The OU community hosted Pulitzer-winning poet and Emory professor Natasha Trethewey at Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History Wednesday.

On Monday, Trethewey was the guest-of-honor in a public conversation entitled “Poetry and Memory.” The conversation was officiated by OU creative writing professor and poet Honorée Jeffers.

The atmosphere of the event was casual and conversational, without losing the feel that the discussion was an intellectual one.

Because the two professors are close friends, the event had a feel of intimacy that would have been impossible otherwise. The audience could feel they were watching a scholarly exchange between friends, because they were.

At the same time, the setting of the event allowed for this viewership to not feel alienated.

Not only were the listeners intended to engage with questions, the manner in which Trethewey and Jeffers spoke included the audience as a third friend in the conversation.

In the discussion, Jeffers asked Trethewey about many aspects of her poetry, from the subjects and inspirations to the forms.

Much of Trethewey’s poetry discusses “historical erasures,” those stories from history that have been nearly forgotten or glossed over in the textbooks. The inspiration for these poems can come from the discovery of a previously unknown history or when something “clicks and starts the next book.”

Finding histories such as these, according to Trethewey, can also provide links to a poet’s erasure of personal memory, especially in regards to difficult material.

“What I have to write is what haunts me, and the happy memories don’t haunt,” Trethewey said. “But the joy is in the craft.”

The second event in Trethewey’s visit was a poetry reading on Tuesday night in the Sam Noble Museum.

This setting was much more formal, with Trethewey reading behind an on-stage podium and an audience occupying the space of the modest auditorium.

Trethewey spent most of her time on stage reading from her Pulitzer-winning collection, “Native Guard.” In addition to reading many of the book’s poems, including favorites “Myth” and “Monument,” she also gave the audience glimpses at the lives of these poems.

For those in the audience who have read Trethewey’s texts before, these glimpses were telling histories some might not know about the poems they have read. For those whose first experience with her work came that night, the reading provided an emotional and insightful look into the world of Trethewey’s poetry.

The surprise of the night, though, was when Trethewey read several poems from her next book, a work in progress revolving around the tradition of Mexican casta paintings. Because each of the works was something that might change before the audience could hold it in our hands or read it with our eyes, these five poems felt as if they had been shared with the intimacy of personal gifts.

The poems also had a feel from unique from those in her previous works. As Jeffers described it, these new poems have “more smoldering in them.”

With the final poem of her visit, Trethewey read “Illumination,” a work that aptly begins “Always there is something more to say …” The very end of this poem, and the event, left the audience with three words: “silent / incendiary / waiting.”

These words described the end to Trethewey’s visit to campus, as the audience was left with an enkindled hope that similar events will find a home here in years to come.