Myth

Natasha Trethewey is a contemporary poet with a diverse racial background. Her poem “Myth” was first published in 2004 by The New England Review. It was then collected into Trethewey’s third collection of poems, Native Guard, in 2006. This collection won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. The book was considered notable for its discussion of the forgotten history of African American guardsmen and soldiers, particularly in the South as well as the legacy of the Civil War. Trethewey uses this history to illuminate her own personal experience in other poems within the collection. “Myth” is placed within the first section of Native Guard, among other poems about Trethewey’s mother, Gwendolyn Turnbough, who was fatally shot in 1985 by her estranged ex-husband. Native Guard is dedicated to her mother’s memory. Trethewey has discussed “Myth” as a poem which attempted to deal with her grief over the loss of her mother while incorporating mythic elements (See: Further Readings & Resources). It shows Trethewey’s command of form, in this case the palindrome, as well as her common concern regarding the interplay of memory and loss. Trethewey went on to write about her mother further in her 2020 memoir, Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir. As a writer, Trethewey has been lauded for her ability to explore how while certain laws and mores have ceased to exist, their remnants remain, shaping the public and private conceptions of African Americans. She is also renowned for her ability to discuss loss and how it shapes identity.

Poet Biography

Natasha Trethewey was born on April 26, 1966, in Gulfport, Mississippi. Her parents, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, a social worker, and Eric Trethewey, a Canadian immigrant, met at Kentucky State College. The couple traveled to Ohio to marry in 1965 since interracial marriage was forbidden at the time in Kentucky. They later moved to Mississippi.

Eric and Gwendolyn divorced in 1972, when Natasha was six. Eric Trethewey moved to New Orleans and Gwendolyn took her daughter to Atlanta, Georgia. In Atlanta, Gwendolyn met and married Joel Grimmette, and in 1974, Natasha’s brother Joey was born. Eric Trethewey, a poet and professor, encouraged Natasha to write as a child to deal with boredom or distress. Her mother also encouraged her to pursue writing. However, Grimmette was increasingly physically abusive and threatening. In 1984, after he tried to kill her, Gwendolyn divorced him. However, in 1985, when Natasha was 19, Grimmette fatally shot Gwendolyn.

Despite grief, Trethewey went on to graduate with a bachelor’s in English from the University of Georgia (1989). She went for her master’s in English at Hollins University, where her father and stepmother were professors. She then received her MFA in Poetry at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 1995. Three years later, she married the historian Brett V. Gadsen.

In 2000, her debut collection, Domestic Work, which details the lives of domestic workers, was chosen as the inaugural recipient of the Cave Canem Prize, chosen by Rita Dove. The prize is given to a significant debut by an African American poet. Trethewey was offered a position in the English department of Emory University in Atlanta, where she taught until 2017.

In the early 2000s, Trethewey wrote Bellocq’s Ophelia, a collection of poems about sex workers with diverse racial backgrounds in turn-of-the-century New Orleans. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003. In 2006, Trethewey published Native Guard, which is about both her own personal heritage and the history of African Americans in the Union Army in the Civil War. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. A portion of Native Guard—which includes the poem “Myth”—is about her mother, in whose memory Trethewey dedicates the book.

In 2010, Trethewey received an honorary doctorate from Hollins University and became Poet Laureate of Mississippi. She wrote Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010), which is a collection of letters, essays, and poems that focus on the aftermath of the 2005 hurricane. In 2012, her collection Thrall was published. It, too, discussed race and history. Trethewey was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States for 2012 and 2013.

In 2014, Trethewey again wrote about the Mississippi Gulf Coast in her collection Congregation. Three years later, Trethewey left Emory and relocated to Evanston, Illinois, to become the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern. Monument: Poems New and Selected came out the next year. In 2019, she was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

In 2020, she wrote Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, which details her mother’s life and murder. It won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction in 2021. She and her husband currently live in Illinois.

Poem Text

Trethewey, Natasha. “Myth.” 2007. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

Natasha Trethewey’s “Myth” is a lyric poem about the emotional struggle experienced after losing a loved one. In its first nine lines, the poem attempts to capture the surreal feelings of grief one has when a loved one dies. The poem begins with the speaker’s lack of knowledge that their loved one has died because the speaker was sleeping. The loved one now exists for the speaker only in the brief time between sleeping and consciousness, represented by the reference to the mythological limbo of “Erebus” (Lines 4, 15). The desire to reanimate the loved one is expressed by the speaker, who hopes to pull them back into life. In the limbo, the speaker turns to search for the person, but they are no longer there behind the speaker, who feels abandoned. After an asterisk, the speaker repeats this notation of abandonment. Conscious, they realize they have been dreaming of the lost loved one. The speaker wishes they could succeed in recovering their loved one, and again regrets that the loved one no longer exists. The speaker realizes they create the liminal space between dreaming and consciousness to keep the loved one with them, but that the loved one is gone.