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Pentimento [1]

Poetry [2]
9.29.20

In Natasha Trethewey’s “Repentance [3],” included in her retrospective poetry collection Monument (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), she describes the term pentimento as: “the word       for a painter’s change       of heart       revision / on canvas.” Trethewey uses this painting practice as a metaphor for contending with the memory of a quarrel with her father: “a moment so / far back    there’s still time      to take the glass   from your hand / or mine.” What memory would you want to revise or repent, as if you could paint over it? Inspired by painting, write a poem that uses detailed imagery to imagine the possibility of a new past.


Source URL:https://www.pw.org/content/pentimento_1

Links
[1] https://www.pw.org/content/pentimento_1 [2] https://www.pw.org/genre/poetry [3] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/repentance