The Market Wonders by Susan Briante (review)

Long has the poem been a vehicle for meditation upon the unknown forces that move our Universe. The poetry of Blake and Milton are each extended meditations on the divine. Whitman's, in its distinctly American and secular way, is too. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" always springs to my mind, with its subtle rhyme standing in as formal representation of the hidden-in-plain-sightness of Mystery. The above examples concern themselves with great, capital-letter systems of belief, universal networks that are bigger than each of us, bigger than all of us put together, bigger than the sun and the stars and darkness and light. We may not always understand them, but they are (most of them) in the end benevolent, seats of wisdom, founts of light. All that good shit. Susan Briante's collection, The Market Wonders, is an extended meditation on a system that did not create us but that instead we created, on the very real and often mysterious economic forces that, though invisible and intangible, shape our lives in profound ways. I don't know if God exists, but I know that capitalism does, and I know that it controls my life. No matter how much I might study it, I don't know that I will ever fully understand it. There is no escaping it.

"There are bigger equations, larger alphabets, scripts from which I want to unwrite myself," Briante writes in "Towards a Poetics of the Dow." Throughout the book there is a repeated punning on the Tao/Dow, and early on she evokes the image of the Bodhi tree, whose leaves fell "[w]hen the Buddha touched his finger to the ground at the moment of enlightenment," which is soon replaced by the image of the black walnut tree in the speaker's yard (a kind of photographic negative of the Bodhi tree), which she returns to across several poems. "Ravenous as a black walnut tree," she writes, "roots sucking the sewer line, the Dow touches everything: the taste of our water, color of our sky, torque of our engines." We often speak, Briante notes, as if the market were a sentient thing: reacting to strong or tepid jobs numbers, to environmental catastrophe, to war. The market is a fiction, and the sums and values it represents imaginary, and yet when the market moves it has real consequences: the disappearance of workers' rights, the evaporating of regulation, a still-more precarious existence for all of us who the market does not favor. Much as it is a force in our lives, the market is not a righteous Old Testament God, or benevolent Savior of the New Testament, it isn't even a flawed and capricious Greek god. The Market, as Briante personifies it in "The Market is a Parasite that Looks Like a Nest," is an unthinking, uncritical wielder of power, dissatisfied with middle age, yet unwilling to look inward. He recalls a trip to Mexico just after college, a girl he slept with "he never wrote," streets named for revolutionaries whose names he does not recall. The Market, blind to his own privilege, goes through the world satisfying his needs with no thought for what he might leave behind, with little concern for the world as it is.

The Market Wonders is built around three poem sequences, each a collection of semi-daily responses to the closing number of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In composing each poem, Briante used the Dow's number—almost like throwing the I-Ching in some respects—to guide her to a quotation from Bartlett's, project Guttenberg, Paradise Lost or Leaves of Grass—along with other texts. Those texts then, as Briante describes the process in the "Notes," "exert their influence over a series of poems—sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically—in order to formally mimic the way the closing number of the Dow exerts an influence over our lived experience." The sequences then take on the feeling of daybooks, fluctuating and shifting formally in their response to life in late capitalism...