Your poems expand skillfully on collage techniques from different approaches. How do you deal with Time as a unity when writing a poem that consciously weaves (and rejects) contesting as well as associative imageries, narratives and spaces of memory all on one page?

I try to honor the Taoist concept of reality as additive and interactive, in which each of “the ten thousand things” retains its own integrity and fullness, though always defined by movement, change, and transformation. In terms of poetics, this means respecting the image or phrase — the thingness of the thing — while not allowing it to repose in stasis or isolation. The important time in the poem is the time of writing and reading, the movement of mind, sound, and rhythm, which mark the transitions and boundaries among and between the fragments. I like to say a reader should run her hand over the surface of the poem and feel for the bumps and gaps, the changes in texture, size, or weight… which is another way of saying she should read aloud. The metaphor is spatial because the time of the poem is the present: I rarely work in any kind of fictional projection of my mind into other times or characters, and in recent years have not felt much interest in constructing a narrative unity. Narrative enters in fragments, as would any other element, personal or collective.

I try to honor the Taoist concept of reality as additive and interactive, in which each of ‘the ten thousand things’ retains its own integrity and fullness, though always defined by movement, change, and transformation….

As a poem develops, I establish a time (and sometimes place) of meditation, from which my gaze extends and into which I gather the fragments, from past or present, that become the speech of the poem. As in any meditative poem, keeping that center constant is important in holding the poem together, even when its location (or even existence) is not apparent to a reader. At the same time, challenging that position, via contradictions of various kinds — tense, register, historical sources of the images — keeps the speaker implicated in the instabilities of changefulness, keeps us mindful that point of view defines each and every piece of language we encounter.

Bone Pagoda, a strong book of poetry — your third — appeared after a long lapse of silence. Why so?

It was a lapse of book publication, not a period of silence. I published individual poems and mixed-genre pieces in those years, some of which won awards and so forth. I did write three books in the interval, all unpublished. Two will remain so, as I now no longer want to see them in print. The third, Trafficke, is a monstrously large (and monstrously strange) mixed-genre project in which I try to sort out and reconcile, recombine and re-complicate the various strands of my maternal grandmother’s family history. I finished it once, about ten years ago, then set it aside because I knew other people were researching related questions that could turn the book on its head…. which, in fact, has happened, so I am now tearing the book apart and re-making it.

Susan Tichy
BY Terra-Raye Carter

Trafficke was instigated by the life of Alexander Magruder, my earliest immigrant ancestor, a Scotsman who was transported to Maryland as a prisoner of war in the 1650s, and sold into indentured servitude. He died twenty-five years later, owner of 1200 acres of what had been Native land, four indentured servants, and one slave. His descendents were slave-owning tobacco farmers — but that part of the story played no part in my childhood, because his descendents also invented a different, more legendary past, attaching themselves to the most Romantic and storied clan in Highland history, Clan Gregor, victims of the most severe genocidal laws ever enacted in Britain. You can read a few pieces of Trafficke online, in its earlier iteration, though some of the “facts” therein are now under revision.