Mixed Race Studies

An Evening with Our New Poet Laureate

MixedRaceStudies.org
2012-09-16

Steven F. Riley

2012-2013 U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey at Library of Congress (2012-09-13).©2012, Steven F. Riley

Natasha Trethewey is preoccupied about race. It is a fruitful preoccupation for which we all should be grateful.

[View the inaugural reading transcript here.]

Last Thursday, Emory University Professor Trethewey gave her inaugural reading as the 19th U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress. After a warm introduction by the Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, Ms. Trethewey arrived on stage for a handshake from Mr. Billington and a standing ovation by a packed and enthusiastic audience of 5oo (plus an extra 100 outside the auditorium).

Ms. Trethewey is the first Southerner to hold the post since Robert Penn Warren, the original laureate, and she is the first African-American since Rita Dove in 1993. Ms. Trethewey is also the Mississippi Poet Laureate (2012-2016); winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for her book of poetry Native Guard; winner of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts; four Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prizes; The Lillian Smith Book Awards for Poetry; fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University; 2008 Georgia Woman of the Year; 2009 inductee into the Fellowship of Southern Writers; and 2011 inductee into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. And she is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University.

Ms. Trethewey read a selection of poems from her recently released book of poems dedicated to her poet father, titled Thrall.

The poems read were:

• “Elegy (For my father)
• Taxonomy:
  • “De Español y de India Produce Mestiso”
  • “De Español y Negra Produce Mulato”
  • “De Español y Mestiza Produce Castiza”
  • “The Book of Castas”
• “Knowledge”
• “Miracle of the Black Leg”
• “The Americans” (“Help, 1968”)
• “Mano Prieta”
• “Torna Atrás”
• “Mythology”
• “Calling: Mexico, 1969”
• “Fouled”
• “Rotation”
• “Enlightenment”
• “Illumination.”

Born in 1966 to a black mother and white father in Mississippi—the tortured crucible of race relations in the United States—it is understandable that the topic of race would be a recurring theme in Trethewey’s writings. Yet we never grow tired reading her poems about race because of her innate ability to weave the personal with the historical. As a consequence, her stories are our stories. As in her poem, “Elightenment,” where she describes a trip to Monticello with her father, for a few brief moments we read how she conflates one of our founding fathers with her own father.

…I did not know then the subtext
of our story, that my father could imagine
Jefferson’s words made flesh in my flesh—

Without taking herself too seriously, Ms. Trethewey humorously described that the only surviving remnant of a family trip to Mexico in 1969 was a photograph of her sitting on a mule, as she began reading “Calling: Mexico, 1969.”

In her series of moving poems about casta paintings, Ms. Trethewey reveals her ability to not only compel the reader to contemplate the lives of the subjects of the paintings, but also to bring the subjects of the paintings to life as in her poem “Taxonomy: De Español y de India Produce Mestiso” (Which describes a series of casta paintings by Juan Rodríguez Juárez, c. 1715).

Spaniard and Indian Produce Mestizo. c. 1715. Oil on canvas. 81×105 cm. (Breamore House, Hampshire, United Kingdom).

The canvas is leaden sky
behind them, heavy
with words, gold letters inscribing
an equation of blood—…

…If the father, his hand
on her skull, divines—
as the physiognomist does—
the mysteries

of her character, discursive,
legible on her light flesh,
in the soft curl of her hair,
we cannot know it: so gentle

the eye he turns toward her.
The mother, glancing
sideways toward him—
the scarf on her head

white as his face,
his powdered wig—gestures
with one hand a shape
like the letter C. See,

she seems to say,
what we have made…

After concluding her reading with her poem, “Illumination,” Ms. Trethewey received yet another standing ovation.

Head of the Poetry and Literature Center Robert Casper concluded the event, and Ms. Trethewey entered the Great Hall of the Jefferson Building for a reception and book signing.

^©2012, Steven F. Riley

^©2012, Steven F. Riley

kiyâm

Athabasca University Press
May 2012
144 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-926836-69-0
eBook (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-926836-70-6
eBook (EPub) ISBN: 978-1-926836-71-3

Naomi McIlwraith

Through poems that move between the two languages, McIlwraith explores the beauty of the intersection between nêhiyawêwin, the Plains Cree language, and English, âkayâsîmowin. Written to honour her father’s facility in nêhiyawêwin and her mother’s beauty and generosity as an inheritor of Cree, Ojibwe, Scottish, and English, kiyâm articulates a powerful yearning for family, history, peace, and love.

Download the entire book here.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. It may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that the original author is credited.

Intersecting Circles: The Voices of Hapa Women in Poetry and Prose

Bamboo Ridge Press
1999
396 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 0910043590; ISBN-13: 978-0910043595

Edited by:

Marie Hara

Nora Okja Keller

This book is out of print.

In this collection of poetry, prose, and personal essay, both new and well-known women authors of mixed race ancestry examine history, culture, and identity using insight from the female psyche. Featured are writings by Ai, Cristina Bacchilega, Kathy Dee Kaleokealoha Kaloloahilani Banggo, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Debra Kang Dean, Kiana Houghtailing Davenport, Jessica Hagedorn, Kimiko Hahn, Velina Hasu Houston, Cathy Kanoelani Ikeda, Carolyn Lei-lanilau, Susan Miho Nunes, Sigrid Nunez, Mindy Eun Soo Pennybacker, Michelle Cruz Skinner, Cathy Song, Adrien Tien, Kathleen Tyau, and twenty-five other writers.

Chick

Bloodaxe Books
2013-01-24
64 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 1852249609; ISBN-13: 978-1852249601

Hannah Lowe

Hannah Lowe’s first book of poems takes you on a journey round her father, a Chinese-black Jamaican migrant who disappeared at night to play cards or dice in London’s old East End to support his family, an unstable and dangerous existence that took its toll on his physical and mental health. ‘Chick’ was his gambling nickname. A shadowy figure in her childhood, Chick was only half known to her until she entered the night world of the old man as a young woman. The name is the key to poems concerned with Chick’s death, the secret history of his life in London, and her perceptions of him as a father. With London as their backdrop, Hannah Lowe’s deeply personal narrative poems are often filmic in effect and brimming with sensory detail in their evocations of childhood and coming-of-age, love and loss of love, grief and regret.

The False Laws of Narrative: The Poetry of Fred Wah

Wilfrid Laurier University Press
October 2009
102 pages
Paper ISBN13: 978-1-55458-046-0

Fred Wah, Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate

Edited by:

Louis Cabri, Associate Professor of English
University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada

The False Laws of Narrative is a selection of Fred Wah’s poems covering the poets entire poetic trajectory to date. A founding editor of Tish magazine, Wah was influenced by leading progressive and innovative poets of the 1960s and was at the forefront of the exploration of racial hybridity, multiculturalism, and transnational family roots in poetry. The selection emphasizes his innovative poetic range.

Wah is renowned as one of Canada’s finest and most complex lyric poets and has been lauded for the musicality of his verse. Louis Cabri’s introduction offers a paradigm for thinking about how sound is actually structured in Wah’s improvisatory poetry and offers fresh insights into Wah’s context and writing. In an afterword by the poet himself, Wah presents a dialogue between editor and poet on the key themes of the selected poems and reveals his abiding concerns as poet and thinker.

The nation’s poet

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Personal Journeys
2012-10-06

Rosalind Bentley, Arts and Culture writer

Personal Journeys is a new weekly feature for readers who like good writing and good story-telling

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 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…

…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 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…

…Sept. 13, 2012: The audience in the auditorium of the Library of Congress in Washington leaps to its feet. Applause crashes against the stage where a black woman in a dark dress stands, her hands clasped to her heart. Today, she looks as though she might burst with joy. This is U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, about to officially open the library’s literary season with a reading. She has come to tell an American story….

Read the entire article here.

Cedric Dover

Wasafiri
Volume 27, Issue 2 (2012)
pages 56-57
DOI: 10.1080/02690055.2012.662322

Cedric Dover was born in Calcutta in 1904. Dover’s mixed ancestry (English father, Indian mother) and his studies in zoology led to a strong interest in ethnic minorities and their marginalisation. After his studies, he joined the Zoological Survey of India as a temporary assistant entomologist. He also wrote several scientific articles and edited the Eurasian magazine New Outlook.

Dover settled in London In 1934 to continue his anthropological studies on issues of race. He published Half-Caste in 1937, followed by Hell in the Sunshine (1943). During the 1940s Dover contributed regularly to the BBC Indian Section of the Eastern Service alongside many other British-based South Asians. There he befriended George Orwell, in 1947 he published Feathers in the Arrow: An Approach for Coloured Writers and Readers. Dover moved to the United States in the same year and took up a range of visiting academic posts. He was a member of the faculty of Fisk University, as Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology. He also briefly lectured at the New School of Social Research, New York, and Howard University. Dover held a lifelong interest in African-American art, culture and literature and his influential book American Negro Art was published in 1960. Dover returned to London in the late 1950s. He continued to lecture and write on minority issues and culture until his death in 1961.

A Note on the Text

These poems were first published in Brown Phoenix (London; College Press. 1950).

Brown Phoenix

I am the brown phoenix
Fused in the flames
Of the centuries’ greed.

I am tomorrow’s man
Offering to share
Love, and the difficult quest,
In the emerging plan.

Do you see a dark man
Whose mind you shun,
Whose heart you never know,
Unable to understand
That I am the golden bird
With destiny clear?
Fools cannot destroy me
With arrogant fear.

Listen brown man, black man,
Yellow man, mongrel man,
And you white friend and comrade:
I am the brown phoenix—I am you.

‘There is my symbol for us all.’

For we are tomorrow’s men,
But not you,
Little pinkwhite man,
Not you!

Read or purchase the article here.

The Fifth Figure

Bloodaxe Books
2006-09-28
80 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 1852247320; ISBN-13: 978-1852247324

Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze

Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze is a popular Jamaican Dub poet and storyteller whose performances are so powerful she has been called a ‘one-woman festival’. The Fifth Figure is a book-length sequence mixing poetry and prose which chronicles the lives of five generations of Caribbean and Black British women of mixed ancestry.

Part novel, part poem, part family memoir, its structure is based on the Jamaican quadrille, a hybrid version of the dance brought from Europe by the island’s former colonial masters. Beginning in the late 19th century with her great-great grandmother’s first quadrille, Breeze tells a many-layered tale of love and betrayal, innocence and suffering, hardship and joy over a hundred years as each mother sees her daughter join a dance that shapes her life.

The Fifth Figure is her fifth book, and sees Breeze breathing new life into the dramatic monologue. Steeped in the history of Jamaica, the book develops the possibilities of narrative, voice and rhythm, offering an eloquent and empowering vision of Caribbean lives and culture.

In 2011 Bloodaxe published Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze’s Third World Blues: Selected Poems, a DVD-book selection of new and previously published work with live performances on the accompanying DVD. This does include work from The Fifth Figure, which remains available as a separate edition.

Travel Light Travel Dark

Bloodaxe Books
2013-06-30
96 pages
216 x 138 mm
Paperback ISBN: 9781852249915

John Agard

John Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 35 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. In this new symphonic collection, Travel Light Travel Dark, Agard casts his unique spin on the intermingling strands of British history, and leads us into metaphysical and political waters. Cross-cultural connections are played out in a variety of voices and cadences. Prospero and Caliban have a cricket match encounter, recounted in calypso-inspired rhythms, and in the long poem, “Water Music of a Different Kind,” the incantatory orchestration of the Atlantic’s middle passage becomes a moving counterpoint to Handel’s Water Music.

Travel Light Travel Dark brings a mythic dimension to the contemporary and opens with a meditation on the enigma of colour. Water often appears as a metaphoric riff within the fabric of the collection, as sugar cane tells its own story in “Sugar Cane’s Saga” and water speaks for itself in a witty debate with wine, inspired by the satirical tradition of the goliards, wandering clerics of the Middle Ages.

Poetry: Three Treasures by Hannah Lowe

Freeword: a global meeting place for literature, argument and free thinking
2012-06-12

Hannah Lowe

A panelist at ‘2 Nations’, our recent event exploring national identity, Hannah Lowe is a poet of Chinese, Jamaican and English heritage. In this poem she performed for the audience that night, she explores how her background has influenced her sense of her own identity.

Three Treasures

Jamaica in the attic in a dark blue trunk,
sea-salt in the hinges. What must it look like
all that wide blue sea?

England downstairs in a rocking chair.
Nanna rocking with her playing cards,
cigs and toffee, tepid tea.

Jamaica frying chicken in the kitchen,
pig-snout in the stew-pot,
breakfast pan of saltfish, akee

China in the won-ton skin,
gold songbird on the brittle porcelain,
pink pagoda silk settee…

Read the entire poem here.