Pioneers in the Study of Motion

Susan Briante

An author’s statement

When I arrived in Mexico I was stunned, inspired, the victim and benefactor of a strange education. But rendering an experience within another culture offers an anxious challenge. I read chronicles from missionaries, scientists, and poets, from Bartholemé de las Casas to Alexander von Humboldt. All experience became a foreign country. Everything had its guidebook. My sources for Pioneers in the Study of Motion include texts on psychoanalysis from the 1920s, on men’s etiquette from the 1950s, Vladmir Propp’s Morphology of the Folk Tale. Representation fails in terrifyingly beautiful ways. The “Eventual Darling” poems became my extended riff on the poetics of elsewhere, taking their inspiration from visual images: a photograph by Sebastian Salgado, a video by Stephen Dean.

As poets we craft structures of perception, affect, and ideology. I’m most compelled by work that evidences an awareness of this process. I’m no more interested in poems that stem solely from a clever intellectualism, than those that profess a naïve sincerity ignorant of the ethnic, class, or gender positions behind their creation. I’m excited by those poets such as Olson or Williams, who examine the culture they come from (and stand against) through a range of theoretical, emotional, intellectual, and historical lenses. As C.D. Wright explains: “I aim to carry the smoked-ham of my voice to the Beulahland. I do not intend to write as if I had not gotten wind of ‘this here’ or ‘that there’ semiotic theory, regardless of which if any one theory, prevails.”

Regionalism, like notions of nationalism, strike me as extraordinarily cliché. And yet in a time of Internet cafes and Fox News at airport gates, our relationship to our environment seems tenuous at a great cost to our physical, political, and spiritual survival. Most of us don’t know how to name the things around us, because there’s nothing in the market that requires us to have such an awareness. As my friend, the poet Dale Smith, reminded me: just being able to identify the grasses in the alleys can seem like radical knowledge. That feels to me like one of poetry’s strongest imperatives: to provide us with vision and vocabulary.

The poems in this collection may seem to cover an ambitious amount of territory from Antarctica to Kinshasa. But then again so does the scope of our lives. The title comes from an exhibit on the work of photographers, such as Eadweard Muybridge, who first captured animals and humans in motion. There’s something about those series of images that seems apropos of the best poetry. It is a matter of doing more than just freezing a moment but observing it in relation to what comes before and after it, a deeper gaze that allows us to see beyond what the eye can register.