Terry Anderson and the Sustaining Power of Poetry
An essay by Michael J. Bugeja
This essay was originally delivered as a speech to the National Federation of State Poetry Societies’
National Convention on June 18, 2000 and is reprinted from Winter 2000 Ohioana Quarterly
I was among millions worldwide who prayed for the release of reporter
Terry Anderson and who rejoiced when those prayers were answered almost
a decade ago. Anderson, as you recall, was kidnapped by Shiites in Lebanon
and held hostage for almost seven years. Upon his release in early December
1991, an ebullient Anderson addressed hundreds of journalists at a press
conference during a stopover in Germany, on his way home. It was a happy
time for me as well. I was viewing CNN and Anderson while bottle-feeding
my newborn son Shane - my wife Diane and I were told we could not have
any more children, after losing two. Shane, like Anderson, defied the odds
just in time for the upcoming holidays, the season of miracles.
Anderson’s release was miraculous. You can read about the inhumane
conditions that he endured in his best-selling memoir, Den of Lions. He
spent most of his captivity in chains at various locations in Lebanon - the
longest held American hostage ever, at least according to the Guinness Book
of World Records - an autographed copy of which he gave Shane, appropriately,
last Christmas.
This is the story about how my life intersected with Anderson’s and how
poetry ultimately brought him to Ohio University. It is also a story about
family, loss, and redemption. In December 1981, almost ten years to the day
of Anderson’s release, my spouse Diane and I were grieving the loss of our
infant daughter Erin Marie Bugeja. The experience devastated us. Psychologists
will tell you that losing a child has the emotional impact of a hostage
experience. They are right. Finally, this is a story about the sustaining power
of poetry.
Terry Anderson and I have more in common, though, than legacies of
pain. In fact, we were competitors. He joined the Associated Press in 1974
and I, United Press International that year. We were both bureau chiefs. We
were both aggressive. We were both consumed with, zealous about, and
defined by the journalism profession - and, in some sense, we still are. But
poetry rather than journalism brought us together in 1991 as he was fielding
questions at that press conference upon his release.
A reporter asked how he survived his ordeal, and Anderson replied that he
did so by reading the Bible and composing poems. The pack picked up
on the Bible part. I stood as if frozen in place, watching the news with
Shane in my arms, wondering if I had heard Anderson correctly. Did he
survive, as I had survived, his darkest hour via verse? Did poetry sustain him
when nothing else, even God - especially God - could not? I had lost two
daughters. In a way Anderson had lost a daughter, too, for 2,454 days;
Sulome was born while he was in captivity. In Den of Lions, Madeleine
Anderson describes how she felt in the hospital after giving birth. “This was
not what we planned for,” she writes. “I wanted to see her and Terry together.
Why, God, why? Why did you choose us for this? I felt no comfort
from God. It was as if he did not exist.”
Let the pack pursue God, I thought, because that is what the public
wanted to hear. God sells. Poetry, as everyone knows, does not sell. It
sustains. So I did what Terry Anderson would have done if our roles as
reporter and newsmaker were reversed. I secured his “secret” address from
a media contact and within weeks was pestering him for an interview. To his
credit, Anderson wrote back and informed me that he wasn’t granting any
interviews for the foreseeable
future, which was understandable,
in light of his newfound freedom
and the desire to be with his
family. So I let a month pass and
queried him again. Would he
please speak on the record about
the role poetry played during his
imprisonment? Would he share
those poems with me and grant
permission as well to publish them
in Writer’s Digest and in my
forthcoming book, The Art &
Craft of Poetry?
He didn’t immediately answer
the letter. So I waited a few more
months and wrote another. This
time Anderson said he would
reconsider - perhaps in a year or
two. He still needed time with
Madeleine and Sulome. Also,
he was writing his memoir.
There are two types of reporters,
I tell my journalism students: ones who get their stories and ones who lose their jobs. I managed to procure his
“secret” telephone number from a source and got Anderson on the line at
the Freedom Forum in New York City. Not only did we have a shared
history as competitors and poets, I reminded him, we knew many of the
same people: Helen Thomas, former UPI White House bureau chief; Peter
Arnett, Vietnam-era combat reporter; and Leon Daniel, Peter’s UPI competitor
in Saigon - just to name a few.
Anderson said he would think about it. He sounded a little disappointed.
His book editor had read his poems, which didn’t rhyme, and had called
them meditations. Would I look at a few? Certainly, I said. And I would
share a few of mine, including one entitled “Hove,” about journalism and
poetry. Soon after Terry read “Hove,” he sent me a batch of his poems,
which also appear in Den of Lions. He wrote, “I had thought when I wrote
my poems, that nobody had ever written poetry about the news business.
I’m glad to find I’m wrong.” Anderson granted the interview and permission
to publish a few of his poems in Writer’s Digest and The Art & Craft of Poetry.
Anderson remembers the exchange a little differently. In a recent interview,
he says: “I wrote several poems about journalism, and Michael saw
them in the book [Den of Lions] and he
wrote me one day when I was in New
York, and he asked for permission to
reproduce them in his book about the
writing and making of poetry.”
For the record, which Anderson and
I still keep as wire hacks, his book Den
of Lions came out after my article in the
January 1993 issue of Writer’s Digest.
Not only was I the first to publish
Anderson’s poems, true to our rivalry,
but also to scoop him on page 27 of
the January 2, 1993, Editor & Publisher,
which reads as follows:
The February issue of Writer’s Digest
magazine, on sale as of Jan. 7, features
an interview with Terry Anderson,
former Associated Press bureau chief
who was held hostage in Lebanon for
almost seven years.
In “The Sustaining Power of Poetry,” Anderson discusses his belief that
he survived his captivity, in part, by composing poems.
He composed 32 poems during his captivity, but had the opportunity to
write down only 11, which he wrote in a single hour on the day fellow
hostages Thomas Sutherland and Terry Waite were released.
Can you imagine that? Writing eleven of thirty-two poems from memory
in a single hour as your best friends, sole companions, and fellow hostages
were to be released? In
his stead what would
you do? Would you pity
yourself for being left
behind? Would you
grieve for your family
and self? Would you
even think of poetry?
Here is how Anderson
tells it:
“I didn’t actually
write any of my own
poetry until my last
month in prison. It was
all memorized. It was never written down until Terry Waite and Tom
Sutherland went home - they were the ones who preceded me - they went
home a little over two weeks before I did. And when they left, the guards
told me I could send a letter with them, a letter to my family. And I did
that . . . I wrote a quick letter to my family, saying, you know, ‘They tell me
we will be together very soon. I’m going to be leaving also very quickly.
Meanwhile, here are some of the poems I have been writing.’
“You see, I had all these poems in my head. I had thirty-some poems that
I had written and couldn’t write them down. They were all in my head so I
would recite them to myself every morning when I woke up just so I
wouldn’t forget them, which was my great fear. So I wrote my quick letter
and then I wrote down [some of my poems] and gave them to Tom and
said, ‘Please give them to my family.’
“Because while they said I was going home, you never knew.”
Terry Anderson did come home. He did share his poems with Writer’s
Digest readers and then the world, through Den of Lions. We became
friends through poetry. We’re colleagues now. He teaches journalism with
me in the E.W. Scripps School at Ohio University, where he was commencement
speaker in 1998. Not only did poetry sustain us, it literally
brought us together.
Here is how Terry explains it:
“I wrote about journalism [during my captivity] which was unusual to me
because I never had seen poetry about journalism. And that is what brought
me to Michael Bugeja and also to Ohio University, in a strange way.
“Among the things that he sent me in his letters was his poem about
poetry, ‘Hove,’ which was a delightful thing and in an entirely different style
than what I was writing about.…We kind of became friends.
"I was teaching at the Columbia Graduate Schhol of Journalism and I decided, yeah, I like this, this is what I want to do. I also decided pretty
quickly after that that New York was not the only place I could do it in. If
you’re going to teach journalism, there are a lot of places to do that - some
of them better places to live than New York.
“The first person I called was Michael. I said, Michael, I think I want to
leave New York. I still want to teach. What do you suggest? Do you [have]
any ideas? And he said,
‘Well, my first idea is to
come out here.’”
As you might imagine,
Terry Anderson has
high standards as a
professor and, in
addition to teaching in
the news sequence,
organizes an annual
student study abroad
program in Lebanon,
with which he has made
his peace, as evidenced
by his CNN documentary,
“Return to the
Lion’s Den.”
While at Ohio
University, Anderson
has done much to
bolster the national
reputation of the E.W.
Scripps School. For
instance, he has invited
to class in person or via
satellite the likes of
network news anchors
Peter Jennings and Tom
Brokaw and former CNN correspondent Peter Arnett, along with a slew of
AP bureau chiefs and journalists. As a professor, he is tough on his students,
who have come to appreciate his journalistic zeal - captured for posterity
in his poetry.
But we are not done with redemption. You will remember I have a son,
Shane, who was not supposed to survive but did and now is a thriving 10-
year-old who hugs Anderson whenever he sees him and calls Madeleine
“grandma” because she speaks with the same mild Mediterranean accent as
my mother, who has passed on. There is more. When our first daughter died
in 1981, and then another daughter a little more than a year later, physicians
recommended that Diane and I adopt. We were not given much hope. Social
workers explained that the typical waiting period for infants was seven
years - ironically the same length of time that Terry Anderson was held
hostage. Would we be held hostage for that long in our own childless hell?
Without much hope, we went through with the application process, part
of which required us to write something about ourselves. Grieving still, I
wrote the adoption application in verse - a children’s book which Diane, a
photojournalism professor at the time and former UPI photographer,
illustrated. We called it, “The Mommy Daddy Book.” It made an impact.
Within months we adopted Erin Marie Bugeja, who attends high school
with Sulome Anderson and who bears the namesake of our firstborn. Erin’s
adoption, along with the miraculous birth of Shane, brought the Bugeja
family back to God and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Last
year, to our delight, the Anderson’s became Lutherans and joined our
church in Athens, Ohio.
Poetry sustains us. It does so because it expresses the highest truths or
reminds us that they are there during our darkest hours, literally or metaphorically
in chains. And we become poets not as fiction and prose writers
do - or journalists, even - to earn a living. Poets do not earn livings.
Sometimes, though, they earn their lives.
Michael J. Bugeja is a journalist, author and educator and is now the director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at
Iowa State University.
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