May Day May 1, 2011: I was going to write a post this month on Alfred Temba Qabula, the great South African worker-poet whose Collected Writings I’ve been trying to get published here in the States for several years; I was going to tell people to read the Poetic Labor Project blog; I was going to say more on Tillie Olsen's "I Want You Women Up North To Know" [...] by Mark Nowak

Workers Across the Americas April 27, 2011: Several times this month, fellow Harietteers have posted wonderful lists of books they’ve been reading, catalogs of their poetry bookshelves, overviews of new poetry volumes, histories of their late modernist avant garde archival projects, and the like. Probably not so surprising to those who read my posts, my own reading patterns tend to drift [...] by Mark Nowak

Poets’ Strike (version 2.0) April 24, 2011: A few days ago, Eileen Myles posted – first through Facebook and then here on Harriet – a general call for a poets’ strike on International Workers Day (May Day). I have to confess that, while I love the trajectory of Eileen’s idea, I have my doubts. About a decade ago, I founded a small Marxist organization in the CLR [...] by Mark Nowak

New Labor Journalism and the Poets April 15, 2011: Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to spend a few days in conversations with several prominent younger labor journalists at events at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor in DC and at the school where I teach in Maryland. The journalists included Kari Lydersen, a regular columnist for the In Theses Times labor blog [...] by Mark Nowak

“Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of…”: On Wisconsin, Michigan, and the most famous question in the USA April 3, 2011: About a decade ago when I was researching Ronald Reagan for my verse play about the 40th President of the United States firing striking PATCO workers (“Capitalization”), I discovered that the Reagan administration had – like the great cut & paste poets and artists of history and of today – Apple X’d and Apple V’d perhaps the most [...] by Mark Nowak

Conceptual Writing [verb, repeat] and Silence April 29, 2010: I think I’m finally beginning to understand Conceptual Writing thanks to Kenneth Goldsmith, who, in his consecutive posts on 4.27 and 4.28, drives home his point by employing the sentence “Conceptual writing [verb]” something like twenty-five times. As conceptual writing’s (oops, sorry, Conceptual Writing’s) spokesperson, Goldsmith uses [...] by Mark Nowak

Another miner dies in Raleigh County, West Virginia April 24, 2010: At approximately 11:30pm Thursday evening, another coal miner was killed in Raleigh County, West Virginia. Still unnamed, still anonymous in the news reports, the miner was crushed to death, pinned against the coal mine wall by a continuous mining machine. This death, in the same county as the Montcoal disaster that killed 29 miners in Raleigh [...] by Mark Nowak

Documentary Poetics April 17, 2010: Yesterday afternoon, Juliana Spahr and I spoke at a graduate student symposium on “Documentary Poetry and the Long Poem” at the University of Utah. The students, primarily from Paisley Rekdal’s class on the subject, presented their own dynamic “documentary” projects on topics ranging from labor and LGBT politics to Appalachia and [...] by Mark Nowak

25 miners killed in West Virginia coal mine blast April 6, 2010: For the past several years – since the Sago mine disaster on January 2, 2006, to be precise – I have been closely tracking the global mining industries and their horrific record on worker safety. About this time last year, when my book Coal Mountain Elementary was published, I began a blog that updates disasters such as the one that devastated [...] by Mark Nowak

Lumière, Redux (Redux) April 4, 2010: In response to Nick Twemlow’s recent post on the Lumière and Company project and his comments on “constraint-based methods” of composition, I wanted to pose a foil -- or perhaps alternative -- to his conceptual poetry analogy. While projects based on constraint-based methods are certainly in vogue – from the Whitney to later this week at [...] by Mark Nowak