[APPLAUSE]
That was amazing.
All right.
Hello, everyone.
Good evening.
That was amazing, Farid.
Thank you.
I'm just buzzing.
In the Western United States, ruins
present themselves both as timely and untimely,
and cultural discourse as materials.
They are often associated with quaint tourist attractions
as metaphor and process.
However, they are timelier than ever
before as they speak to the decay of the American dream
and other myths associated with progress
narratives of Western expansion and Manifest Destiny.
I have always loved the way that Susan Briante's
poetry and critical writing have considered
the ways in which infrastructure underscores social space
and relationality, and how ruins tend
to erase history and inspire myth.
Briante's work is an elegant critique in depth
as we visit places full of holes, landscapes
with no past, an attempt to imagine the ghosts
and structural conditions that haunt those locales that Susan
refers to as settlements--
Newark, Chicago, Tulsa, Guapiles, Mexico City, Miami,
and the I-35 between San Antonio and Austin.
We are here to celebrate Susan Briante, who has gifted us
a new selection of work in 13 Questions for the Next Economy,
gathered in a substantial textual object,
with a reprinting of her first three out-of-print books,
Pioneers in the Study of Motion, Utopia Minus, and The Market
Wonders.
This is good news for the completists among us.
We're here to celebrate the poet who has given us "Mother is
Marxist," "The Eventual Darling,"
and who has asked us to critically tune
in to the heart-dropping, soul-shaking,
rhizomatically-vexing "Aleph," Borges' "Aleph,"
known as "The Market."
Today, an anecdote I share from earlier today,
where it was in the Mexican consulate waiting room, where
I encountered a series of photographs of the Arizona
Mexico borderlands that run through the unceded territory
of the Tohono O'odham Nation, there
was Baboquivari Peak, which always
strikes awe each time my gaze lands on the neck between two
heads--
a holy place that lies on land that I have walked through
in the summer of 2017, on a ride along with humane borders,
on a Saturday long mission to fill water
barrels to help people traveling by foot as they seek out
a chance at an affordable life.
This was a journey made possible by the inaugural Southwest Field
Studies program that launched that year, with Susan Briante
at the helm.
I was one of Susan's students, eager to feel my way through
the geo-, necropolitically fraught landscapes that lie
beyond us not a mere 45 minutes away.
It was the forging of this program that
brought us, the MFA students, close to the material
lived experiences of those caught between life and death
and the policies that dictated each.
These experiences catalyzed Defacing the Monument, one
of the most important contributions
to the field of critical creative writing,
a powerful hybrid text that draws on
primary source, documents of national identity,
immigration juridical proceedings, criticism,
or what I like to call--
it is a poet anarchist cookbook, a book that helped many of us
consider the implications of our positionality
and the ideologies that imbricated
the safety of our privileges, that ignited
a reckoning with the means of representation,
for the old adage of, those who control
the means have the power.
That held us to account when we consider
telling the story of the other, as well as what
it meant to be the other in question
at the helm of that writing.
And for this work and all of the works, and for the poet herself,
I'm grateful.
I'm grateful for you who walks in dreams with us.
Una luchadora para los derechos, para el ajeno:
mi amiga, querida Susan Briante.