Susan Briante Discusses Poetry That Extends the Document at LARB

For Los Angeles Review of Books, Roberto Tejada interviews press-mate Susan Briante, whose newest book, Defacing the Monument (Noemi Press), turns to "the issue and system of migration in the United States." Briante "sources the desires and politics that undergird documentary works while crafting a cultural critique through literary, visual, and sonic forms," writes Tejada about the hybrid text. From their conversation:

Muriel Rukeyser appears throughout Defacing the Monument. A phrase of hers — that “poetry can extend the document” — is a claim you define and trouble in various passages.

People take that quote “poetry extends the document” to mean we can put documents into our poems. But it’s more than that. It’s one of her most famously quoted phrases, and it appears in a footnote to her series of poems “The Book of the Dead.” The series attempts to recount and contextualize the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, which killed at least 476 miners, mostly African American migrant workers, between 1930 and 1935. Rukeyser goes back to the legal record from a congressional investigation and hearing regarding Union Carbide’s mining practices, which found the company negligent but resulted in very little justice for the workers and their survivors.

The title of my book, Defacing the Monument, references Rukeyser’s poem “West Virginia,” in which she places what happened at Gauley Bridge within a national legacy of racism and economic exploitation. At one point, she evokes John Brown, the abolitionist and leader of a failed attempt to launch an armed liberation movement for enslaved people. She transcribes the words that appear on a plaque dedicated to him…

Find out more at LARB.