Poets and Others

At a conference in Chattanooga today, I had the privilege of listening to many southern writers, among them a panel of four discussing the special challenges of writing from "the other's" point of view. Alan Gurganus, Elizabeth Spencer, Rita Dove, and Natasha Tretheway all stated that no race or class or gender has the right to insist that only members of that group can write from the point of view of that group. Instead of questioning a right to write "the other," they said the issue is art.

Rita Dove, Alan Gurganus, Natasha Tretheway

The talk was fascinating, but so also was the very fact of being in the room with two particular poets I greatly respect -- Dove and Tretheway. Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah is a series of persona poems (poems written in the voices of two people) that tells the tale of a long marriage. Intricate and moving, the book is one I have read several times. Tretheway recently won the Pulitzer Prize for a book of poems about a black regiment that served in The Civil War (Native Guard). Her poems are direct and beautiful.

Here's one on a different subject:

Limen
By Natasha Tretheway

All day I've listened to the industry
of a single woodpecker, worrying the catalpa tree
just outside my window. Hard at his task,

his body is a hinge, a door knocker
to the cluttered house of memory in which
I can almost see my mother's face.

She is there, again, beyond the tree,
its slender pods and heart-shaped leaves,
hanging wet sheets on the line -- each one

a thin white screen between us. So insistent
is this woodpecker, I'm sure
he must be looking for something else -- not simply

the beetles and grubs inside, but some other gift
the tree might hold. All day he's been at work,
tireless, making the green hearts flutter.

Oddly, one thing Natasha Trethway talked about was really familiar. She told a tale of her step-mother's work on a poem that included a section in the voice of Frederick Douglass' mother. Her stepmother, she said, is white. Then she said her step-mother is an accomplished poet. Before she named the woman, something stirred in me. I thought, I think I know who she is. And indeed I do: Katherine (Bonnie) Soniat, a fine poet and a former McGehee student, who, on visiting New Orleans, once spent much of a day with my students.

The world is small and growing smaller, and it nurtures many fine writers.