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Poetry and History
(4)Natasha Trethewey, in her forum on “Poetry and History” at the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, said that she is interested in the problem of “historical erasure” or what gets left out of the historical record.
This erasure, I think, will be familiar territory to those of us who have tried much in the way of roots research, but it is even more problematical for minority groups, those who were not part of the dominant culture. Trethewey said that any of us who are American citizens have a responsibility to remember the stories that are handed down to us. Stories that often reflect a truth somewhat at odds with the official text.
In her last column, Writing Our Stories, Georgia Green Stamper writes that as she travels around the state reading from her new book, You Can Go Anywhere from the Crossroads of the World (Wind, 2008), audience members often approach her to tell her their own family stories. “But,” they say, “I’m not a writer. I can’t write my stories.”
Similarly, Jeannie Williams, who is compiling a family history book for the Owen County Historical Society, has told me that while people have all kinds of family stories that they love to tell, few have been willing to try to write entries for this book.
But I learned from Joanie DiMartino, who is not just an excellent poet but also a public historian, that these written records don’t have to come in the form of a polished narrative. Journals, letters, calendars, ledgers, there are many ways to preserve the record. You can also talk to a tape or digital recorder.
Some one I ran into this weekend said, when she has ideas for a poem/story while driving, she calls herself on her cell phone and leaves the line as a message. So there are all manner of ways to “write.”
So if you know stories, throw the things your English teacher taught you out the window and record them somehow.
But I digress. Trethewey is interested in doing more than simply recording this history. Her goal is to turn it into poetry, to use events that are actual to create characters who are fictional. To do this, she said, she looks for the “luminous details,” details that she described as “transcendentals among the facts.”
In describing her work from historical photographs, she used the term punctum, Latin for point, to describe “a point in a photograph that sparks your imagination to consider everything outside the photograph.” In Bellocq’s Ophelia, she talked of seeing, in one photograph, a spittoon in the corner of a bedroom. Or it might be the print of a woman’s dress or the curl of a man’s hand. Anything that allows the writer “to access the human in the facts.”
One last point, Trethewey said that historians now use imaginative writing in their classes, to fill in the personal and keep the documentary stuff “right.”
This point sort of leads me to Ginger Strand, who in talking of the research into her book Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, & Lies (Simon & Schuster, 2008), spoke of running into a librarian who said “They’ve poured all this stuff down the memory hole and they’re not letting it out.”
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Natasha Trethewey
4 Responses to “Poetry and History”
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Historical Erasure almost cost us Zora Neale Hurston. Was it Maya Angelou who brought her back from the brink of relative obscurity? In Women’s Lit at Murray we talked about this, how very very close Their Eyes Were Watching God came to being consigned to obscure book status. It would have been a bloody shame.
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Joanie DiMartino September 18th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Ah! I would have LOVED to be at this session, especially since this is exactly what I’m doing in my own work!
Another example: when I was researching Alice Paul’s suffrage activities in Philadelphia before she headed to DC, I discovered that the PA suffrage assoc. papers were destroyed by an archive, because they weren’t considered historically valuable. I could’ve cried–they were so pertinent to my research!
In my archives management class we were told that archives and records management locations have limited space, and so through the years decisions were made regarding what was ‘valuable;’ what wasn’t was therefore destroyed. Needless to say, records of minorities, immigrants, women, etc. not considered important are no longer with us.
Fortunately things are better, but still decisions have to be made: what gets space, what gets digitalized first, etc. Who gets to make them?? (well, the archivists, actually, but I’m asking a deeper question here.
Incidentally, Alice Paul was almost written out of history by fellow suffragists because she was so radical–and she was white and rich! Then there are always issues of race and class within the subcultures of these movements as well, so that wealthy white suffragists often didn’t acknowledge the part played by African American or immigrant women in obtaining the vote as well.
I would love to hear Marilyn Nelson discuss this same topic! She’s the former Poet Laureate of CT, and writes a lot of poetry books about historical topics, and reclaiming stories.
Ciao!
Joanie
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I thought of you a lot that day, Joanie. I thought of you, too, when Natasha Trethewey said that one way to get into the head of a historical character is to get their tools right — what tools did they have and how did they use them. I thought of you and your hearth cooking.
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Jack, I read Their Eyes Were Watching God straight through with tears streaming down my cheeks. I am very thankful that it was not lost to history.
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