Photo courtesy of Bear Guerra
Susan Briante is the author most recently of Defacing the Monument, a series of essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics, and the state. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona, where she also serves as co-coordinator of the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program. The program brings MFA students to the U.S.-Mexico border to engage in reciprocal research projects with community-based environmental and social justice groups.
Brendan Allen: I want to start with Defacing the Monument and read a short section that comes near the end, in which you write:
We need a kind of negative capability to deal with the present moment: to see the present as another coordinate in a long history of racist, misogynist and capitalist oppression, without allowing the continued separation of families at our borders, the assault on women’s rights (reproductive and otherwise), assaults on the rights of the LGBTQ+ community and their rights, the criminalization of nonwhite bodies, the criminalization of poverty, the continued destruction of our environment — to become any more normalized than they already are.
How do you see your work and your role as a poet in relation to the present moment?
Susan Briante: I think the quote suggests, on one hand, that we cannot let the current assaults on human rights writ large become normalized; we can’t be desensitized to them. However, we also can’t consider them exceptional. They are part of a long history. I hope the quote is a practical starting point for the current moment. In terms of myself as a poet or writer, I think my best self (which is not always the one that comes to the page) and the self out of which I write with the most freedom sees this book, sees everything I write, as one chapter, segment, installation in a totality of everything that’s being written at this moment. There’s something vitally anti-capitalist about this perspective. I hope my book contributes to that totality in a useful way.
I talk to students a lot about this, so we may have talked a little about it when we met: under capitalism art is a product. And the way in which creative writing is being taught at universities is focused on the individual and on the individual product. (“You have to turn your thesis in.”) These kinds of market imperatives put a lot of pressure on us as individuals, and I think they also put limits on our creativity and intellectual possibilities. It thwarts collaboration, frankly. So I made a very conscious effort in Defacing the Monument to continuously point to other writers who were doing work that helped me address some of the questions coming up in my own writing. In thinking through these issues, I wanted to help other artists and writers. I wanted to show a range of responses and set out some possibilities that might be useful to writers grappling with the same issues.
BA: One thing that strikes me in reading Defacing the Monument — in the present moment of early 2021 — is its sheer contemporary nearness. The book incorporates more and more documentation up until the very moment of publication. By my read, there’s sections taking place as recently as July 2019, such as your visit to the Kino Border Initiative’s Migrant Aid Center. How did you decide when your project was complete? Or, if it’s complete?
SB: This was an in-process exploration of events that were happening and changing at the U.S.-Mexico border. I wanted to situate them within these larger inquiries: How do we witness? How do we write about social justice issues? How do we write about a crisis that doesn’t impact us directly, but that we’re implicated in?
I was trained as a journalist, but this wasn’t an act of journalism. There are, just in Tucson, any number of writers who’ve done amazing, in-depth work to cover and uncover the situation on the border, and that’s not what this book was intended to do. However, it was important to document my interactions with what was happening on the border, in real time, as an example of the kind of situation and issues that other writers and artists might encounter. The impulse to bring in other voices, to include pages from other books within this book, and the idea of asking questions, and then literally leaving spaces for readers to write back were about trying to model examples and opportunities. My goal isn’t to provide the reader with solutions, but a range of possibilities, as well as a range of questions they might ask themselves within a project. It is a book that is written for other writers and other artists who want to engage with social justice issues in one way or another.
BA: Defacing the Monument also contains a number of pedagogical sections, formatted as fill-in-the-blank, workbook-like structures. You ask the reader such questions as, “How can the poet stand as witness or court stenographer?” and “How can the documentarian in a courthouse, in a desert, bring a flood?” These sections include actual blank lines on the page, where a reader might write their own answer. How do you see the form of these pages relating to the reader’s participation — and overall role — in the book?
SB: This book sprung out of conversations with Noemi Press’ publisher, Carmen Giménez Smith, who knew about my work, knew about my interest in documentary poetics, and who thought I should write for the Infidel Poetics Series. If you are familiar with some of the other books in this series, there’s this experimental quality to all of them. And we talked about the fact that all three of my books of poetry have a slant relationship to documentary poetic practices. I’ve taught documentary poetics. I’ve been on a handful of what seems like an ever-increasing number of panels on documentary poetics. And yet, there wasn’t a book about documentary poetry. There were many books written from or through this genre, but there wasn’t one book that took a critical look at these practices. So we were aware that we could make a book that might be useful for some folks teaching documentary poetics.
The workbook aspect of it was a very conscious gesture. I knew that if I was going to write a book that delineates the limits of the archive, I had to be aware that the book itself is an archive. If I’m going to write a book that encourages writers and thinkers to contest, to write into, to deface an archive or a monument, the book itself needed to be porous, or needed to welcome that same kind of defacement. I love the idea of this book getting written on and into. I would like nothing more than for anyone who reads and writes into the book to send me images of the pages that they’ve written into. Then I’ll know the book is fulfilling its mission. It’s meant to provoke questions, thoughts, and, hopefully, a continued conversation or continued ways of thinking about the issues that I was trying to confront.
BA: As a current MFA student, I feel very steeped in the genre of documentary poetry — it’s a significant component of both my coursework and own writing experiments. But when I step outside of the critical field of poetry, I feel that there’s actually a general lack of awareness about documentary poetry as a form.
SB: I am usually not interested in debates around genre. In other words, it’s not like, “Oh, if it’s this tall, and this wide, and if you stick the little litmus paper in it and it turns pink, then it’s a documentary poem — or even a poem.” Any genre, or even a sub-genre like documentary poetics, activates a legacy.
If I say my book, The Market Wonders, has a slant relationship to documentary poetics, and I mention a writer like Bernadette Mayer in the book, I’m trying to point to an inheritance or connection. Midwinter Day isn’t documentary in a socially-engaged, poetics way, right? It doesn’t report on or act as witness to something outside of the author’s experience, something that represents a kind of crisis, tragedy, disaster. But [Midwinter Day] completely borrows from the tools of documentary. It’s like an auto-ethnography in this broader notion of documentary. And so, when I drop Bernadette Mayer into The Market Wonders, I want people to think of my recording of the daily closing number of the Dow and of the things I saw or experienced on corresponding days in conversation with, and influenced by, a book like Midwinter Day.
I’m interested in teaching documentary poetics because it offers students a variety of possible ways to confront the situations that they face, the aesthetic questions that they have. It might be useful in helping them do what they want to do on the page. But I also want a very big and breezy definition of what counts as documentary poetics. We have to constantly be thinking about different kinds of archives. The books that are most interesting to me are those that begin with a central premise and then push against that premise in some way. I teach and reference The Book of Jon by Eleni Sikelianos a lot. The book is a portrait of the author’s father and their relationship, written after his death. It has very “documentary” moments in which it chronicles and catalogues. And then it has lists of dreams that family members had about the father; other sections that are clearly imagined. So it’s pulling from this tangible material archive and another kind of information we don’t often think about in terms of the archive or the document. And that’s really interesting to me.
BA: There’s a thread that I’ve encountered in Utopia Minus, The Market Wonders, and Defacing the Monument: your own role within a family feels present in each of these books. In Defacing the Monument, there is the inclusion of the immigration papers of Anna Briante [Susan Briante’s great-grandmother]. And in The Market Wonders, the acquisition of appropriate familial housing is a large undercurrent. What is the relationship between your documentation of daily familial life and your critique of its surrounding systems?
SB: In their writing on Marxism and the public sphere, critics Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge argue that a market economy depends upon the denial of “lived experience.” I do think that there is something vital and defiant about cataloguing individual personal experience as a data point that can be really useful when trying to confront these systems like capitalism.
That being said, there’s also a caution especially for white writers — and certainly white writers who have middle-class privilege — that’s really important. The stronghold of white supremacy in literature created a situation in which whiteness has been overrepresented. Whiteness has been given a lot of space. White narratives have also been held up as “universal” and used to erase the experiences of others. So, if I use my familiar — the quotidian — as a data point, I need to put a metaphorical asterisk by it, to suggest that while this is my experience, it’s not going to be the experience of other folks. There’s all kinds of factors that change the way we experience life in United States to which we as writers need to be accountable.
BA: In Defacing the Monument, there is a section in which you cite the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s “Asylum” webpage. In one of your notes, you mention that Homeland Security specifically revised this webpage over the course of you writing the book. How can poets respond to the fluidity of shifting documents, if the revision of those documents is always possible?
SB: I think we have to relinquish the desire to be experts, to be masters. In some ways, it’s an anti-colonial gesture (of which we need many more, I don’t want to make it sound overly grand). I’m thinking of this in terms of this wonderful essay by Kristen Prevallet, “Writing is Never by Itself Alone: Six Mini-Essays on Relational Investigational Poetics,” published in 2003 in Fence. She writes about Charles Olson’s use of historical documents and information. The critique that Prevallet offers — which I think is spot on — is that Olson is incorporating information to master it, to use it in service of his arguments.
So how do we incorporate information, understanding it’s always relational, fluid, and subject to later reinterpretation? I think that learning how to do that as writers, that gesturing to a provisional nature, that gesturing toward, “this is one voice of many, one possibility of many,” is important. Even if we take the most intimate details about our lives — we’re constantly shifting our narrations of things. Solidifying some things, but bringing other information in and reconceptualizing others. There’s a way in which it’s more natural — and I think it’s also important — to allow our books, and the information within them, to continue to be in dialogue with other texts and to point to their own provisional nature.
BA: I read Utopia Minus back in 2011, which was my initial encounter with your work. I remember reading it for the first time and being enraptured with the book’s environment: the Dallas area, the highways, the strip malls, and the urban detritus that’s both beautiful and destructive. Environmentally speaking, how do your immediate surroundings inform your practice as a poet?
BS: I just got back from a couple of days in the mountains, just south of here in Madera Canyon. We were in a cabin there for a couple days. It was beautiful. Our family tends to go with this group of other families we’ve become friends with through our daughter. Two of the parents were trained as wildlife biologists. When I’m with them, I think things like, “I’m going to sell this house, go to the mountains, and learn the names of everything.” I think this is maybe one of the roots for my interest in documentary. When we can simply name what’s around us, we acknowledge the reality of our everyday, material lives. And I believe that it allows us to trace both the way our lives and experiences intersect and differ from those of others.
There’s nothing in capitalism that wants me to know the name of that plant in my backyard. Capitalism wants me to know myself as… well… as my ten-year-old daughter just said to me: “We’re a Marvel family. We’re not DC.” And I’m like, “Yes, I love Marvel comics. We’ve watched the whole series over the pandemic. But you know, we need to be malleable…” And she wasn’t hearing it.
Capitalism wants me to be marketable, to identify myself as a brand. “I’m Coke, not Pepsi.” It doesn’t really care whether or not I could tell you, “That’s lantana growing in my backyard.” So there’s something that feels defiant and important about being able to understand my environment, to allow my environment to consist of more than thoroughfares to consumption. That feels related to the documentary impulse. There’s just something about naming that feels documentary, in and of itself.
BA: I just have one last question, and maybe this is slightly cheating as an interviewer, but —
BS: I don’t think there are rules! [laughter]
BA: Well… It does seem related to the question of environment — in this case, the social environment around the poet. I’m wondering if you would be willing to answer one of your own questions from Defacing the Monument?
BS: I can try — you know, they’re hard questions.
BA: [laughter] So this question is from page seventy-two: “Can the documentarian ask themselves, who do you look to, or like, or for? Describe them?”
BS: I mean, I do think that the book, in its own way, tries to answer those questions. I would like nothing better than to bring every other writer and artist I mention in this book together at a dinner party… And some of them are people I know, like Brandon Shimoda, who gets quoted in the book a couple of times, who lives here in Tucson. And then there are other folks who, I know their work, but I don’t know them personally. They are the people who I look to.
Who do I look like? In the hopes of not re-centering my story or re-centering whiteness, but in the hopes of explaining who I am on the page, I try to include some of that in the book: I’m an ethnic white woman. And you can decide if I bear resemblance to Anna Ceres Briante.
And who do I look for? I think I’m always looking for other artists who fill me with possibility. I’m looking for other artists that surprise me in some way. Sometimes, the surprise is painful recognition. Sometimes, it’s a joyous possibility. Looking at the work of Ana Teresa Fernandez, an artist who “erased” the border wall and whose work appears in Defacing the Monument, I feel beautiful possibility. There are other artists whose work reminds me of how terrible things are, and that’s also important and offers a different kind of possibility for engagement and resistance.
Did I answer my own question for you?
BA: That was wonderful.
BS: Good! Awesome! Did I pass? Did I pass? [laughter]
It’d be interesting to set a reminder for myself, for maybe two years from now, to go back to
those questions. I love being aware of who I’m thinking with. I feel like every book I’ve written has taught me different things. The opportunity and the lessons I got from Defacing the Monument came from the joy of writing in a kind of collaboration with other writers whose work I admire. Collaboration is maybe too big of a word, but to be able to bring them onto the page felt appropriate and useful, and I hope that I’m able to keep doing that in future projects.
