The Market Wonders
The Market Wonders
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In Revelations the angel commands John the Divine Rise and measure! And thus begins
- Briante will read from “The Market Wonders,” a lyric investigation into the stock market, and talk about its writing as a response to the 2008 financial crisis. She will also discuss the ways in which poetry offers models for understanding lived experience under neoliberalism as well as for tracking possibilities of individual complicity and resistance.
- Aug 30, 2016 I met Susan Briante at a poetry reading recently. It was her reading, from her book of poems The Market Wonders, in particular. I had a sense that I could learn quite a bit from talking with her. A poetry book about The Dow, and market values, and human values? How could I resist reading and Continue reading 'Book Review: The Market Wonders by Susan Briante'.
a prophecy a litany of calculations 40 and 2 months 2 witnesses 200 and 3-score days
2 olive trees 2 candlesticks in a singe of data John like a physicist scavenges for God 3.5 days,
4 and 20 elders, 12 stars, for the prophets to measure is to signify and separate “Rise and measure
the temple of God” they told him “but do not measure the court outside” something or some-1
is always left out 7 heads, 10 horns, 7 crowns accounting is frequently an exercise of power
(we ticker we financial officer) as in the story of the Samurai who falsely accuses his servant
Okiku of stealing 1 of his 10 delft plates his words spreadsheet she inventories 1 2 3 must be
4 5 6 mistaken 7 8 9 counts again her master will spare her if she fucks him an equation
she refuses he throws her down a well a well is a chamber of calculations an ear
a labyrinth of bone a darkness so seldom our habitat whence Okiku endlessly counts 1 2
my genre is cross-cultural 3 4 epic ticker 5 6 and genres fall 7 8 from office buildings 9
Okiku screams like mid-level managers in the 1930s equations spool through us pool storm
Market Fresh Foods
drains confirm the season in Revelations the angel never specifies standard or index or weather
a portfolio of catastrophe spirals round in times of stress as before a fall or angel or robbery
we see in hyper-reality innumerable pixels (my god my 401K my billfold) at gunpoint
in the backseat of my airport taxi my epic is national precarity the poet said his mind burned
with numbers—arithmomania—John’s angel commanded Measure! gunman barked Give me
your walletor I’ll fucking kill you! to submit to another’s accounting is to surrender is to actuary
in a taxi where I hand over my money (so financial adviser so market crashed) not counting
The Market Wonders Of England
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The Market Wonders Book
Susan Briante is the author of Pioneers in the Study of Motion (2007) and Utopia Minus (2011). For her forthcoming collection, The Market Wonders, Briante started recording the closing number of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. She let those numbers randomly guide her to texts: plugging them into Project Gutenberg, Bartlett’s quotations, online versions of Paradise Lost and Leaves of Grass as well as various search engines. She allowed those texts to exert their influence over a series of poems (sometimes very directly, sometimes more subtly) much in the same way the closing number of the Dow exerts an influence over our lives.
The Market Wonders