Mark Nowak : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Author Archive

Thanks to some offline encouragement, I’ve decided to start re-posting my column here at Harriet once a month or so. In my time away, I’ve been penning reviews of new working-class poetry volumes (an extremely critical one of the highly problematic The Way We Work: Contemporary Writings from the American Work Place, edited by Peter Scheckner and M.C. Boyes, for Labor History and another more positive one of You Work Tomorrow: An Anthology of American Labor Poetry, 1929-1941, edited by John Marsh, for the Labor Studies Journal).
And I’ve also been watching the economy plunge further since I last wrote for Harriet, reading of its effects on working people across the globe and trying hard to find new poems that innovatively address the current economic clime and its effects on workers in the U.S. and across the globe.

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01.05.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Mark Nowak

Labor Day Adieu

Several years ago in my essay for a special symposium on Adrienne Rich published in the Virginia Quarterly Review (82:2), I outlined a series of industrial accidents and union/social movement engagements with capital that had all occurred during the week the essay was written: 42 workers trapped in a flooded Chinese coal mine… 600,000 Korean temporary workers launching a strike over working conditions… Aerolinas Argentinas pilots and mechanics ending a successful nine day strike… a strike unfolding in French Polynesia… and much more from Guyanese workers, Jakarta teachers, Kenyan oil workers, Trinidadian employees, anti-globalization protestors in Hong Kong, etc. etc.
The paragraph for this past week would sound eerily similar: a strike by Guyanese sugar workers, 9 coal miners trapped in an illegal mine in China’s Hebei Province; a wave of strikes and sit-ins and labor protests in Iraq’s industrial sector; news of three murdered trade unionists in Colombia in August; the arrest of the secretary general of the Swaziland Federation of Trade Unions. [Note: for those interested in these and related stories, bookmark Labourstart in your browser.] And in the upcoming week, here in USAmerica alone, with Gustav nearing New Orleans and the RNC protest marches here in St. Paul tomorrow, what will the news bring?
And what will the reportedly “news that stays news” bring?

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08.31.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Mark Nowak

“The Republicans are coming! The Republicans are coming!”

2.86 miles.
According to Mapquest.com, that’s the distance from my front door to the barricades outside the entrance to the Republican National Convention, which opens on Monday at the Xcel Energy Center here in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
On Labor Day no less.
Four years ago, when we as a nation supposedly democratically decided that four more years of Bush2 was the way to go, James Bowman, a resident scholar at the right wing Ethics and Public Policy Center, was so captivated by a line in Georgia Sen. Zell Miller’s speech at the 2004 convention that he decided to pen a poem a day from the RNC at MSG (or maybe his room at the Four Points Sheraton). Here’s a stanza to whet your whistle:

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08.29.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Mark Nowak

Fences, Workers’ Theatre, & the CPT(s)

One of the unadulterated joys of living in the Twin Cities is the presence of the Penumbra Theater just a few blocks down the road from my house. Founded in 1976 by director Lou Bellamy, Penumbra has embarked on a five year project to stage each play in August Wilson’s 20th century magnum opus—which is, as many of you may know, a bringing home of the native Pittsburgh playwright, who lived in St. Paul from 1978 to 1990 and wrote a good portion of his 10-play cycle here. And as Chuck Smith, resident director at the Goodman Theater, recently said, “If you want to see an August Wilson play done right you’ve got to go to Penumbra. Those guys know him, they know how to speak that language, because they developed it with him.”
Last night while I was at the Bellamy/Penumbra preview of Wilson’s Fences—which runs through late September if you happen to be anywhere near St. Paul—and again this morning while I was rereading sections of the play and thinking about Chuck Smith’s statement, I latched onto the concepts of reciprocities, development, and the dialogism of collective action that have propelled me in the past decade to experiments in articulating poetry to documentary/workers’ theater within transnational social movements.

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08.20.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Mark Nowak

Summer Shorts

As I bask in the humid afternoons of August sipping a mint julep on the shore of Lake Wobegone (ok, I’m actually utterly landlocked in my office, wearing a COSATU t-shirt, sans beverage, but who’s counting), I wanted to celebrate the season of pants at or above the knees (the ones we wear over our briefs… well, most of us) with a few not-so-long takes on several books they probably won’t have in stock at Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery or Skoeglin’s 5 and Dime:

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08.16.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Mark Nowak

Prairie Style: An interview with C.S. Giscombe

csg%20at%20the%20ocean%2C%20summer%2008.jpg
Photo by Katharine E. Wright
Mark: There’s a wonderful anecdote early in June Jordan’s Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood about waiting as a young child for the arrival of a train, that “moaning in the dark,” that “transitory signal from a hidden fire” that “eased its promise into the night.” I seem to be reminded of this Jordan passage every time I read your new writings. The acknowledgements section in your new book, Prairie Style, concludes: “Portions of this poem were written on Amtrak.” And the trains themselves rail their way, so to speak, across the book, particularly in the central (Mid-American?) section, “Inland (…poems about Downstate Illinois),” in works like “Fever” and “A Train at Night” and “Afro-Prairie.” What is it that keeps bringing you back to those modernist machines that roll along on pre-determined tracks?

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08.12.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Mark Nowak

Rêves de poussière (Dreams of Dust)

The following email message appeared in my inbox over the weekend:
OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso (AP) – National radio says at least 31 people have been killed in a mudslide at an unofficial gold mine in Burkina Faso. There are thousands of unofficial, or bush mines, in West Africa. Desperately poor villagers eke out a living, risking their lives to descend deep chutes and then use mercury to force the gold out of the dirt. The mines are especially treacherous during the monsoon season. According to radio reports, the landslide was brought on by heavy rains in a mining village in southwest Burkina Faso. Local authorities are digging for survivors.
The email was sent to me by the United States Mine Rescue Association’s listserv (to which I’ve subscribed for years—which is probably not that surprising to anyone who perused my Harriet post, Poetics (Mine), a few weeks ago). And in my ongoing exploration of Langston Hughes’ interrogative (“What kind of poem/Would you/Make out of that?”), I like to keep tabs on the global extractive industries and especially their toll (Engels called it “social murder”) on working people across the globe.

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08.11.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Mark Nowak

An interview with Phinder Dulai

In one of my earliest posts here at Harriet (on the conference celebrating the retirement of poet, editor, and Japanese-Canadian internment activist Roy Miki, “Tracing the Lines”) I mentioned being introduced by my transnational roommate, Jeff Derksen, to Phinder Dulai and his work. Since May, I’ve had a chance to read both of Phinder’s superb poetry books, Ragas from the Periphery and Basmati Brown: Paths, Passages, Cross and Open (as well as recommend them to several USAmerican readers). Below is part of an online Q&A we’ve been engaged in the past few weeks. Enjoy!
Mark: In your first book, Ragas from the Periphery, you include several poems—such as “The Booth” and “I Work On Your Holy Days”—that directly engage issues of race, labor, and socio-economics in the service sector in direct and unique ways. Can you tell us a bit about these poems and why you felt it necessary to include them in your first collection?

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08.07.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Mark Nowak

I Fought the Law

Gravitating into my book-holding and keyboard-typing fingers of late have been a series of texts that articulate modern and contemporary poetry and poetics to issues of habeas corpus, governmentality, the state (particularly the judicial branch/state-sanctioned executions), and human rights—perhaps not so surprising in a country engaged in ongoing pre-emptive wars. I wanted to say a few words about four items I’ve picked up and put down and picked up again over the past few months.

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08.05.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Mark Nowak

Seeds of Fire

Seeds of Fire: Contemporary Poetry from the Other USA, edited by Jon Andersen, appeared earlier this year from Smokestack Books in Middlesbrough, UK. Mike Alewitz’s stunning mural from the Roosevelt School in New Brunswick, New Jersey (“Temporary Sanity”) graces the cover (and those not familiar with Alewitz’s work should check out Insurgent Images: The Agitprop Murals of Mike Alewitz). Epigraphs from June Jordan and Paul Robeson open the book—so take your cures from there. (And in full disclosure, an excerpt of a verse-play from yours truly appears in the collection.)