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Chapter 22 - Undead Sound
- Edited by Harilaos Stecopoulos
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- Book:
- A History of the Literature of the U.S. South
- Published online:
- 29 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 20 May 2021, pp 362-375
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- Chapter
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Summary
Aligning theories of objecthood and poetic sound, this essay analyzes three important writers of the current American South – Natasha Trethewey, Adam Vines, and Cormac McCarthy – whose lyric renderings speak to undeadness on integrated planes. Undeadness reveals what is distinct about poetry through a formal reading of sound as an undead force, if we understand poetic rhythm as a disembodied presence that evokes the unnamable space between words and sounds. Further, these writers’ striking motifs of deathliness provide a reference frame for translating the otherwise undefined field of poetic rhythm. Finally, the ethos of the undead is attached to the father figure, who takes on mythic strains, existing in a state of undeath. The father’s lasting presence carries on most powerfully in his child repeating, while revising, the rituals of his labor. Per this vision of undeadness, the value of generative work bears us beyond irruptive pasts, damaged and damaging environs, and compensatory narratives.
21 - Natasha Trethewey's Civil War
- from Part III - Figures
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- By Daniel Cross Turner, Coastal Carolina University
- Edited by Coleman Hutchison, University of Texas, Austin
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- Book:
- A History of American Civil War Literature
- Published online:
- 05 December 2015
- Print publication:
- 01 December 2015, pp 316-330
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Summary
I had quoted the graveyard ode by Allen Tate.
In that old hall, it had made a passing sense.
But Natasha's clear soprano said ‘It was not my war.’
James Applewhite, “The Literary Conference in Chattanooga”The lines from James Applewhite's poem that serve as my epigraph recollect an exchange with Natasha Trethewey during a conference session about southern poetic responses to the Civil War. Trethewey's claim, “It was not my war,” disavows not the war and its surrounding histories per se but more precisely Fugitive Allen Tate's mournful angst over the Confederacy's failure in “Ode to the Confederate Dead” (1928). Tate's elegiac poem reflects a modernist reboot of the Cult of the Lost Cause. Tate was a white, male writer who grew up in privilege at the turn of the twentieth century. Trethewey, by contrast, is a female writer of mixed race who was the child of a marriage between a white father (poet Eric Trethewey) and a black mother (social worker Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough). According to Mississippi legal statutes in 1965, miscegenation, a term first coined during the Civil War, was illegal; therefore Trethewey, the product of this taboo marriage, was born into “psychological exile” as a mixed race child. Consequently, Trethewey has no truck with Tate's Eliotic worrying of the wound left by the Confederate States of America's (CSA) defeat and dissolution. Instead, Trethewey's purported response rhymes with sociologist Larry J. Griffin's observation that the Civil War was in fact a victory for millions of southerners – namely, those African Americans newly emancipated from enslavement. To make the war hers, Trethewey rewrites the dominant historiographic record to reveal heretofore underwritten episodes, especially the accomplishments of more than 200,000 African American soldiers who served during the war. Trethewey's impulse is toward countermemory: to trace residual, resistant strains of these alternate histories, to build out of her poetry a collective cenotaph to the Black Union dead.
Currently Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, Trethewey (born 1966; active 2000–present) is a native of Gulfport, Mississippi, and has become one of the most visible and highly honored contemporary American poets.