to being a tourist, where the act of documenting—whether through notes or photographs—can sometimes hinder one's ability to fully engage with the moment. This highlights the complexities of creativity and memory, revealing how art can serve both as a means of preservation and a barrier to genuine experience.
Themes
PoetryExperienceMemoryDocumentationArtCreativity
In practice
Example use cases
In a poetry reading, one might use this quote to illustrate the challenges of capturing emotions.
More from Natasha Trethewey
All quotes →I've been telling my students, 'Imitate, imitate.' And they say, 'Well, what if I plagiarize, or what if I'm not original? I want to be myself.' And I always tell them, 'Your self will shine through'... If you allow yourself to feel deeply and honestly, what you say won't be like anyone else.
Natasha TretheweyRead
I think that it's hard enough being an adolescent and wanting so much to fit in with your peers, your schoolmates, and to erase any sign of difference, to be part of the group. And being biracial but also being black in a predominately white school marked me as different.
Natasha TretheweyRead
'Memory.' 'Race.' 'Murder.' That's what they say about me. I am an elegiac poet. I have some historical questions, and I'm grappling with ways to make sense of history; why it still haunts us in our most intimate relationships with each other, but also in our political decisions.
Natasha TretheweyRead
For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure.
Natasha TretheweyRead
People always want to be on the right side of history; it is a lot easier to say, 'What an atrocity that was' then it is to say, 'What an atrocity this is.'
Natasha TretheweyRead
Similar quotes
Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.
Tim O'BrienRead
The music comes through me, and I let it come the way it comes, and it shapes itself. I just hold space for it. I don't intend to write it for a purpose, but it comes as it comes and am proud of the way it can support change because I believe strongly in what I sing about.
Xavier RuddRead
So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out.
John SteinbeckRead
Music is a defining element of character.
PlatoRead
In the best of all possible worlds, directors would obsess about the quality of their storytelling, and not the details of their technical methods.
Roger EbertRead
But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its soul and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.
W. E. B. Du BoisRead