Words After the Fire: Natasha Trethewey Converses With Guernica

Ben Purkert interviews former US poet laureate Natasha Trethewey at Guernica, where the two discuss, among other subjects, a terrible fire that began in the library of her new home. "I hope I chose a good poem for this. Well, actually, I didn’t have much of a choice," Trethewey begins. From there: 

Guernica: What do you mean?

Natasha Trethewey: I lost most of my drafts in a fire.

Guernica: Oh no! What happened?

Natasha Trethewey: It was last year on Thanksgiving morning. My husband I had just taken jobs at Northwestern, and we had just moved to Evanston, and were having a library built to house my father’s books. My father was a poet and he died in 2014.

Anyway, the fire started in the library and it’s still under investigation. We don’t know exactly what happened. But we were lucky; we had a house full of family including a baby, but thankfully it didn’t happen while we were asleep. It started in the morning at around the same time as my brother-in-law began making himself breakfast. So when the smoke alarm went off, even though it was not in the kitchen, we all teased him about burning his food or something. I used a towel to fan the alarm, so that it would stop going off. Eventually it did stop beeping, so we thought everything was fine. Then, about ten minutes later, my mother-in-law who was sitting in the living room, which is across the hall from the library, just happened to look to the left, and she saw orange and blue flames.

She came running and we realized that it was a real fire. It moved quickly up the grand staircase and into our bedroom and closet and down the hall, all the way to my husband’s study at the back of the second floor. Then it turned the corner, went up the stairs to the third floor where my study is. The fire department, when they got there, they managed to put out the fire at the top of that landing. But in a fire like this, what the fire doesn’t get, smoke and water does. We lost a lot.

Guernica: I’m so relieved that you’re alright.

Natasha Trethewey: Thank you. We were very lucky, my family and I.

Guernica: “Repentance” is a poem very much about family… Can you talk about how it came into being?

Natasha Trethewey: It began with a quarrel that I had with my father. It happened in 2008 when he was visiting me, back when I still lived in Decatur, Georgia. Then, years later, I must’ve seen the Vermeer painting and something about the composition took me back to the argument. After we fought, I was sitting there feeling regretful, by myself, at the table. Then I stood to clean up, to put away the dishes, and caught my own reflection in a mirror, just as that woman might have caught herself in the mirror in the painting. And that mirror used to be a man until Vermeer painted over it. I learned that when I researched the painting, that it has a pentimento in it. There are actually multiple; there was also a dog on the floor that Vermeer erased too.

Read on at Guernica.