Utopia Minus

Susan Briante

An extended bio from the author

I was born in Newark, NJ, the winter after the riots. Sometimes I imagine my pregnant mother that summer sitting at her kitchen table, listening to news on the radio, while the city sparked and burned. In December of my birth, Robert Smithson published “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey.”

My family followed the tide of white flight to a split-level in the suburbs. But almost every week for much of my childhood we’d visit my grandparents on Newark’s Highland Ave. We did not know how to speak the Spanish of the neighborhood kids. We were not allowed to play off of the porch. We learned very quickly that we were half a generation and a 20-minute car ride from the inner city’s working class. Somewhere there’s an equation for the debt that formed.

The first poem that referenced a world I could recognize was Nikki Giovanni’s “Song for New-Ark.” I stole a beat-up copy of Sound and Sense and an anthology called Twentieth Century Poetry from a storage closet in my high school. The latter had a “groovy” manipulated image of a vase or gourd in red and magenta on the cover and black white photographs throughout. It also had Robert Creeley and Amiri Baraka (then writing as LeRoi Jones) within its pages. Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note was another first love. Years later I found out that my mom went to high school with Amiri Baraka. And I found those other New Jersey poets who would inspire me: Whitman, Williams, Ginsberg, Smithson.

In all our discussions about poetry, class comes up very infrequently. Now more than ever, we need to articulate our place in this flailing system. Claiming working class roots isn’t about claiming victimhood. The view to roof-top air conditioning units from my office at a public university is still a view from the heights. But we need to understand both our privilege and lack in order forge the compassion and community we’ll need to survive in a world of potentially dwindling resources and waning national power.

Here’s where the poem comes into play. I harbor no illusions about poetry’s ability to feed the hungry or sway an election. And yet the lyric is a space of thoughtful speculation, a call for action or witnessing, a place where imagining can become an act of deep sympathy, where we might recognize connections and complicities.