Bone Pagoda

Susan Tichy

An extended bio from the author

 

I was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Maryland–one foot in the empire and one in the greenwood. As a child, I was allowed to roam freely over farms and forests that were soon to disappear under malls and houses. Thanks to one bohemian aunt (whom my parents respected, though at a distance) our house was full of books, among them The Golden Treasury of Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer. This anthology (which I still have) was designed for children (big pages, lots of illustrations) but filled with real poems written for adults, from Chaucer to the 1950s. There I first read Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, the Brownings, Dickinson, Whitman, John Clare, as well as Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, cummings, Roethke, and Bishop. (I still see “The Fish” in a bloody, page-sized drawing, whenever I read it.) All seemed equally distant from my lived life, and equally connected to my inner life. When I was fourteen, I discovered Dylan Thomas, and, like many young poets before and since, learned from him that language could be an addictive drug. Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti followed, but a bigger epiphany was Paul Carroll’s anthology, The Young American Poets, published when I was sixteen. These were poets only a few years older than I; their biographies informed me that a person could get a degree in writing poetry; and their poems said the inner and outer lives could actually meet somewhere in language, on a page. A few of these poets—a very few—were even female.

Our house was also full of all things Scottish, so I knew traditional Scottish ballads from infancy. My sense of form begins in their idiosyncratic mix of elegant form and mortal stakes, as does my sense of poetry’s inherently political nature.

In my teens, I was a small but very active cog in the antiwar machinery in Washington, and my first poems were published in The Quicksilver Times, an underground newspaper which I also sold on the street. I graduated from Springbrook High School in Silver Spring, MD, in 1970, and attended Macalester College in St. Paul. While a student, I helped to found one of St. Paul’s many communes, and soon left college to work in a community clinic and an inner city high school. I finished my BA in 1975, at Goddard College in Plainfield, VT, and my M.A. at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1979. In 1977 I spent four months picking fruit, painting fences, and herding cattle on an Israeli kibbutz on the Golan Heights, which became the focus of my first book, The Hands in Exile. This manuscript was chosen by Sandra MacPherson for inclusion in the National Poetry Series, and was published by Random House. It also received the Eugene Kayden Award for Poetry. The poet who most visibly influenced this book was Yehuda Amichai, but I was also paying close attention to Nazim Hikmet, Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Adrienne Rich, James Wright, and Gary Snyder. All my early work was influenced by Snyder’s outdoor ethic, Zen humor, and sound-drenched language.

In the early 1980s, I married Michael O’Hanlon, a Vietnam combat veteran who was a Colorado native and dedicated mountaineer. We designed and built a cabin in Rosita, a silver-mining ghost town in the southern Colorado Rockies, and lived there fulltime for six years, sans electricity, running water, or telephone. In later years, we owned a bookstore in Westcliffe, the nearest town, and were board members for a local land trust working to protect open land from development, so we looked like a fairly upstanding sort of neighbor. In the early years, though, we lived hand-to-mouth, Michael by working at slave wages for the local paper and I by writing genre fiction under false names. In 1983, we co-founded the world’s smallest Amnesty International group, which worked successfully for the release of a Romanian prisoner of conscience.

In 1985, when Michael was working on a semi-autobiographical novel set in the Philippines, we sold something or other to pay for plane tickets and spent a month in Tarlac Province, P.I., researching its political history and the human rights catastrophes of the 1970s. I subsequently learned that my great-great uncle had been military commander of Tarlac in the most brutal phase of the Philippine-American War, at the turn of the 20th century. Thus did a few poems, started in a hotel in Tarlac City, grow into my second book, A Smell of Burning Starts the Day, published by Wesleyan University Press in 1988. My essay, “Forms of Temptation,” describes the writing of these poems, the most narrative and, despite the historical link to my family, the least personal of all my work.

During those years I read a great deal of poetry in translation, looking for a breadth of subject I hadn’t found in American poetry. Amichai and Hikmet remained important; Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniev Herbert were essential; and a host of others—Janos Pilinsky, Ingeborg Bachman, Anna Akhmatava, and Ernesto Cardenal, among them—taught me the true size of the 20th century and the vast, shifting nature of political insight in poetry. American political poets for the most part provided negative models, poems I did not want to emulate; but I won’t name these poets. I admire and honor them for tackling difficult subjects in a literary culture that often denigrates political content. I wouldn’t be the poet I am—perhaps not a poet at all—without their early example and without my long struggle of love, hate, and respect for their work.

Since the publication of A Smell of Burning I have taught in the MFA program at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, always returning to the mountains when I am not in the classroom. Aside from poetry workshops, at all levels, I teach modern and contemporary poetry, with particular interests in women Modernist and avant-garde poets, poetic form, sequence and collage, war poetry, “the poem including history,” and Scottish poetry. Poets who recur most often in my courses are Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Gary Snyder, Susan Howe, Harryette Mullen, and the Scottish poet and conceptual artist Ian Hamilton Finlay.

During my first years in Virginia I began to write rather differently. I was opening up my line, listening differently to language, and gradually working my way back from the short-line narrative lyric I had learned from my teachers to a wider and more inclusive aesthetic, closer in spirit to my first, untaught ideas. Focusing on the political power of representation led me to look anew at relations among lyric, narrative, and documentary impulses, and to rely on a different set of cues for readers. Individual poems from those years have been published and anthologized, but when I reread the collection in its entirety (an unpublished manuscript called Study of Human Proportion) it appears to be what it is—the document of a transition. One clear line through these poems, however, is an ever-stronger turn toward the methods of collage, quotation, and linguistic overlap, which I had used off and on from the 1970s and particularly in “Inheritance: The Water Cure,” a sequence in A Smell of Burning Starts the Day.

In the mid-1990s I began what I thought would be a chapbook, called An Autobiography of Imperialism. It became, instead, a long-term, book-length project—Trafficke: An Autobiography, a mixed-genre meditation (verse, prose, collage) on the myths of family and national history and on the power of literacy. Way back in the 80s, when I was first reading Milosz, I came on an essay about him by Patricial Hampl, in which she described his work as an effort “to use the self not as a source, but as an instrument.” I have taken that phrase as my guide, ever since, and in Trafficke I take it over the top. Drawing on, and collaging, nearly 200 sources, Trafficke hunts and incorporates traces of a family history from the 6th century Scottish Highlands to the displacement of Natives and beginnings of slavery in early Maryland. The family is mine; the story both historic and mythic, collective and intensely personal; the trafficke is traffic in land, language, lives, slaves, and tobacco. Several sections of Trafficke have been published, and in 1999 an excerpt was chosen by Douglas Messerli for the annual Prose Award from Quarter After Eight. It is nearly finished now. Really.

Despite all else that happened in our lives, the war never really went away. Michael first returned to Vietnam in 1998; in 2000, he and I spent a month traveling there. In the northwest mountains, near China, he climbed Fan Si Pan, the tallest peak in Southeast Asia, while I took easier treks through farms and villages surrounding the town of Sapa. In the south, we traveled mostly by motorized sampan, with a boatman and interpreter, visiting rivers, canals, and towns where Micheal had fought with the Navy’s River Assault Force in 1968 and 69. On return, I began rereading memoirs and histories of the war, on both sides, and of resistance to the war. I reread every issue of The Quicksilver Times, as well as my own diaries of the 1960s and 70s. When I Googled The Quicksilver Times I discovered that one of the staff members, whom I had dated for a while when I was 17, was later unmasked as a CIA spy, sent to the QT to uncover vast sums of Chinese money the White House believed was funding the paper. (Alas, there was none.) In Fall of 2001 I was in Virginia, teaching, and had just begun work on Bone Pagoda’s first poems when the WTC was attacked. I wrote the first draft of perhaps half the book in the months of insomnia that followed, through the bombing of Afghanistan and the anthrax attacks. I finished that draft the following summer, in Scotland. In between, Michael and I had traveled to Montana, then across the whole southern U.S., visiting the graves of young men killed in the River Assault Force. Within a month of my return from Scotland, Michael fell to his death while descending a mountain peak near our home in Colorado.

After his death, the first thought I had about Bone Pagoda was that I would have to abandon it. It did not seem psychologically possible for me to continue with a project so intimately connected to Michael’s presence, in his wrenching absence. Through a series of plans, each more impossible than the last, I gradually formed a new idea of the book and began in the following year to rewrite it. The book as it stands now is greatly distilled from its origins—less cheeky, more elegiac, more drowned in itself, in its language. I wrote it to survive, and I survived. I wrote it for all those who didn’t.