To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Honors College at Kennesaw State, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet spoke to a crowd Tuesday, Jan. 24, on the relevance of poetry in modern society and more.
Natasha Trethewey won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and she was appointed U.S. Poet Laureate in 2012 and again in 2014.
Her speech — which sat on the heels of KSU’s celebration of Martin Luther King week and in the shadow of rising national tension over race relations — addressed the experience of growing up as a racially mixed child, what she called a metaphor. The speech was titled “You are not safe in science, you are not safe in history: on abiding metaphors and finding a calling.”
Tretheway spoke on the “historical amnesia” that drove Southern ideas about the civil war and racism, as well as the role of poetry in modern society and the relationship of metaphor to southern constructs of race.
“The role of metaphor is not only to describe our experience of reality,” Tretheway said. “Metaphor also shapes how we perceive reality.”
Tretheway attributed much of these observations to what she described as central Southern values — “white superiority” and “black inferiority.” These topics are familiar from her poetry collection, “Native Guard,” for which she was awarded her Pulitzer Prize.
Her personal relationships, she explained, had a significant effect on her poetry. Tretheway described the times she visited Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation and debated with her father about Jefferson’s rumored affair with a slave.
She also told the audience about her mother’s murder at the hands of an ex-husband and how that shaped her own life.
“Even my mother’s death is redeemed in the story of my calling, made meaningful rather than merely senseless,” Tretheway said. “This is the story I tell myself to survive.”
The poet explained that, after her mother’s death, she started writing.
“I’ve been trying to answer my mother’s last question to me,” Tretheway said. “‘Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?'”
The commemoration also focused on the upcoming redesign of the Honors College, which will be launched next fall and promises to provide a more customized experience to fit students’ needs.
The Honors Program began in 1996 with 25 students and then became the Honors College in 2013. It now boasts more than 1,000 student participants across the Marietta and Kennesaw campuses.
Tretheway is currently a creative writing professor at Emory University, where she also directs the school’s creative writing program.