FOOD SCIENCE A STANDOUT
COURSE FOR FORMER POET LAUREATE
By Rich Hanson
In June I went to
Knox College in Galesburg Illinois to attend their graduation ceremonies. The impetus was an opportunity to hear the
Nation’s 19th Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey, give the
commencement address. I’ve admired Ms.
Trethewey’s work since reading her Native Guard, a book of poetry that tells the story of the Louisiana State
Guards, an all-black Union regiment that was made up mostly of former
slaves. Ironically, they were given the
assignment of guarding Confederate prisoners of war. This book, Ms. Trethewey’s third, earned her
critical acclaim and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. In 2012 she was chosen as the Poet Laureate
of the United States. She is also
Mississippi’s Poet Laureate. In choosing
her to represent the Nation as its poet, James Billington, the Librarian of
Congress said that “he was immediately
struck by a kind of classic quality with a richness and variety of structures with which she
presents her poetry…she intermixes her story with the historical story in a way
that takes you deep into the human tragedy of it.”
Her life is tied
to history in so many ways, from the fact that she was born on Confederate
Memorial Day, to the fact that her parents were married illegally at the time
of her birth (the state laws that forbade such marriages weren’t struck down
until a year after her birth,) to the fact that the War in Viet-Nam left her
mother’s second husband a deeply troubled man, whose war-induced post-traumatic
stress issues eventually caused him to snap and kill her mother while young
Natasha had just entered her freshman year in college. Ms. Tretheway said that that incident was the
impetus that turned her to poetry, as she attempted to analyze and understand
the emotions and underlying causes that led to such a horrible event.
She envied her
classmates who entered college certain of what their career path would be. She was still searching, and although she
chose to major in English, she sampled a number of courses in other areas. One of two courses that she credited as
standing out in her memory was a history course, in which the instructor took
each student’s hometown, and by recounting events that happened in it, tied
them to history by making them aware of how much history had helped to mold and
shape them into the individuals that they are now. Her choice of that course wasn’t surprising
given the way she weaves history into her work.
The second course that she mentioned during her address at Knox was….
“The other course was a food science course
I took in my senior year. It was only a
two credit course, but it was one of the most memorable of my college
experience. We studied everything from the
FDA and the USDA guidelines about the various grades of meat, food processing,
labelling and safety, to food-borne illnesses.
In one assignment, in order to learn how to recognize which bacteria had
caused a particular illness, we had to solve cases in which we were like
detectives, following the clues as a sleuth does in a mystery novel.
Until then I had not known how much I
could be drawn to a kind of scientific research, to investigation, to puzzling
out using primary evidence the answer to some practical question affecting our
lives. Nor did I realize there were
connections between a course like this one and my shock and disgust and
pleasure upon reading in high school Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle, that details some of the
early horrors of the meat packing industry in Chicago and the regulations that
it spurred. Nor could I see that taken
altogether, these courses and my English major were preparing me for the moment
that I’d recognize what it was that I had been meant to do, that it involved
literature, not only reading it, but writing it and that the writing of it
would involve an engagement with history, society, and culture, a curiosity
that fostered a desire to do research, to go beyond disciplinary boundaries, to
make my way in the world, not just in spite of certain setbacks, but building
upon them. These lessons that hardships
and limitations, no matter what they are, can teach us.”
What can history
teach us? It would not be right to end
an article about Natasha Trethewey without getting a chance to hear how she
crafts her life, history and culture into a poem. Let’s finish with her reflection on Southern
History.
Southern History
Before the war they were happy, he said,
Quoting our textbook
(This was Senior-year
History class.) The slaves were clothed, fed
And better off under a master’s care.
I watched the words
blur on the page. No one
raised a hand,
disagreed. Not even me.
It was late; we still
had Reconstruction
To cover before the
test, and –luckily –
Three hours of
watching Gone with the Wind.
History, the teacher said, of
the old South –
A true account of how things were back then.
On screen a slave
stood big as life: big mouth,
Bucked eyes, our
textbook’s grinning proof – a lie
My teacher
guarded. Silent, so did I.
Ms Trethewey was
kind enough to autograph three of her books for me and to thank me for coming
to hear her commencement speech. She’s a
gifted writer and a gracious and inspiring individual. She will be coming to Knox College to give a
reading this coming April. I will be
there. I urge any of you who have an
opportunity to hear her read at a venue near you to take advantage of the
opportunity. You won’t be disappointed.
