Susan Briante

I am on sabbatical. I began these responses at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Moulin-a-Nef residency in Auvillar, France. That was my studio.

Readings

A book of poetry that was important to you when you were starting out as a poet and how has that shifted or remained constant for you over time

C. D. Wright, Tremble (Ecco Press, 1997)

C. D Wright’s Tremble, a book I received as a gift from the poet and friend Jen/Eleana Hofer, when I was living in Mexico City in the 1990s. I had not yet done an MFA. My knowledge of contemporary poetry was limited, and Tremble was like nothing I had ever seen before. It changed what I thought was possible in the poem. C. D.’s work became a standard and inspired me to consider how I could also push the traditional limits of the lyric by writing about things like the stock market (The Market Wonders) or abandoned buildings (Utopia Minus).

When I return to Tremble, as I often do, it’s like listening to an album I once played on repeat. Of course, the poems continue to astonish with their sensuality, incredible imagery, and surprising diction: Wright’s legacy across books. But the poems take me back to a time in my life when I had just gone through a big breakup and was staggering through a series of rebounds. Everything felt charged with grief and desire like a magnolia tree in the rain or the tree on the cover of the stunning first edition of Tremble.

Looking at my work, especially my most recent work, you can see the links between C. D. and I as practitioners of documentary poetics. But her lyrics trained my eye and the ear to an ever-expanding range of possibility in language and image. I continue to be a student of Wright’s work.

The first poem you remember loving (and how you feel about it now)

Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note” (1961)

Amiri Baraka’s “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note” (from the chapbook of the same name, 1961 from Totem Press/Corinth Books, when Baraka was publishing under the name LeRoi Jones). I found the poem in an anthology in the storeroom of the public high school I attended in NJ. I stole that anthology and memorized the poem.

It is dedicated to his daughter, Kellie Jones, and opens with the lines:

Lately, I've become accustomed to the way
The ground opens up and envelopes me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.

In the anthology as I remember it (I lost track of that book a few years ago), the poem is accompanied by a black and white photo of a fire escape. At that time I found the book and the poem, in the mid-1980s, I still had family living in Newark, NJ, which had faced a tremendous loss of tax base because of white flight and wanning federal funds. It was labeled a “failing city” in the media speak of the times. Although written some twenty years before, the poem carried a kind of hopelessness or a narrative of hopelessness that surrounded postindustrial, urban landscapes in the 1970s and 1980s. A feeling that is magnified when the speaker of the poem finds his daughter “. . . on her knees, peeking into/ Her own clasped hands” in an act of prayer, of hope.

When I first read the poem, I think I identified with both father (clear-eyed in his disappointment with the world) and the daughter cusping her small hands in a gesture of hope, which complicates the father’s position. Now the poem summons up tenderness for the child I was, parent I am, and all of the children who deserve better.

Later I would learn that Baraka and I were both born in Newark, NJ. He went to the same high school as my mother. In the 1980s, while there was crime and poverty in cities like Newark, there was also hope. There was art and creativity. And Baraka was working as a poet and community leader helping to create a transformation in Newark. (His son is now the mayor of that city.) Baraka’s activism and poetry (despite the considerable controversy he's stirred up) remain a pedagogy for me and many poets I admire.

A work of fiction

W. G. Sebald, Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New Directions, 1998; originally published in German as Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt, Einchborn, 1995)

When writing my second book, Utopia Minus, I became obsessed with landscape and cultural memory. I was taking tours in my mind. I love falling asleep somewhere over Kansas and waking up on the tarmac in San Francisco. But I also relish the process of taking things mile by mile, word by word, to notice every historical marker, strip mall, roadside curiosity, to savor every preposition, verb, clause. A glimpse from a jet plane like any good fragment can illuminate, but a sentence leads us step by step through the procedures of thought and syntax. W. G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn proposes to take readers on walking tours of the English countryside. But it is journey through syntax, thought and history as well:

In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the country of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work. . . . In retrospect I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralsing horror that had come over me when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place.

Those “traces of destruction” discovered on the walks provide Sebald with a pretext to take his readers on a journey that traverses topics as diverse as a Norwich hospital, the 17th century English author Thomas Browne, Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson,” René Descartes, Borges . . . and that’s just the first chapter. (Ricky Moody, who literally mapped out the topics Sebald takes on with diagrams in an article for The Believer, calls it an example of “prose fiction.”) My book Utopia Minus, also began with a concern for topographies, a kind of tour through those histories—remembered and forgotten in US landscapes. I wanted the poems to start with a fixed place—literally with a building (often abandoned) or some other site in the present—but I wanted to challenge myself as to the intellectual distance I could traverse. It is still something I think about now as I write poems and prose: How far and where can I go? Can I continue to surprise myself? That potential for discovery and surprise is why I keep writing.

Writings

Night Walk Notes August 29, 2023

Smoldering sunset deep into August. I see myself in shadow against it, against a list of dates I to use to explain how I got here. The bats feed. The mesquite rustles. The arroyo stays dry. I type this out on my phone. In my mind there are line breaks like these telephone wires across sunset.

The light runs
like mercury I can’t keep
up with it

I am not fast. I am not whole. I’m walking slow as dusk weighs me down. These suburban streets hum with air conditioners, will be our end. We are all writing the same poem. And the poem says: Please tell me how to make it stop. I keep walking

towards sunset. Stars stagger out and don’t do anything. There’s a queen. There’s a node. Two hawks patrol the neighborhood trees. We are all writing the same poem, and the poem says: the ground is so uneven. This suburban street curls back on itself. What do I sound like when I talk about it? January 6, September 11, the day the levees broke in New Orleans and the National Guard began shooting. That’s just the start. I’m watching Scorpio watch you. What do I sound like when I try to explain how the stars refuse? We are all writing the same poem, and it says: I’m walking into the dry of the wash where things hide. There’s some other kind of knowledge I’m supposed to use. Tents billow along the parkway. People camp in the arroyo. There’s a boarded-up house that no one can buy.

Susan Briante is the author most recently of Defacing the Monument (Noemi Press 2020), a series of essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics and the state, winner of the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism in 2021. In addition, she is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Market Wonders, (Ahsahta 2016/Kriller74 2023, bilingual edition). She is a full professor in the creative writing program at the University of Arizona, where she directs the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program. Her next book 13 Questions for the Next Economy: Poems, Prose and Pedagogies is forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2025.