NEW YORK POET MEREDITH TREDE READS AT "FOOT OF THE LAKE" POETRY EVENT

Meredith Trede, a poet

from Sleepy Hollow, New York, read from her poetry at a Foot of the Lake gathering last night in the Windhover Center, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. With her husband, Trede operates a management consulting business; and if her business consulting is anything like her poetry, her clients are well-served indeed.

Trede has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence and a Master's in business development as well. Her poetry has been published in Paris Review, Nebraska Review, West Branch, Diner, and The MacGuffin. Quite a large swatch of her work, forty-some pages, I believe, also appears in Desire Path from Toadlily Press.

Many of the poems Trede read last night come out of her experience growing up in a tenement building in New York City, and out of the lives (and in the voices) of the residents of that building.

Trede spoke of the hardship in Ireland in 1845, calling it "The Hunger" and "The Famine" and "The Shame." As a new bride, she didn't know any better and made potatoes every night. Her poem cautions: "Some confuse person with potato."

All those Irish girls in the Catholic school Trede attended were named Patricia or Mary Ann - saints' names. Trede was named Meredith for the heroine of a popular novel her father was reading when she was born. At her baptism, the priest held her and said, "No, not Meredith. In church we must call her by a saint's name." Her father took the baby back from the priest and said, "In my church, Meredith is a saint's name." An awkward moment of silence, perhaps, before the priest said, "And so it shall be here, too." And all her life, it seems, she has been trying to live up to the measure of that other Meredith, the one her father read of.

Her parents were a practical sort, working class folks, and even today with her two-sided career, business and poetry, her mother's question still rings for Trede: "When are you going to make up your mind about what you're going to do with your life?"

Trede's mother was Irish; her father was not. Trede was well along in school before she realized that not everyone hated the English. And the lilt of her grandmother's command still echoes: "Don't be getting above yourself."

Trede read a poem of an encounter with her ex-husband at the cheese line in a grocery market; it ends: "and I hold the high ground, managing not to brag about myself in the cheese line."

At one point during her reading, Trede confided that "this started out to be a poem about Einstein. If I didn't tell you, you'd never know that." Like many of her other poems, it became a poem about family.

At another point, Trede said: "Every story moves on and around, without getting to pick subject or author."

She read from a poem, and I think she was talking to herself in it: "elegy, eulogy, literary logarithm - you write...."

She wrote scripts for skits as a child; she wrote poems. But when Trede married at age 20, "that part of my life went away." Trede started writing about fifteen years ago, and I think we are fortunate she did.

The first half of her life, Trede tells us, she tried to get away from those voices of the tenement, those people, that place where "the higher the floor, the lower the rent," where "secrets echo in the narrow air." And in this part of her life, she is trying to reclaim them. "To save myself," she wrote, "I thought I could disavow you." Yet now she knows, as we know, that you get into heaven not by denying where you've come from, but by accepting it.

Comments

[Marja-Leena]

I enjoyed reading Trede's interesting story, thanks Tom! And surprised to see that there is a REAL Sleepy Hollow!!

[Tom Montag]

Hi, M-L. Yes, Meredith Trede is quite a personable poet, and humble, too. That's a lovely combination in a writer, or anyone else for that matter. Now when I go to my atlas to locate Sleepy Hollow there, I cannot find it! What's with that? Oh, it's because Sleepy Hollow's other name is "North Tarrytown."