A Quote by Natasha Trethewey
I've been most happy to be an advocate for the kinds of grassroots things that people are doing who care about poetry.
Related Quotes
Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing
with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring
with replacing the noun. It is doing that always
doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that.
Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and
pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is
what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no
matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a
great many kinds of poetry.
I just like doing things with people that I love and care about and trust to work with, and I care about good material and good content - as long as I'm doing that, I'm happy.
Palestinian society is filled with poetry, but not experimental poetry. The Palestinian poetry that people know is not the modernist experimentations, it's certain kinds of poetry that lends itself to recitation and song and things like that.
Mathematics can have its problems, but it's actually hasn't seen a lot of the problems as some of the other sciences and so much of it in what people are doing is completely useless. Nobody kind of in really cares very much. You don't really have kind of right and left and people in ideology coming in because there isn't any. It just doesn't actually connect up to the kinds of things that people ideologically worry about. So most of mathematics just doesn't tell you anything one way or another about global warming or about healthcare or about any number of things that you might care about.
Everyone's got that frustrating thing and that's a natural feeling, but you know I'm 31 years old and I'm happy with what I'm doing. You know I'm not rich, I'm not wealthy at all but I'm happy and I'm surrounded by the people and the things that I care about and it's good.
I'm so happy to be an advocate for poetry.
When marginalized people gain voice and center their own experiences, things begin changing. And we see this in all kinds of grassroots movements.
I like all forms of movies. I'm a movie geek, so I watch all kinds of films, but - and I read all kinds of things, too. But the poetry that speaks to me the most directly will contain mundane things, will contain details.
I'm not a grassroots organizer; that is clear. I believe in a division of labor. I'm not trained to organize the grassroots, and grassroots has to come from the grassroots.
Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.
Policy, for the most part, has been made by white people in America, not by people of color. And they have tended to take care of those things that they think are important. Whether it's their agricultural subsidies, or other kinds of expenditures that are certainly not expenditures for poor people or for people of color. And so we have to band together and keep fighting back.
I've been my most happy and my most unhappy in relationships. I have family and friends and people I care very much about. I've got a really, really, really good life.
I care about the match. I don't care about, you know, other things. It's like if I'm not happy, it's okay. I want just to be happy, you know. If I'm not happy, fine. Have it, you know.
People who are knowledgeable about poetry sometimes discuss it in that knowing, rather hateful way in which oenophiles talk about wine: robust, delicate, muscular. This has nothing to do with how most of us experience it, the heart coming around the corner and unexpectedly running into the mind. Of all the words that have stuck to the ribs of my soul, poetry has been the most filling.
My feeling is that most political poetry is preaching to the choir, and that the people who are going to make the political changes in our lives are not the people who read poetry, unfortunately. Poetry not specifically aimed at political revolution, though, is beneficial in moving people toward that kind of action, as well as other kinds of action. A good poem makes me want to be active on as many fronts as possible.
If I've influenced people, so be it, but I don't dwell on those kinds of things. I just put out my music. If I influence someone without knowing it, I'm happy about it. I try not to think about those things because it's not about me.
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