Tuesday, July 12, 2016

TRAFFICKE by SUSAN TICHY

Jon Curley reviews

Trafficke by Susan Tichy
(Ahsahta Press, Boise, ID, 2015)


A fusion of forms, a panoply of patterns, and a dense historical underlay—dispersed, fragmented, voluminous, at times vertiginous—are the structural ingredients of Susan Tichy’s fifth collection Trafficke. Fortunately, this exhaustive traffic of terrain, narrative, and ethical insight into imperialism, colonialism, immigration, and memory never gets congested even if it sometimes overwhelms.  A succinct statement of guiding principle arrives early on in a couplet as profound as it is short: “New carpentry   old hinges // History begins  where it changes” So this is a historical poetic narrative of a sort but one so diffuse and messy (in a preferred way) that those old hinges are going to buckle then break, and multiple histories will blast any conceptual door down and away. Amen.

The starting point to this long poem—almost two hundred pages and constructed and shaped over two decades—is the fate through movement of a Scottish ancestor, Alexander MacGregor (among cited spellings) who immigrated to Maryland in the 17th Century. This figure in particular is no monumental historical figure—nor are many of the subjects cast into the dramatic traffic of this volume. But Tichy’s tact is towards the preservation of lost voices across “a dissident topography”…“not found on earlier maps under any name.” I am doing some radical stitching in this quotation but do so in the spirit of this volume which stitches so many disparate elements—etymologies, languages (Irish/Scottish Gaelic, Latin, Restoration-era English, among many others), genres, and biographies—and then refuses to make them cohere. A failure? Yes, gloriously; any other refining, resolving, streamlining, or bonding would be too easy and inaccurate. As Tichy instructs: “Ah, but never trust a fair copy, words by which the violence of revision is concealed” (Those two italicized words are a history and moral conundrum unto themselves!). This explorer of history is an empiricist, though not completist, urging any discerning wanderer across thickets of text and actual thickets in one’s midst to “Go back along the drove roads, test the difference: mountains, or a view of the mountains”; in other words, record concrete objects and the perception, singular and collectively considered,  of these objects through time. This kind of instruction built in multiple itineraries through inventories is basically an operator’s manual for how to understand poetry and history, a valuable twofer whatever the poem or history.

Tichy’s construction is a contradiction—a history that seeks a reckoning with human events and natural occurrences but refuses answers or conclusions. Throughout this poetic narrative which, speaking of or in Gaelic, mimics the classical Irish poetic form of an immram, a sage blazing through adversities and attempting to navigate a lapsed world while seeking to visit and gain knowledge from a Christian underworld, Tichy espouses a clarifier and corrective to go more deeply, to visit the underworlds of untold or imagined history, to burrow into and under words to test their accuracy. An ostensible family history to chart genealogies gets caught up in a project of sentimental identifications, not mythologizing or heroicizing per se, but gauging the limits of attachment to one’s forbears, one’s own chronicle. The final lines of Traffique impacts with Donne-like bursts of violent alliteration, inquiry, and also self-awareness: “This is a blow, my genitor—my bright—my battering. I blacken myself in the transitive. Alexander, I am seeking to love you.” The poetic sequences always endear, the prose parts are essential but often so direly exhaustive (though never cloying)—but therein lies the imperative of lives filled, if not fulfilled, by all the messy, unauthoritative data of their destinies.


*****

Jon Curley's most recent book of poems is Hybrid Moments (2015). With Burt Kimmelman, he co-edited The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller: A Nomad Memory (2015). He teaches in Newark and lives in New York.


10 comments:

  1. Jon, thanks for the wonderful review. I agree with all of the points here -- this is an important book of poetry, and the fruition of a somewhat staggeringly large research project. I recommend it to anyone interested in American colonial history, as well as any interested in contemporary poets working avant-garde archival poetics of Susan Howe. I also recommend it to anyone thinking right now about the history and cultural impact of American slavery, and about whiteness, inherited whiteness, and the silence and obfuscation that whiteness enacts -- the "whiting out" of history. I think it's important to mention that here, because this book, to my mind, has a different set of ethical stakes than many "wanderers across thickets of texts." In this case, Tichy's research uncovered generations of slave-owning in her family, from the very beginning. This slave-holding, which is part (literally) of the DNA of her ancestral history, but which had been erased and replaced by spurious family lore, is the center of what the research project (and this book) reveals. This matters, to my mind, because it gives the book moral and ethical stakes that extend beyond a purely academic interest in the archive, or in the construction of history. This is the kind of book that changes its author, its author's family, etc., and this - in addition to everything you wrote - is what makes this book so important in the contemporary moment.

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    1. Superb critique of my review! Whoever you are, thank you: I did not intend to elide the ethical and oppressive structures of kin and country that Tichy so deftly weave and to which she pointedly refers throughout...but I did. What I wished to strive to report was the pressurized space of the poetic narrator's subjective considerations on many forms of dominant discourses and dire methods of treatment of peoples, while leaving out (from the original draft) reference to Noel Ignatieff's HOW THE IRISH BECAME WHITE, a seminal study of White Studies and one which has greatly aided my sense of how migrant communities to the Americas come to integrate themselves as either oppressors or become victims; for the former this can occur despite a previous history of mistreatment by others by force of race, ethnicity, class, gender, religion, and sexual orientation, et cetera (too many et ceteras); or to generalize meaningfully in this context, how the the skin you're living in gives one the privilege of power and possible inducements to brutality or else leaves one open to attack, subjugation, murder...erasure. Tichy's project of reconsideration and reclamation does much to restore a sense of how we should establish a historical frame so not to forget the many dead, the many unjustly treated throughout time, on American lands and all others.

      I could go on-- and should have done so in my review. Let me offer this comment as an addendum, revision, and APOLOGY to Susan Tichy and her many faithful and attentive readers. I trafficked in some perhaps observant reflections on this powerful volume but missed conveying more formidable statements of how to read it (my job!) and what its heady contents aim to illuminate and judge. The contemporary moment that this commentator wisely addresses-- Tichy's, ours, and all others-- demands a corrective depth of perspective (the aim of this response), and seeing as I write this, a review tile just above mine about the letters of Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn, let me end this extension of my review, with three words that Baraka, a mentor of many sorts, inscribed in my copy of TRANSBLUESENCY: "Unity and Struggle!"

      This instructive comment restores my faith in online comments (and shows but another example of the greatness of the voices that assemble here at GR). Also, it lights a bright flare of nuance to this here reviewer. Again, thank you, dear commentator! JC

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    2. Jon, thanks for the note! I didn't mean to obscure my identity before (it auto-filled anonymous). I don't know the Noel Ignatieff, but I'll have to read it (I grew up outside of Boston, a city with a long long history of folks striving desperately to become white). Unity and struggle indeed.

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    3. Sean Pears, that's you? Good Sir, so happy to send glowing words, thought, and spirit your way with a name! A fellow New Englander too! I grew up in southeastern MA, closer to Plymouth than Boston, but without the Puritanical trappings of either. Have you read ALL SOULS: A FAMILY'S STORY FROM SOUTHIE by my friend Michael Patrick MacDonald? It shows, among many other disturbing trends, how whiteness became affirmed disgustingly during the Boston Busing Crisis by working class Irish and Irish-Americans who had spent hot summer nights like tonight listening to Jame Brown, Motown and Stax Records artists, and then moved to black disavowal and white violence and hatred. Unity and Struggle indeed!

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    4. Sean Pears, is it! Great to send glowing words, thoughts, and spirit to your name! I, too, am from MA, closer to Plymouth than Boston, but without the Puritanical trappings of either.
      Have you read ALL SOULS: A FAMILY'S STORY FROM SOUTHIE by my friend Michael Patrick MacDonald? It shows, among other disturbing trends, how the working-class Irish and Irish-American community of South Boston moved from adoration of Black Culture to virulent disavowal and violence during Boston's Busing Crisis. Well worth your time! All Best! Jon

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    5. Hey Sean! Thanks for getting this discussion rolling, and I'm glad to see your name now attached. The scope and delicacy of your thinking is always a pleasure to encounter.

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  2. All in all, a wonderfully positive review, I think, until it hits me. Hard. Between the eyes. In the gut. No! He cut out the very soul of this fine work. He left out the slaves. For twenty years this intrepid poet labored to bring these hidden, forgotten people into the light. These people we white Americans owe everything. And her reviewer -- Why? Why? -- relegates them back to obscurity. Back among the forgotten. The Unmentionables. Please explain, sir.

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    1. Karen Branan, thank you, for your critically astute and heartfelt response to TRAFFICKE and my review. I read the comments of your good self and the other commentator and sent a response above that dwells on both-- you two steer me further towards the intended and obvious representations of the volume. I meant not to remove any soul but your comments infuse more soul to my own sense of the book and help me establish finer lines of consideration. As mentioned above, take these words as marks of apology and also appreciation. Thank you again, Karen Branan!

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    2. Thank you, Karen, for joining the conversation. You know better than anyone the difficulties of this work, and the need to hang in. To all reading this: check out Karen's book, The Family Tree, about a "kinship lynching" in Jim Crow Georgia.

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  3. Thank you all for this thoughtful and unflinching discussion, and especially to you, Jon, for your replies. When I realized slavery had been silenced by the review, I too was momentarily silenced, unsure how to express both the shock registered by Karen Branan and my very real gratitude for your insights into the book--even for taking the time to read and review such a long and complicated project. For several years now I've been part of an informal network of white poets writing about race, and writing against white supremacy. While the media associates that term with overt and aggressive racist acts, we know it also to be be applicable to small, almost silent acts of commission and omission, including the elision of black experience, the assumption of white experience as some kind of default humanity. Every one of us in this loose group have learned those lessons in our own work and lives, painfully and sometimes publicly. In my own case, why did I write for decades about other injustices--war, especially--always using either personal or family experience as the gateway to larger histories, while ignoring my family's 200 year perpetration of one of our history's greatest injustices? Looking back on it, just having to ask that question blows my mind. So, thank you Jon, Karen, and Anonymous, for again demonstrating what we white people need to learn and how we can help each other learn it. Going back to what the review DOES do...HOW THE IRISH BECAME WHITE is indeed a great book, an expansive fellow-traveler to James Baldwin's essay "The Price of the Ticket," about what European Americans gave up by becoming "white." I could sense that that kind of historical knowledge was behind your words, Jon, and am glad TRAFFICKE found a reader who could bring that perspective to its pages. ST

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