Caught Up In Language

“Writers, particularly poets, always feel exiled in some way - people who don't exactly feel at home, so they try to find a home in language.” – Natasha Trethewey

Born in Mississippi on April 26, 1966, Trethewey grew up in a family of poets and started writing poetry as a child.  She was U.S. Poet Laureate from 2012-14 and won the Pulitzer Prize for her collection Native Guard.

A professor of English and creative writing at Emory University, she’s won numerous awards, especially for works that examine memory and the racial legacy of America.     “I think people turn to poetry more often than they think they do, or encounter it in more ways than they think that they do,” she said.  “I think we forget the places that we encounter it, say, in songs or in other little bits and pieces of things that we may have remembered from childhood.”   For Saturday’s Poem from her wonderful Pulitzer Prize-winning book is Trethewey’s,

                          Theories Of Time and Space

You can get there from here, though
there's no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you've never been. Try this:

head south on Mississippi 49, one-
by-one mile markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion - dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on a mangrove swamp - buried
terrain of the past. Bring only

what you must carry - tome of memory
its random blank pages. On the dock

where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:

the photograph - who you were -
will be waiting when you return.

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