Dick of the Dead

Rachel Loden

An extended bio from the author

I was born at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C., where (in recent years, after a shock to his heart) Dick Cheney was often said to be “resting comfortably.” Whether this inauspicious birthplace somehow reset my own tiny, beating heart, and sent me trundling down the road to poetic catastrophe is unknown. But certainly I come from a family that had little reason to be affectionately attached to Richard Nixon.

The summer I was born, Nixon made his name at HUAC (the House Committee on Un- American Activities) and my father lost his job as a deejay at WQQW when the station came under political pressure from HUAC, the FBI, and the FCC.

My family imploded in the crucible of the McCarthy era and my mother, brother and I set off on a nationwide odyssey, moving from D.C. to Brooklyn, Berkeley, and Los Angeles before I was ten, all under the beneficent eye of friendly local G-men.

My mother (a Vassar girl turned machinist and labor organizer) succumbed to schizophrenia within a few years and was repeatedly hospitalized, receiving shock treatments that wiped out huge swaths of her memory and did nothing to calm whatever might have been left of her mind. She was never well again.

So Nixon had always been with us, but he didn’t start turning up in my poems until April 23, 1994, when I wrote that he was “slipping / in and out of consciousness....” In fact, that night, he was dying—but he was also slipping in and out of my consciousness. He began making appearances, insistent appearances, as a muse or dancing-master, refusing to go quietly, continuing to campaign from beyond the grave.

But now, with Dick of the Dead, the campaign is against death itself and Dick is actually rather sunny about the prospect. He missed the game, missed the enemies. He’s tanned, he’s rested, he’s ready to resist and he storms the yawning underworld that fell open for him, so conveniently, after (what George W. Bush often calls) “the events of September the 11th.”

Dick is joined by a cast of conspicuously obsessed characters including Hugh Hefner, Sylvia Plath, Wyatt Earp, Federico Fellini, Valerie Solanas, George Costanza, Captain Hook, and J. Edgar Hoover, as well as an outraged experimental subject in a pink tutu, an Egyptian god of scribes, a raft of venture capitalists and code-spinners, and (in various appearances) his own seduced-and-abandoned dog, Checkers.

I first wrote about Nixon and his checkered cohort in Hotel Imperium, which won the Contemporary Poetry Series Competition of the University of Georgia Press (and in the prizewinning chapbook that preceded it, The Last Campaign). It was named one of the ten best poetry books of the year by The San Francisco Chronicle, which called it “quirky and beguiling,” and was shortlisted for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. More recently I published The Richard Nixon Snow Globe, a chapbook, with Wild Honey Press in Ireland, and my work has appeared in two volumes of the Best American Poetry series, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and numerous magazines, including New American Writing, The Paris Review, and Jacket. In 2001 I received a fellowship from the California Arts Council and in 2006, a grant from the Fund for Poetry.

I live with my husband Jussi Ketonen, a logician, with whom I raised a daughter, Skye.

Until this year, almost my entire poetry “career” had been conducted through the mailbox (and the email outbox), due to a decades-long bout with agoraphobia and panic disorder. Now I’m beginning to give my first readings of the new millennium, a small victory that, so far, gives me considerable joy.

My family is full of writers and would-be writers like my father, a stage actor before the blacklist who worked with Fay Wray and Sinclair Lewis (whom he called “the worst actor ever born”) and thought he had a great play in him. He never birthed it. My great grandmother’s sister, Rebecca Harding Davis, published (the now often-studied) Life in the Iron Mills in the Atlantic Monthly and supported her family with her pen. In a spring 1861 letter to her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, Emily Dickinson asks to borrow it:

Will Susan — please lend
Emily — “Life in the Iron Mills” —
and accept Blossom
                     from Emily —

Stumbling on that blossom, as I did today, it seems that my life has come full circle.


Author photo © 2008 rahphoto.com