History Lesson

“Incident” by Natasha Trethewey (2006)

This poem is from Trethewey’s collection Native Guard, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The form is a pantoum, a series of quatrains, or four-line stanzas, wherein the second and fourth lines repeat in the following stanza as the first and third lines. In the last stanza, the second and fourth lines are lines one and three of the initial stanza. While this is a traditional form, it echoes the mirroring of “History Lesson.”

“Miscegenation” by Natasha Trethewey (2006)

Also from Native Guard (2006), this poem is written as a ghazal—a series of syntactically complete couplets that end on the same word, in this case, “Mississippi.” Originally an Arabic form, the ghazal typically focused on romantic love. In this poem, the speaker considers her parents’ experience of marrying while miscegenation laws were in place in Mississippi.

“White Lies” by Natasha Trethewey (2000)

In this poem, the speaker recalls her experience of “passing” for white while growing up and of her other’s anger over her deceit. In the end, the speaker gets her mouth washed out with soap, believing it might “cleanse” (Line 25) her “from the inside out” (Line 28).

“Dancing with Strom” by Nikki Finney (2011)

The speaker in this narrative poem grapples with the presence of a white supremacist at a family function. It is a wedding, a joyous occasion, where seemingly everyone is dancing except the speaker, who meditates instead on racial histories of South Carolina and “the architecture of Black people” (Line 62).

“Afterimages” by Audre Lorde (1997)

In this poem, images generate via photographs, newspapers, and television, as well as through memory and the imagination. The speaker considers race and devastation through the lenses of so-called natural and human-driven disaster and violence.