Susan Briante
- University of Arizona Poetry Center, United States of America -
Susan Briante is the author of Defacing the Monument (Noemi Press 2020), essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics and the state, winner of the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism in 2021. In addition, she has written three books of poetry, most recently The Market Wonders. Her work can be found in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Best American Poetry and The Brooklyn Rail (among many other venues) and has been translated into Spanish, Italian, German and Chinese. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona, where she directs the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program, which brings students to the US-Mexico border to collaborate with community-based environmental and social justice groups. Briante’s book 13 Questions for the Next Economy: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2025.
Susan Briante (University of Arizona Poetry Center - USA) participates in the Versopolis USA mobility project, a collaborative initiative between Versopolis and the Formal Consortium of U.S. Universities and Institutions Dedicated to Poetry.
TOWARDS A POETICS OF THE DOW
Every day has a number attached to it. Great additions, subtractions. This is not just an aesthetic problem (see Ashbery). There is a “natural impulse toward the boundedness of closure.” The bell rings, trading stops. But the world is “unfinished” (Hejinian). Both the rivers and their banks are moving. The poem remains incomplete. The trading day long over.
I do not believe if I follow the Dow I will find nirvana, but I often check the numbers, sit for meditation.
Even when we think we are at the end, there are decimals.
When the Buddha touched his finger to ground at the moment of enlightenment, all the leaves fell from the Bodhi tree. It is February 10, 10:04 in the morning, the Dow falls to 12194. The present poetic strives toward total awareness, incessant recording.
Ravenous as a black walnut tree, roots sucking at the sewer line, the Dow touches everything: the taste of our water, color of our sky, torque of our engines. It is February 10, 10:15 in the morning, the Dow at 12203 is rising. The poet—like the trash tree—uses all of it.
A poem moves as does the Dow influenced by a variety of factors and events: mergers, oil spills, revolutions, suffering. Sometimes what does not move tells the story. I like poems that go to prisons and coal mining towns. I like poems that act as archive or a view to Elizabeth Street. I admire circuitry and cosmology. I write with a power industry dictionary on the bookshelf behind my desk, a copy of the King James, a guide to Texas trees.
Poems should evidence some degree of control, but poets should be a little volatile. The poem is a high-risk investment, a long-term commitment. Like a big dirty city, it should make you feel a little uncomfortable.
It is February 10, 1:11 in the afternoon, the Dow falls to 12197. The poet wants to remind the Dow that the bird has something to teach it about falling and song.
The theoretical physicist says, “I’ve always wanted to find the rules that governed everything.”
The theoretical physicist says, “Deep laws emerge.”
I have a friend who asks about “truth” in poetry. Whenever he does, I want to send him a valentine on musty pink paper. He lives in a Mid-Century modern house with Mid-Century modern furniture carefully culled from vintage stores and eBay. He owns an old mahogany stereo cabinet, jacked up so you can listen to an iPod through it.
That’s the kind of truth in which I am interested.
Plus the silence, plus the static.
Charles Olson writes, “no event/is not penetrated, in intersection or collision with, an eternal/event.”
To which I offer this corollary: no event is not penetrated, in intersection or collision with the stock market.
I wish more poets would write about money.
The New York Stock Exchange began when brokers met under a buttonwood tree in 1792, the year that Blake wrote “Song of Liberty,” the year Shelley was born. Charles Dow created the Dow Jones Industrial Average, representing the dollar average of 12 stocks from leading American industries, on May 26, 1896, six days after the U.S. Supreme Court introduced the “separate but equal” doctrine.
Now corporations have the same rights as people. Why can’t poems? I nominate Robert Duncan’s “Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar” for president, Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You” for chairman of the Senate’s foreign relations committee, Gwendolyn Brooks’ “In Montgomery” for attorney general—although the House will not approve it.
Brenda Hillman explains, “Shelley wants you to visit Congress when he writes/a violet in the crucible & when he notes/ imagination is enlarged by a sympathy.”
Bernadette Mayer asks us “to show and possess everything we know because having it all at once is performing a magical service for survival by the use of the mind like memory.”
Blake reminds us, “For everything that lives is Holy!”
And there is this: When you make the poem, you can hear the swish of dollars washing down the sewer line, second by second, you can hear the stock ticker ticking away.
Farid rests in child’s pose on the living room floor. Gianna sleeps in her crib. The Dow closes its eyes. In the park across our street, nothing blooms. Winter grass the color of a lioness. My warrior. My tree.
After the fall of Mubarak, reporters talk to tailors on Cairo streets. They broadcast video of doctors who treated the revolution’s wounded. People write congratulatory notes on their lab coat sleeves.
We love the look of magic marker on white cloth. But no one tells us how much money we’ve sent the dictator over the years. How many more receive our checks? There are bigger equations, larger alphabets, scripts from which I want to unwrite myself.
In 1994, the artist Mark Lombardi began working on a series of spindled drawings that graph relationships between business and government elites, tracing paths of financial meltdowns and mergers, shady deals and convenient bedfellows. The poem, as well, can spin webs.
The archive is wide. The poem accepts yellow leaves, guide stars, a crop failing, my milk coming in.
We need the aerial photograph and microscopic slides as well as something beyond our personal viewfinders. Not a ball and chain of cause and effect, but a tendency toward pattern, implication, investigations of grief and ecstasy.
The artist Mark Lombardi worked in pencil.
The poem and the stock market welcome speculation.
What a drag it is to be among people who fear art because they think it mocks them. The tree is nothing but the tree. Or your mother. Or the nation. Bank of America, Merck, Pfizer. Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen. Rusty backhaw, golden rain tree, 3M, Alcoa, AT&T.
We record noise, interference, outliers, error.
On February 10 the Dow closes up at 12273, poised to snap a winning streak, may fall tomorrow on Cisco. Characters ticker between us. Both the river and its banks are moving. A bird rests at the end of every winter branch plotting its own flight path.
Across the dateline, markets open.
Essay written by Susan Briante
Poetry
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Selected poems /
