Bone Pagoda

Susan Tichy

An author’s statement

In war, the slightest detail, the slimmest luck, may determine life or death, truth or lie. Those moments of choice and chance are mirrored in the poems of Bone Pagoda by shifting rhythms, incremental changes of phrase or sound, grammatical swerves. Who is speaking? What “really happens”? Which way of reading this line is true? Is a line of fishing boats, joined by nets, placed there to catch fish, or to force a gunboat to swerve into rifle range? Is smoke on the riverbank gunfire, or cookfire? Will you shoot, or risk not shooting? To be wrong either way is fatal to someone, an epistemology no combatant forgets.

My sense of war was conditioned by a quarter century with my late husband, a veteran of extensive combat in the Mekong Delta. My sense of form is conditioned by having been raised on traditional Scottish ballads—where stanza form may multiply or delay rhyme, but never escape it; and where incremental repetitions mean death and betrayal, or life and deliverance, may strike with the shift of a single word.

In our life together, the war was stories; but also, like ballads when they are sung, heard, war was embodied presence: the flinch after thunder; the instant, even heroic response to emergency; the need for emergency; the compulsive reading of history, whose huge presence could dim a personal memory down to size.

From the first day of putting ink on paper, Bone Pagoda has been permeated space: “My tongue is mine aine / But who said that.” This is an ethos; in Oppen’s words, an ethos of being numerous. My sources (one meaning: my authors, my makers) include an array of poets, politicians, soldiers, spies, and resisters, from Jonathan Swift to Joan Baez, and from Lyndon Johnson to Nguyen Thi Dinh.

Collage compels because it preserves (collects, if you will) a sense of origins, contexts, which the new composition will never quite obscure. This, too, is embodied presence. A reader should be able to feel the bumps and joins, to run her hands over the surface of the poem and feel where one piece of language meets another, where texture and temperature change. After a prefatory prose poem, “Couplet,” the book is composed entirely in couplets and solo lines, a form whose potential for multiple readings and recombinations, uncertain transitions and stopping points, belies it visual serenity.

Presiding over this manufactury, George Oppen shares space with Emily Dickinson. Both are great poets of war (though only one “was there”) and both are poets who create an illusion of simplicity where there is none. I was “there” in Vietnam (for a month in the year 2000), but I was not “there” in war. Nearly all of my life I have been “there” in the struggle of meaning located in “Vietnam.” It is also known as “here,” “now.”