Pioneers in the Study of Motion

Susan Briante

An extended bio from the author

Growing up working class in New Jersey, I had no models for how an artist should make a life—let alone become a poet. I majored in journalism at Northwestern University. From this came an appreciation for the documentary, an eye for blessed distraction: a superintendent’s lisp, patterns of ceiling tile. I found myself a “good job” covering school board meetings in suburban Tulsa. The flames from the Sunoco refinery lit up a not-too-distant sky. I lasted about nine months, quit journalism, and left the country for the next seven years.

In Mexico City, I worked as an editor and a translator for the bilingual magazine Artes de México. I read Benjamin and Lyotard on crowded collective buses sitting next to indigenous matrons in their huipiles, schoolboys in navy blue slacks, mestizo administrative assistants, earnest engineers with their English textbooks. NAFTA passed. I learned to recognize birds and trees in Mayan textiles. I labored through long passages on the iconography of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The peso collapsed. I fell in with a poet/scholar/mentor Roberto Tejada and his magazine Mandorla. A ski-masked rebel came down from the mountains of Chiapas on horseback. I started writing poetry.

I completed an MFA at Florida International University. Cesar Vallejo, CD Wright, Vincente Huidobro, Frank O’Hara, Robert Duncan, George Oppen, and Rosmarie Waldrop served as salve and stimulant. I went to Austin where I pursued an MA in Comparative Literature at the University of Texas. I moved to New York City in the summer of 2001. The towers fell. We wheatpasted Celan and HD on the bus stops and telephone booths of SOHO. For a year, I taught ESL and subletted my way through Williamsburg and the East Village. In 2002, I returned to Austin to work on a PhD. You can still find me there many days writing essays about half-built hotels, Civil War monuments, amusement park ruins. You can find me making poems at the Spider House café. I earn a living as an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Dallas.

I tell my students that writing a poem is an act of political resistance. I worry that I have not yet had a baby; I check the prices on flights to Paris; I ride the light rail to work. On a good evening, I drink a tequila or two over ice on my porch and watch the grackles percolate through the scrub oaks.