 Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Giovanni Singleton, Lunch Palms Coordinator. It's my great pleasure to welcome you all here today. First, I would like to thank the Alphonse Berber Gallery for hosting this month's Lunch Palms event. We really appreciate it. I want to first let you know about our upcoming readings. April 1st, we have Lisa Chen, who's a UC Berkeley alum. And on May 6th, we end the season with student reading. I also want to let you know that on our website, you can view this reading and all of our past readings as webcasts and also on YouTube. And we are just now on iTunes as well. The readings are typically posted within a week of the event. And we're also on Facebook. So do log on and become our friend. And now seriously, we'd love to have you. So please join me in welcoming Robert Hass, who will introduce this afternoon's distinguished guest, Natasha Tresway. Thanks, Giovanni. And thank you all for coming. This reading is the first in a series of five events that are happening around the publication of this anthology, Black Nature, 400 Years of African American Nature Poetry, a remarkable book edited by Camille Dunge, who's here, which includes some of the work of Natasha Tresway. The next event, and gathered here for this event, are about as exciting and distinguished a collection of poets as has been gathered in Berkeley in decades. The reading tonight is at 7 o'clock in this space. There'll be a reception to follow and give you a chance to meet the poets. Tomorrow, there is a panel with many of the poets that starts at 2 o'clock. And it's in Barrow's Hall on the top floor. And then the second reading tomorrow night at 7 o'clock in the Mod Fife Room in Wheeler Hall. It's an amazing collection of poets and events. And you will want to get to it. I thought about two ways of, I didn't know how to introduce Natasha Tresway and get out of the way quickly, because one part of me wanted to talk about her work in relation to this subject that we're going to be talking about, Black Nature Poetry. I was struck by it because one of the poems in Black Nature is called Carpenter B. And it begins in what you'll see is the plain, direct, quietly elegant language that goes with the powerful nature of her material and the sort of classicism of her instincts as a poet. All winter long, I have passed beneath her nest a hole no bigger than the tip of my thumb. Beautiful little three-line stanza that you can hear the shape and the dance of in a reading. Last year, before I was here, she burrowed into the wood framing my porch, drilled a network of tunnels, her round body, sturdy for the work of building, torped the cold months. She now pulls herself out into the first warm days of spring. And the poem, which I won't take you to, goes on to describe no longer being able to get into the place where she's laid her eggs. So it turns out to be what a lot of Natasha's work is, a meditation on memory, and a meditation on access personally, historically, politically, psychologically, and socially to what's been faced, repressed, or denied in our inner lives. Sweetness of the poem, to me, is that probably the first nature poem written by an American poet is a poem about a wasp being frozen to death slowly in New England in 1678 by Edward Taylor. Africans and Europeans got to the American continent in 1605. First poem that looks at a natural object and meditates on it is in 1678 and 400 years later in this tradition that Camille has traced in her anthology. Natasha is meditating on this subject. She was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. She grew up in Decatur, Georgia, partly. Is that right, Decatur? And Gulfport and Tulane University, where her father, a poet Eric Trethewey, was doing graduate work in New Orleans. And all of that world of the South figures in her work, one of her books she said was conceived when she was jogging through a cemetery. And I thought that, like the carpenter, Ant was another metaphor for the qualities of her work. The epigraph to one of the books comes from another Southern poet, Charles Wright. Memory is a cemetery I visited once or twice, white, ubiquitous, and the set aside, everywhere underfoot. It's that everywhere underfoot that shows up in a lot of her work. She went to the University of Georgia. She worked as a social worker for a year or more, then went to graduate school and got an MFA at UMass Amherst, during which time she got involved with the poets of the Dark Room Collective, Kevin Young, Thomas Sayers Ellis, very good and very exciting company, group of young poets that we have been reading ever since those days, I guess. And her first book of poems is called Domestic Work. We have a copy of it here. It won the Cave Canem Prize for the best first book of poems by an African-American writer. Her second book, Bellach's Ophelia, turns to her experience of growing up in New Orleans and in a deep way to this work of memory in a remarkable suite of poems, Storyville Diary, that imagine the world of biracial prostitutes in that bellapok where most of us know it from Louis Moll's film. You'll now know it from this haunting book of poems. The third book is called, I want to look again and say Native Guard because I want to say National Guard. The Native Guard was the term for the black military that was formed by the Union to guard for the state of Louisiana. And one of their jobs was to guard white Confederate prisoners on an island just off the coast of Gulfport, a story that does not get told if you visit that place. And Natasha goes to that story, goes to the story of her experience of growing up in Mississippi as the daughter of a white father and a black mother at a time when miscegenation was a crime in the state of Mississippi and goes to a story, a set of allergies that deal with the stories from her mother's life. It's a remarkable book. It, as she does, works in and semi-invents new forms of the blues, the blue sonnet, republic, I mean not the republic. What's the name of the, what is the name of the, it's not the villanelle. What's that other form you're worth? In the Pantoon, in that book. Repetitive forms that have to do with the cyclicalness of memory, forms that call on some of the deepest kinds of sadness and survival in American culture and the blues forms. And she speaks to, again, to these different layers, historical experience, personal experience, experience that it's as if William Faulkner had to invent Natasha Trethewey to tell the story of what happened after light in August to the issue of race in Mississippi. Anyway, it's thrilling to have her here today. Please welcome Natasha Trethewey. It's such a delight to be here. And I love the idea of thinking that it was indeed like William Faulkner who invented me. I mean, because the creation of such a possibility that a Mississippian like me would exist certainly comes out of Faulkner's world. Thank you for that lovely introduction. So, because I am here as part of this wonderful symposium about a very wonderful book, I thought that, and since I'm reading some nature poems tonight, I thought that today at lunchtime, I would try to read some poems that suggest the intersections between nature or the natural and what is rendered unnatural in its wake. My birthplace is Gulfport, Mississippi, along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, one of those towns that was wiped out during Hurricane Katrina. And it's always seemed to me that that place is a perfect metaphor for this idea of historical memory and historical erasure. In the middle of the 20th century, they created the world's longest man-made beach on the Gulf Coast. And to do that, they bulldozed all the mangrove swamps and dumped a bunch of sand and planted some trees that weren't there before. And of course, it was this very thing that left the coast much more vulnerable to the heavy winds of Hurricane Katrina. One of the things that always sort of bothered me after having turned in this book, I turned in my last book, Native Guard, to my publisher in March of 2005. And the very first poem in the book was very much a kind of figurative meditation on the impossibility of going home, going to these landscapes that we'd left behind, not because they had changed, but because we change when we go away and are constantly changing. But by August 29th, it became quite literal. I was actually sitting in a classroom at Duke University waiting to hear from my family. And Ragini is here from that time. So it feels like I've been taken back there in a way. So after that, the poem became quite literal. And I realized that what I had done, strangely, was to write an elegy from my hometown, as unnatural as that seems, before it was gone. Theories of Time and Space. You can get there from here, though there's no going home. Everywhere you go will be somewhere you've never been. Try this, head south on Mississippi 49, one by one, mile markers, ticking off another minute of your life. Follow this to its natural conclusion, dead end at the coast, the pier at Gulfport, where riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches in a sky threatening rain. Cross over the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand dumped on the mangrove swamp buried to rain of the past. Bring only what you must carry, tome of memory, its random blank pages. On the dock where you board the boat for Ship Island, someone will take your picture. The photograph, who you were, will be waiting when you return. This next poem has an epigraph from Robert Herrick that reads, fair daffodils, we weep to see you haste away so soon. Genus Narcissus. The road I walked home from school was dense with trees and shadow, creekside and lit by yellow daffodils, early blossoms bright against winter's last gray days. I must have known they grew wild, thought no harm in taking them. So I did, gathering up as many as I could hold, then presenting them in a jar to my mother. She put them on the sill and I sat nearby, watching light bend through the glass, day easing into evening, proud of myself, forgiving my mother some small thing. Childish vanity. I must have seen in them some measure of myself. The slender stems, each blossom ahead, lifted up toward praise or bowed to meet its reflection. Walking home those years ago, I knew nothing of Narcissus or the daffodil short spring, how they dry like graveside flowers, rustling when the wind blew, a whisper treacherous from the sill. Be taken with yourself, they said to me, die early to my mother. What is evidence? Not the fleeting bruises she'd cover with makeup, a dark patch as if imprint of a scope she'd pressed her eye too close to, looking for a way out. Nor the quiver in the voice she'd steady, leaning into a pot of bones on the stove. Not the teeth she wore in place of her own or the official document, its seal and smeared signature fading already, the edges wearing. Not the tiny marker with its dates, her name abstract as history. Only the landscape of her body, splintered clavicle, pierced temporal, her thin bones settling a bit each day, the way all things do. This poem relies a little bit on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Myth. I was asleep while you were dying. It's as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow I make between my slumber and my waking. The arabus I keep you in, still trying not to let go. You'll be dead again tomorrow, but in dreams you live, so I try taking you back into mourning. Sleep heavy, turning my eyes open, I find you do not follow, again and again this constant forsaking. Again and again this constant forsaking, my eyes open, I find you do not follow, you back into mourning, sleep heavy, turning, but in dreams you live, so I try taking not to let go. You'll be dead again tomorrow, the arabus I keep you in, still trying I make between my slumber and my waking. It's as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow I was asleep while you were dying. Every year in Mississippi and a couple of towns like Vicksburg and Natchez, they host annual pilgrimages where people get to go back and explore the old antebellum mansions. They started doing this not long after the Civil War to raise money for the very devastated Southern towns. And so when they're all decked out with flowers, the women are decked out in their antebellum clothes and we get a taste of the old South. Pilgrimage, Vicksburg, Mississippi. Here, the Mississippi carved its mud-dark path, a graveyard for skeletons of sunken riverboats. Here, the river changed its course, turning away from the city as one turns, forgetting from the past. The abandoned bluffs, lands sloping up above the river's bend where now the Yazoo fills the Mississippi's empty bed. Here, the dead stand up in stone, white marble on Confederate Avenue. I stand on ground once hollowed by a web of caves. They must have seemed like catacombs in 1863 to the woman sitting in her parlor, candle-lit, underground. I can see her listening to shells explode, writing herself into history, asking what is to become of all the living things in this place. This whole city is a grave. Every spring, pilgrimage, the living come to mingle with the dead, brush against their cold shoulders in the long hallways, listen all night to their silence and indifference, relive their dying on the green battlefield. At the museum, we marvel at their clothes, preserved under glass, so much smaller than our own, as if those who wore them were only children. We sleep in their beds, the old mansions, hunkered on the bluffs, draped in flowers, funerial, a blur of petals against the river's gray. The brochure in my room calls this Living History. The brass plate on the door reads, Prissy's room, a window frames the river's crawl toward the gulf. In my dream, the ghost of history lies down beside me, rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm. Scenes from a documentary history of Mississippi. One, King Cotton, 1907. From every corner of the photograph, flags wave down the main street in Vicksburg. Stacked to form an arch, the great bales of cotton rise up from the ground like a giant swell, a wave of history flooding the town. When Roosevelt arrives at parade, the band will march and from every street corner, flags wave down. Words on a banner, Cotton, America's King, have the sound of progress. This is two years before the South's counter march, the great bales of cotton risen up from the ground, infested with bull weevils, a plague, biblical, all around. Now, Negro children ride the bales, clothes stiff with starch. From up high in the photograph, they wave flags down for the president who will walk through the arch, bound for the future, his back to us. The children on their perch, those great bales of cotton rising up from the ground, stare out at us. Cotton surrounds them, a swell, a great mound, bearing them up back toward us. From the arch, from every corner of the photograph, flags wave down and great bales of cotton rise up from the ground. Two, Glyph, Aberdeen, 1913. The child's head droops as if in sleep. Stripped to the waist in profile, he's balanced on the man's lap. The man, gaunt in his overalls, cradles the child's thin arm. The sharp elbow, white signature of skin and bone pulls it forward to show the deformity, the humped back curve of spine, punctuating the routine hardships of their lives. How the child must follow him into the fields, haunting the long hours, slumped beside a sack, his body asking how much cotton, or in the kitchen, leaning into the icebox, how much food, or kneeling beside him at the church house. Why, Lord, why? They pose as if to say, look, this is the outline of suffering. The child shouldering it, a mound like dirt heaped on a grave. Three, flood. They have arrived on the back of the swollen river, the barge dividing it, their few belongings clustered about their feet. Above them, the National Guard hunkers on the levee, rifles tight in their fists, they block the path to high ground. One group of black refugees, the caption tells us, was ordered to sing their passage onto land, like a chorus of prayer, their tongues, the tongues of dark bells. Here, the camera finds them still, posed as if for a school day portrait, children lace fingers in their laps, one boy gestures allegiance, right hand over the hearts, charged beating. The great river all around, the barge invisible beneath their feet, they fix on what's before them, the opening in the sight of a rifle, the camera's lens, the muddy cleft between barge and dry land, all of it aperture, the captured moments, chasm in time. Here, in the angled light of 1927, they are refugees from history. The barge has brought them this far. They are waiting to disembark, for you are late. The sun is high and the child's shadow, almost fully beneath her, touches the soul of her bare foot on concrete. Even though it must be hot, she takes the step. Her goal to read is the subject of this shot, a book in her hand, the library closed, the door just out of reach. Stepping up, she must look at the two signs, read them slowly once more. The first one in pale letters, barely shows against the white background. Though she will read Greenwood Public Library for Negroes, the other bold letters on slate will lead her away, out of the frame, a finger pointing left. I want to call her, say, wait, but this is history. She can't linger. She'll read the sign that I read. You are late. You know, about 12 years ago, a little over 10 years ago, the state of Alabama voted whether or not to remove the anti-miscegenation laws from the books. And though they did vote to get rid of them, about 40 some percent of the population wanted to keep them, so that at least symbolically it could be said that parents like mine couldn't be married legally and people like me born legally in the state. Miscegenation. In 1965, my parents broke two laws of Mississippi. They went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi. They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong, miss in Mississippi. A year later, they moved to Canada, followed a route the same as slaves, the train slicing the white glaze of winter, leaving Mississippi. Faulkner's Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus, given his name for the day he was left at the orphanage, his race unknown in Mississippi. My father was reading War and Peace when he gave me my name. I was born near Easter, 1966 in Mississippi. When I turned 33, my father said, it's your Jesus year. You're the same age he was when he died. It was spring, the hills green in Mississippi. I know more than Joe Christmas did. Natasha is a Russian name, though I'm not. It means Christmas child, even in Mississippi. My mother dreams another country. Already the words are changing. She is changing from colored to negro, black still years ahead. This is 1966, she is married to a white man and there are more names for what grows inside her. It is enough to worry about words like mongrel and the infertility of mules and mulattoes while flipping through a book of baby names. She has come home to wait out the long months, her room unchanged since she's been gone, dolls winking down from every shelf, all of them white. Every day she is flanked by the rituals of superstition and there is a name she will learn for this too, maternal impression, the shape like an unknown country marking the back of the newborn's thigh. For now, women tell her to clear her head, to steady her hands or she'll gray a lock of the child's hair wherever she worries her own, imprint somewhere the outline of a thing she craves too much. They tell her to stanch her cravings by eating dirt. All spring she is sat on her hands, her fingers numb. For a while each day she can't feel anything she touches, the arbor out back, the landscapes green tangle, the molehill of her own swelling. Here outside the city limits, car speed by, clouds of red dust in their wake, she breathes it in, Mississippi then drifts toward sleep, thinking of some place she's never been. Late, Mississippi is a dark backdrop bearing down on the windows of her room. On the TV in the corner, the station signs off, broadcasting its nightly salutation, the waving stars and stripes, our national anthem. Southern Gothic. I have lain down into 1970, into the bed my parents will share for only a few more years. Early evening, they have not yet turned from each other in sleep, their bodies curved, parentheses framing the separate lives they'll wake to. Dreaming, I am again the child with too many questions, the endless why and why and why my mother cannot answer, her mouth closed, a gesture toward her future, cold lips stitched shut. The lines in my young father's face, deepened toward an expression of grief. I have come home from the schoolyard with the words that shadow us in this small Southern town, peckerwood and nigger lover, half-breed and zebra, words that take shape outside us. We're huddled on the tiny island of bed, quiet in the language of blood, the house unsteady on its cinder block haunches, sinking deeper into the muck of ancestry. Oil lamps flicker around us, our shadows, dark glyphs on the wall, bigger and stranger than we are. Incident. We tell the story every year, how we peered from the windows, shades drawn, though nothing really happened, the charred grass now green again. We peered from the windows, shades drawn, at the cross trust like a Christmas tree, the charred grass still green. Then we darkened our rooms, lit the hurricane lamps. At the cross trust like a Christmas tree, a few men gathered white as angels in their gowns. We darkened our rooms and lit hurricane lamps, the wicks trembling in their fonts of oil. It seemed the angels had gathered white men in their gowns. When they were done, they left quietly, no one came. The wicks trembled all night in their fonts of oil. By morning, the flames had all dimmed. When they were done, the men left quietly, no one came. Nothing really happened. By morning, all the flames had dimmed. We tell the story every year. I'm gonna read just a few newer poems that I've been working on. I got interested in a series of Mexican costa paintings by Juan Rodriguez Juarez, circa 1715. And these were paintings that represented the mixed blood unions that were taking place in the colony. And what was interesting to me about them is that not only did they purport to suggest this kind of actual taxonomy where you could imagine exactly what you'd get if you crossed this with this, but also that they created such a diverse group of terms to name the people that were included right on the paintings. I was also interested in the idea that people who were indigenous, their blood was considered pure enough that over a few generations, they could be purified to white but that the taint of African blood was irreversible so that you had names like mulatto returning backwards and hold yourself in midair and I don't understand you. Taxonomy, one, de español y de india produce mestizo. The canvas is a leaden sky behind them, heavy with words, gold letters inscribing an equation of blood. This plus this equals this as if a contract with nature or a museum label, ethnographic, precise. See how the father's hand beneath its crown of lace curls around his daughter's head. She's nearly fair as he is. Callidad, see it in the brooch at her collar, the lace framing her face. An infant she is born over the servant's left shoulder bound to him by a sling, the plain blue cloth knotted at his throat. If the father his hand on her skull divides as the physiognomist does, the mysteries of her character discursive legible on her light flesh in the soft curl of her hair. We cannot know it, so gentle the eye he turns toward her. The mother glancing sideways toward him, the scarf on her head white as his face, his powdered wig gestures with one hand a shape like the letter C. C, she seems to say, what we have made. The servant, still a child, cranes his neck, turns his face up toward all of them. He is dark as history, origin of the word native, the weight of blood, a pale mistress on his back, heavier every year. Two, the Espanol y Negra produce mulatto. Still the centuries have not dulled the sullenness of the child's expression. If there is light inside him, it does not shine through the paint that holds his face in profile, his domed forehead, eyes nearly closed beneath a heavy brow. Though inside, the boy's father stands in his cloak and hat. It's as if he's just come in or that he's leaving. We see him transient, rolling a cigarette, myopic, his eyelids drawn against the child, passing before him. At the stove, the boy's mother contorts, watchful, her neck twisting on its spine, red beads yoked at her throat like a necklace of blood. Her face so black, she nearly disappears into the canvas, the dark wall upon which we see the words that name them. What should we make of any of this? Remove the words above their heads, put something else in place of the child, a table perhaps upon which the man might set his hat or a dog upon which to bestow the blessing of his touch and the story changes. The boy is a palimpsest of paint, layers of color, history rendering him that precise shade of in between. Before this, he was nothing, blank canvas, before image or word, before a last brushstroke fixed him in his place. Three, de Español y mestiza produce castiza. How not to see in this gesture the mind of the colony? In the mother's arms, the child hinged at her womb, dark cradle of mixed blood, call it Mexico, turns toward the father reaching to him as if back to Spain, to the promise of blood alchemy, three easy steps to purity. From a Spaniard and an Indian, a mestizo. From a mestizo and a Spaniard, a Castizo. From a Castizo and a Spaniard, a Spaniard. We see her here, one generation away, nearly slipping her mother's careful grip for the book of castas. Call it the catalog of mixed bloods or the book of not, not Spaniard, not white, but mulatto returning backwards or hold yourself in midair and the Mariska, the Lobo, the Chino, Sambo, Albino and the Note Entiendo, the I don't understand you. Guidebook to the colony, record of each crossed birth, it is the typology of taint, of stain, blemish, sullying spot, that which can be purified, that which cannot, Canaan's black fate. How, like a dirty joke it seems, what do you call that space between the dark geographies of sex? Call it the taint, as in it taint one and it taint the other, illicit and yet naming still what is between, between her parents, the child, mulatto returning backwards, cannot slip their hold, the triptych their bodies make, in paint, in blood, her name, written down in the book of castas, all her kind, in thrall, to a word. I'm gonna close now with two poems. This one is after a chalk drawing by J.H. Hasselhorst, 1864. Knowledge, whoever she was, she comes to us like this. Lips parted, long hair spilling from the table, like water from a pitcher, nipples drawn out for inspection. Perhaps to foreshadow the object, she'll become a skeleton on a pedestal, a row of skulls on a shelf. To make a study of the ideal female proportions, four men gather around her. She is young and beautiful and drowned, a venous demedici risen from the sea, sleeping. As if we could mistake this work for sacrilege, the artist entombs her body in a pyramid of light, a temple of science over which the anatomist presides. In the service of beauty to know it, he lifts a flap of skin beneath her breast as one might draw back a sheet. We will not see his step-by-step parsing, a translation, Mary or Catherine or Elizabeth, to corpus, a reola, vulva. In his hands, instruments of the empirical, scalpel, pincers, cold as the room must be cold, all the men in coats trimmed in velvet or fur, soft as the down of her pubis. One man is smoking, another tilts his head to get a better look. Yet another, at the head of the table, peers down as if enthralled, his fist on a stack of books. In the drawing, this is only the first cut, a delicate wounding, and yet how easily the anatomist's blade opens a place in me, like a curtain drawn upon a room in which each learned man is my father. And I hear again his words. I study my crossbreed child, a misnomer, the language of zoology, natural philosophy. In this scene, he is the preoccupied man, an artist collector of experience, the skeptic angling his head, his thoughts tilting toward what I cannot know, the marshaler of knowledge knuckling down a stack of books, even the disector, his scalpel in hand like a pen poised above me, aimed straight for my heart, elegy for my father. I think by now the river must be thick with salmon. Late August, I imagine it as it was that morning, drizzle needling the surface, mist at the banks like a net settling around us, everything damp and shining. That morning, awkward and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked into the current and found our places. You upstream a few yards and out far deeper. You must remember how the river seeped in over your boots, and you grew heavier with that defeat. All day, I kept turning to watch you how first you mined our guides casting, then cast your invisible line slicing the sky between us, then wrought in hand how you tried again and again to find that perfect arc, flight of an insect skimming the river's surface. Perhaps you recall I cast my line and reeled in too small trout we could not keep. Because I had to release them, I confess I thought about the past, working the hooks loose, the fish writhing in my hands, each one slipping away before I could let go. I can tell you now that I tried to take it all in, record it for an elegy I'd write one day when the time came. Your daughter, I was that ruthless. What does it matter if I tell you I learned to be? You kept casting your line, and when it did not come back empty, it was tangled with mine. Some nights dreaming, I step again into the small boat that carried us out and watch the bank receding, my back to where I know we are headed. Thank you.