Natasha Trethewey’s Incident is a retelling of a story that was seemingly passed down over the years in her family. The story itself, is an incident which involved the Ku Klux Klan or “white men in their gowns” (line 13) and the burning of a cross in someone’s yard. I find that the way Trethewey goes about telling this story in the poem is very interesting. In the poem, she seems to be telling the same story twice with one being a long version and the other a short five line summary. The poem starts out and ends with the line: “We tell the story every year” (line 1 and 20), which I believe is done to make sure that the reader understands that this is not a new story and has not been a new story for quite some time now. Because of the fact that this is a story that is told every year, it would highly unlikely that it has remained consistent throughout all those years. Trethewey does a great job of showing these inconsistencies by reusing lines throughout the poem but in different variations. I also found it interesting that when I read the first line of each stanza, a five line poem can be seen and appears to serve as a summary for the original poem. I believe that this is done to show that even though the story is told every year with the inconsistencies that come along with it, the story still remains the same.
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I agree with you that the form of this poem is really interesting, and I like your idea that we get the story told to us in several different versions. I’m not quite sure, however, why you say the short version is a five-line summary instead of a four-line one. Including the fifth line of the poem (which is a repeat of the second) in the summary seems redundant or to leave it hanging as an incomplete sentence.
I liked the irony. “Nothing really happened…” But she says we tell the story every year. It was not a large event, but the impact was for her and family everlasting.