So you aren't afraid to trust that kind of surreal dream imagery to take you to new places?
Well,
I have a great fear of getting stuck in a rut. I think there are
certain kinds of poems—such as poems in "The Venus Hottentot" mode,
poems that engage a black historical figure, an aspect of black
history—that I sort of know how to do, and that I feel I can do well. I
don't want to do that kind of poem to death, although certainly there's
so much to write about in that whole area. That's just to say I
wouldn't want to be someone who just writes the same version of a poem
she wrote before over and over and over again. That would be the worst
thing.
I've heard other writers talk about the
connections between the labor of childbirth and the birthing of poems,
the links between these two acts of creation. Do you see the whole
process of becoming a mother as affecting you as a poet, changing you,
pushing your craft in a different direction?
I didn't
know when I had my first son how my creative life would change, because
of course you put so much physical energy, so much emotional energy,
and so much creative energy into your child, especially around the
birth of a first child. But the greatest gift is that in the absolute
middle-of-night blear of nursing him, and being so exhausted and
staggering about going from place to place with this nursing
child...after I got used to it I found that there was also something
that was very peaceful and fertile about that time, that half-dreamy
place. And I found that little snippets of things came to me, almost as
though to say, "This is just a new stage of your creativity and it is
not incompatible with writing poetry, and in fact it will give your
poetry something that it never has had before." I do think the
correlation of trusting the pregnant, then laboring, then nursing body
has corresponded with something being liberated in my work. Trusting
the surreal turns in the dream poems, trusting the vocabulary of
dreams, playing within the logic of a strange imagistic world, feels
akin to me to what I experienced with the birth of my two children in
quick succession—so it seemed to me! —while I was writing the book.
There are so many sublimely organic wholes in the nature of pregnancy,
childbirth, and infancy, and I think witnessing them has helped me find
unconventional wholes new to me in line, stanza, image, and verse.
So let's talk about Antebellum Dream Book some more, particularly the title. Where does it come from?
It was a title delivered to me in a dream without explanation. I think of antebellum as a word that is like race,
one of those old-school black words, one of those words always heard in
my childhood in an accounting of our history in this country: There was
this period, there was that period, there was the antebellum period,
there was Reconstruction, and so on. I've been interested in
old-fashioned dream books, particularly as they interested some black
people. They'd say, "I dreamt a fish," and they'd look up fish and the book would give an interpretation of what fish
meant as a symbol in the dream, and then often a number that they might
go and play. I thought it would be neat to think of the book as a
handbook of sorts. So there is kind of that allusion, and certainly the
time period before the war seemed to have all sorts of suggestive
possibilities: before something explosive, like childbirth, or before
other moments of seeming crisis or apocalyptic moments. There are a
number of, I think, quietly apocalyptic moments in the book, so perhaps
I was interested in what leads up to those moments. But really, truly,
it is a dream title that I decided to try. And it always seemed to me
that it was absolutely the right and only title for the book.
One
more question: Your first book begins with a poem that imagines the
voice of a woman who has been objectified and thus rendered a mere
body. Then you have a second collection entitled The Body of Life; and your new collection, Antebellum Dream Book, seems to deal with the body in many more ways. In your work, what does it mean to "write the body"?
I
think, certainly for women, that the stories of so many bodies are not
the stories that we have heard. I remember once, in teaching in the
core curriculum at Chicago, I was teaching Descartes, and I remember
one of my feminist colleagues saying that she asked the class, "If
Descartes were a woman who had given birth, would he have written ‘I
think, therefore I am'?" In other words, what would a more embodied
version of that statement look like? What that means to me is "What
would so many versions of our history look like if the body of the
physically abused woman, the body of the sexually exulting woman, the
body of the childbirthing woman, the body of the slave, the body of the
domestic worker all spoke and told their stories and narrated their
embodied experiences?" That's a huge, vast terrain. If you let a body
speak, it gives you access to all sorts of concrete sensations that are
vital, the stuff of poetry, the way a poem convinces. When my
oldest child began to realize that he smelled things, he started
telling me what everything smelled like: "Oh, it smells like toast in
here" or "Oh, it smells like sickness in here." He'd go through
experiencing the world only through smell. What a gift to go through
life being aware that we've been given these senses and that you should
live in them: something to look at, something to smell, something to
taste—all as a gift.
Natasha Trethewey is the author of Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000). She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta.
