In the final days of 2008, I read in the NYTimes about the plight of the auto industry and its effects on Black autoworkers: “By last month [November], nearly 20,000 African-American auto workers had lost jobs, a 13.9 percent decline in employment, since the recession began last December… That compares with a 4.4 percent decline for all workers in manufacturing.” One automobile industry employee is quoted in the article as saying “that when America catches a cold, African-Americans catch the flu.” So to go back to the central lines of one of my favorite poems, Hughes’ “Johannesburg Mines,” “What kind of poem/would you/make out of that?”
A reading I attended several months ago at the Mayday Bookstore in Minneapolis helps flush out the NYTimes article. David Roediger was in town to speak and read from his brilliant new book, How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon. I love Roediger’s work because the poet—either in spirit, voice, and/or text—is never forgotten (Roediger’s essay on Sterling Brown and new labor history, published in New Working Class Studies a few years ago, is one of the finer texts I’ve read on the articulation of poetry and labor). Along with Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness, How Race Survived US History is a must read in these days preceding the inauguration.
I’ve also been reading my way around in the massive recent Nicholas Coles and Janet Zandy edited American Working-Class Literature: An Anthology. Weighing in at nearly 1,000 pages, the volume is a comprehensive take on the field. Coles, editor of the defining 1990s anthology Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Life, and Zandy, author most recently of Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work, have scoured the shelves and archives to produce a volume that will, for the early years of the 21st century, be canonical in literature and labor history classes. My only real beef with the book (besides the fact that they misspelled my name in the bibliography!), which should be familiar to readers of my earlier Harriet columns, is the limitation that’s incurred by the adjective “American.” I’d like to begin to imagine what the volume might be if the defining title were simply “Working-Class Literature: An Anthology.” Can we push beyond the nation-state in our thinking about labor and poetics in order to (re-)envision a poetry (and working-class politics and poetics) that includes, say, Canada and Mexico and the rest of the world? Both in the years prior to this continent becoming these particular “nations” and in the post-NAFTA era of neoliberal globalization (and its potential collapse), how does (or might) poetry address a working world that is not so stringently nation-bound?
Amidst this economic plummet that is obviously both a national crisis and a crisis far beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, this seems a perfect time for poetry and poetics to simultaneously expand as well.

Prior to the impending “free speech zones” we’re sure to encounter tomorrow here in Minne-, I wanted to thank everyone (blog readers, commentators, Harriet administrators, et al) for openly engaging the past three months my mini-essays, book reviews, and waxings & wanings on left-labor poetry and poetics. If nothing else, I hope they show that despite the seeming reluctance of either political party to utter the word class without the qualifier “middle” before it, a vast array of estimable works are regularly being produced that articulate innovative aesthetics to transnational crises produced by neoliberal globalization—crises that overwhelmingly effect most directly the working classes, the working poor, nonregular workers, the unemployed, the informal sector…“the precariat.”
Perhaps I’m not in the majority, but I want even more poetry that brings that news. I want more poetry that reaches out to ethnographic praxis and reportage, that explodes and reconfigures documentary, that emerges from new social and aesthetic relations with the precariat (and from the precariat), that teaches American poetry transnationally and through a vast array of disciplines, that collaborates with everyone from David Harvey to Human Rights Watch… a poetry that works at everything working class, everything precariat, and all the newly emerging meanings of “What Work Is” in the first decades of the twenty-first century.
***
“…people all over the world, and particularly ordinary working people in factories, mines, fields, and offices, are rebelling every day in ways of their own invention. Sometimes their struggles are on a small personal scale. More effectively, they are actions of groups, formal and informal, but always unofficial, organized around their work and their place of work. Always the aim is to regain control over their own conditions of life and their relations with one another. Their strivings, their struggles, their methods have few chroniclers.”
—from Facing Reality

Sing, oh muse, your most heroic ditty.
Republicans convene in New York City.
Where we shall see kick-off their fall campaign.
Giuliani, Schwarzenegger, and McCain…
The legions (no doubt) of Harriet readers interested in exploring Bowman’s “heroic ditties” and leaden rhymes further can head straight to National Public Radio, where soundfiles of Bowman reading his poems are archived.
Thus far, I have received no calls from NPR to poem from St. Paul.

[And if you’re interested in reading more, I’d suggest some the following: Attilio Favorini’s Voicings: Ten Plays from the Documentary Theater, Collete Hyman’s Staging Strikes: Workers Theatre and the American Labor Movement, Gilbert Doho’s People Theater and Grassroots Empowerment in Cameroon, Alan Filewod’s Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada, Kirk Fuoss’ Striking Performances: Performing Strikes…]
What would it mean for the actual nuts and bolts our “poetry” to be developed with others?; to have not so much an audience or readers but collaborators (I like the connotations of compañeros/co-conspirators better) that “know how to speak our language”?; to create “poems” (or some sub- or trans-genre works that are inclusive of the poem in addition to other discourses/disciplines) that are impossible without the participation of others?; to create poetic works, as Bourdieu writes in Firing Back, that “invent a new relationship between researchers [poets?] and social movements,” that refuse to “mistake revolutions in the order of words or texts for revolutions in the order of things…”?
The history of my verse play “Capitalization,” for example, goes like this. Assembled (or mashed up) in 2003, it was first published by a small chaplet series here in the Twin Cities. That same year, it won a project development grant from a Chicago theater, which premiered it on President’s Day (2004). Shortly thereafter, students at a Chicago high school wrote and performed their own versions of “Capitalization.” In 2005, striking airline mechanics and cleaners from Northwest Airlines (AMFA Local 33) asked to have an excerpt of the verse play—on McCarthyism, Reagan’s firing of striking PATCO workers, and English grammar—staged at one of their rallies. The next year, it ran at the Cleveland Public Theater as part of a series leading up to the November elections, with town hall meetings after each performance which linked the central issues of each play to central issues in the election cycle (and, btw, for anyone in and around Cleveland this fall, the CPT’s production of Michael Tisdale’s “Goldstar, Ohio,” which tells the stories of twenty-two Marines from the Brook Park, Ohio based 325 Battalion who lost their lives in Anbar Province, Iraq, should be another important addition to the documentary/testimony tradition).
Left-labor and social movement verse theater received one of its first poetry-world awards when Marjorie Welish selected Rodrigo Toscano’s Collapsible Poetics Theater (CPT) as winner of the National Poetry Series (2007). Fence Books will publish Toscano’s much-anticipated volume this fall. A researcher and labor educator on environmental and safety issues at the Labor Institute in Manhattan, is it that surprising that Toscano’s recent work intricately addresses the laboring body in the spaces (environments, geographies) where language intends to but doesn’t always cohere—where it slips, breathes in something it wasn’t supposed to, falls and gets back up and attempts to coalesce again? CPT opens with “Truax Inimical” (in three parts), “a trans-modern masque for four voices.” Here’s a snippet from the opening pages, which of course we have to imagine simultaneously penned-to-paper and polyvocally-performed:
(1) Scrolling
(4) Pointing
(2) Clicking
(3) Selecting
(1) A refurbished laptop in a crate in the Indian Ocean
(2) A wave-swell five stories high approaching
(3) A decision to bare leeward 45 degrees
(4) A good decision, in the end, MS Word working well enough on 500 MHz / 64MB
Ram, 120 U.S. dollars + no charge (ground-rate) shipping
(2) Your weapon of choice…U.S. dollars?
(3) Avec me
(1) Avec ministerial me
(4) Avec ministerial beaucoup flappable me
(3) Bold conception that of Marti’s—why not refurbish it?
(1) Bold conception that of DuBois’—why not ship it?
(4) Bold conception that of Sub-Commandante’s—why not wholesale it?
(2) Bold conception that of Chavez—why not retail it?
(4) We’ve got two pots brewing in the back…
(3) One of them’s good for you…
(2) One of them’s not…
(1) We’ll decide which one you get…
(1-4) WHEN YOU GET HERE!
Toscano’s CPT synchs and sings the body glocal; it places actual individuals into scripted overlays of linguistic slippage, where “(4) We once revered flat surfaces/(1) ¡No mas!” Globalization’s (and moreso, anti-globalization’s) politics, multi-lingualisms, and tongue-in-cheek (are they really?) questions appear throughout:
(3) Bechtel—in Bolivia, tried (but failed) to make collecting rainwater illegal
(4) Life is bluster on the move—for sure
(2) ¡Movimiento a la construcción de bombas poeticas efectivas para explotar la dirección general de Bechtel!
(1) Where do I sign up for a Spanish class?
Toscano’s new work continually makes us ask who’s speaking, to whom, in what intonation, and for what end(s); it highlights the low-lights of the neoliberal agenda in turns sarcastic, sacrosanct, and searing. In an era where the dialectic often seems to be represented by Myspace vs. Facebook social networking, CPT plays the joker in “Zero Friends (ZF) card deck”:
Zero Friends quits Zero Friends steering committee, again.
…
Zero Friends on a surgery table remembering a pretty darn good “us-v.s.-them” poem, again.
Poetics trialogues, radio plays, preludes, minimally staged dialogues, trans-modern masques and anti-masques… Toscano creates genres like a cow creates cheese: imbibing, processing, dispelling, re-processing, borrowing, mixing, amalgamating, aging… the latter in constant collaboration with and in critique of the creative industries’ version of Con-Agra, i.e., “the Poetry world” (with a Capital “P”). Which is, of course, already there in Brecht’s famous re-writing of that most famous dairy-related phrase, “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.”
Such are the fences in the world today—too many of them in too many geographies and keeping too many locked in and too many locked out. The Penumbra, workers’ theater, and the CPT address, in various ways and using various methodologies, the fences to be mended, the fences to be obliterated, the fences never-to-be conceived, and the fences to be bombed (Bansky-style). As a worker of the word amongst fellow workers of the world, these developments give me hope for what may yet rise, rise up.

1.) From Lake Wobegone to Lake Koshkonong
Recently out from the University of Iowa Press, Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, edited by Elizabeth Willis, gathers seventeen new and previously published essays on the Wisconsin poet extraordinaire. Originally composed as talks for what was a marvelous Niedecker centenary celebration (2003) organized by perhaps the most poetry-dedicated people in USAmerica (the staff at Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee), Radical Vernacular includes writings by Peter Quartermain (on Niedecker and Bunting: that reference is for you, Don!), Peter Middleton (on “The British Niedecker”), Anne Waldman (on “Gaps, Silence, Cage, Niedecker”), Jenny Penberthy (on “Writing Lake Superior”), Mary Pinard (on “Niedecker’s Grammar of Flooding”), and others.
2.)”Everybody in the pool!”
Michael Davidson, whose essay “Life by Water: Lorine Niedecker and Critical Regionalism” opens the Radical Vernacular collection, has also recently published a noteworthy new critical volume, Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body. In the opening sentences, Davidson “thick descriptions” the community pool where he takes his morning swim. In this summer of the seemingly omnipresent uber-pools all populated by Michael Phelps, Davidson brings us back to the actual heavily-chlorined water users: one child with cerebral palsy, another who is probably autistic, a women who walks with braces and double canes, two triathaletes with “bodies that are nontraditional by any standard,” a national masters freestyle record holder who is deaf, and the author himself (“wearing a brightly colored earplug in [his] one ‘good’ ear”). The essays that follow articulate a wide array of cultural forms (including film noir, photography, ASL poetry performances, and the verse of Larry Eigner) to disability and social justice.

3.) “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
If you’re down for some summer sonnet reading, let me recommend two titles to take to the Lake Wobegone shoreline (or your neighborhood espresso bar, or your neighborhood bar for that matter…), G. E. Patterson’s To and From and Roger Farr’s Surplus. Tying in with the water images and issues of mobility/immobility above, Patterson notes in an interview posted on the Ahsahta Press website that “[f]or most of my life, each year has been spent in three or four places, in three or four states. Living by water is one constant in a life marked by continual movement.” Divided into four sections (three of which are specific near-water locations: New York Suite, Give or Take, Mulberry Street, and Cape Cod), the sonnets in To and From reinvent the form through Patterson’s use of floating phrases of other poets’ words in a composition by field arrangement above each of the 14-line poems. To give some sense of this, here are the para-phrases that appear, cirrus-like, above the sonnet “A Temporary Spot”: “The road…” George Oppen; “…then becomes continuous…” John Koethke; “…in the distance…” Athol Fugard; “…closest…” Yoko Ono; “…the sea…” Athol Fugard; “…travelled…” e.e.cummings. British Columbia poet Roger Farr has likewise published a series of thirty-five sonnets (and several other serial pieces) in his recent book, Surplus, that, as Jeff Derksen writes, appropriates the sonnet form “to investigate, directly address, and…map to roiling geographies of global capitalism, and its even meaner, sharper toothed offspring, neoliberalism.” [Note: For an excellent review of Surplus, including excerpts from the sonnets, see Derksen’s Simon Fraser University colleague Steve Collis’ Accumulation Strategies.] Perhaps the sonnet is making a comeback? [Cut immediately to LL Cool J response here.].
4.) And finally, an old old school summertime work-related rhyme…
“I’m gonna raise a fuss, I’m gonna raise a holler
About a workin’ all summer just to try to earn a dollar”
(C’mon, poetry people. You gotta love that Eddie Cochran rhyme, circa 1958!)

C.S.: My thanks for your patient reading of my long-winded acknowledgements section. I’d wanted to name Amtrak because my interest in the railroad continues past the romantic images of trains that one sees everywhere, images that the fact of Amtrak is necessarily at odds with. I note of course that Amtrak as a business makes use of (and does spur on) the nostalgia over rail travel—they use it as a selling point. Amtrak wears the mask of some sort of old imagined or imaginary elegance but the mask is rather obviously a tired old mask. The name itself—Amtrak—betrays our worst nominative tendencies: it’s one with Kleenex and Miller Lite.
But part of what I like about the railroad is that at core—behind the mask—it’s not sentimental; it’s a business that’s evolved over the last couple of centuries and it still uses the same physical superstructure. The railroad business is continuous. The Rockville Bridge over the Susquehanna at Harrisburg was built in 1902, still used by Amtrak; also in Pennsylvania, the Starrucca Viaduct, over the wide valley of the creek of that name, completed in 1848, still used by the Norfolk Southern; the gorgeous Hell Gate Bridge over the East River, linking Queens and Manhattan, was completed in 1916, still used by Amtrak. Implicit in that list is another thing I like about the railroad—that it’s intimately connected to features of land and water, the stuff that is, the stuff that defines. “Geography’s irreducible in the world, a fact, opaque,” I said once and then, “Railroads describe it.”
And all this stuff is profoundly racial as well—railroads divide and define cities. Note that a tenet of urban sociology is the idea of the “natural boundary”—neighborhoods are created by (and their separateness is maintained by) rivers, hills, etc., but also by railroads, hence the phrase, “wrong side of the tracks.” So a railroad, in town, is itself a natural boundary or has that value or tends to have that value. I’m typing this in my parents’ house on the West Side of Dayton, Ohio, the neighborhood where I grew up, black Dayton—the West Side is and always has been the residential area where the railroads are; the West Side is really several neighborhoods but the tracks and trains brush up against people’s houses over here in black Dayton more than anywhere else in town. This is the vista I became familiar with at an early age, this consciousness is a huge part of my railroad sense.
Mark: Architecture (and its relation to home, to location and dislocation)—from Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Usonian” designs to Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes —plays an increasingly significant role in your new work. What is it about built place and habitation, particularly in the Midwest that is so much the focus of Prairie Style, that allows it to act as both a fulcrum for and metaphor within your poetic practice? And why, as you write in “I-70 between Dayton and East Saint Louis, Westbound Lanes,” is property “a measure of elimination”?
C.S.: For me, habitation has, within it, a whole slew of unsaids and relations. There’s the cultural value of owning your own home (that familiar phrase); and then there’s your house’s “real” value, the ever-changing market value—websites’ll tell you what your place is worth in US dollars. What can I get for it? Well, that depends (as the real estate truism goes) on location, location, location. It depends on the neighborhood, on the place’s proximities and juxtapositions, on its relationship to other human settlement. When you market your house or your apartment you’re also marketing that other human settlement—who are you going to see on the street as you disembark from your new address? At this moment—the moment of this question—the issue of marketability places the human and the habitation on the same level.
And—this in response to your concern with “poetic practice”—I’m thinking of poetry as a gift economy; that is, I’m thinking of the worthlessness (conventionally speaking) of poetry as property. This is, I think, a profound strength that poetry has, its off-the-grid existence. Sometimes I hear ambitious people talking about marketing their poems.
Property as “a measure of elimination”? In an apocalyptic dream I wrote down in the 1980s I saw a slogan printed and nailed to a fencepost: “What you own can be taken from you.” Or, of course, it can just walk off one day. Intellectual property can give you the slip.
Where do we live? And who is this “we”? What’s the range of assumption behind the question? Who’s included? Who’s excluded? Increasingly I’m finding myself interested in range, in how variation takes place over a geographic space—I’m thinking of populations—human and otherwise—and customs and identifications and, God knows, landscape. Much of the “place” of a middle section of this Prairie Style book, the Indianapolis poems, comes from the neighborhood in which I stayed in that city—the Near North Side, with its in-progress gentrification efforts, its influx of whites to the streets of Arts and Crafts houses in which black people live now (or were living in 2000 during my sojourn in Indy). The shape of the range fluctuates and neighborhood—one of the big topics in my head when I look back over Prairie Style—speaks to this, I think. I hope.
Mark: I’ve written earlier here on Harriet about what I called a “NAFTA Superhighway Poetics,” a poetics of vertical mobility across the continent that is not solely an east-west “American” poetry but a north-south North American (or larger) one. This has certainly been (to me) one of the most engaging and inspiring parts of your own expansion of poetics in books like Giscome Road and Into and Out of Dislocation, where particularly British Columbia and Jamaica inhabit and in many ways drive the poetics. Perhaps that’s part of the challenge you’re issuing poets in “Afro-Prairie” when you write, “Everybody wants to be the singer but here’s the continent”? Do we need to be singing beyond the nation-state to larger forms, systems, geographies, et al?
C.S.: I read your question and immediately remember two things: one is hearing Michael Manley talk about the rise of multinational corporations, this at a lecture at Cornell early in the 1980s, the first time the shifting nature (or shifting definition) of nation—and its conflation with big business, long the thing that the gangster films, the film noirs, had been metaphor for—had been brought to my attention. The second event was my own travel to Jamaica in the mid-1990s and meeting people there who told me that Michael Manley was a white man, a Jamaican certainly enough, but white (or and white). Which had not been my understanding as I watched him in that room in Uris Hall.
I see these two events as reminders to me, or signals of my burgeoning understanding that borders are flexible—national ones as well as racial ones. Or that the flexibility and interesting uncertainty that I’d always understood about race was even bigger than I’d imagined and that nation touched it with a limber finger. What’s interesting of course is not the border itself but statements about it, approximations of it, attempts to describe it as well as the way that it’s constructed. I’d wanted to “kit-bash” the book some, to stick what America refers to as “our” southern and northern neighbors (and who is this “we”?) into a writing project about the Midwest. And we’re back again to that focus on neighborhood.
Mark: Your “prairie,” unlike the prairie’s construction in much classic literature and contemporary poetry, contains multitudes. One of the “Prairie Style” poems (62), for example, opens with an epigraph from Emma Lou Thornbrough’s The Negro in Indiana (“…to designate a person with any discernible amount of Negro blood”), moves across the racialized neighborhood (“it starts because of the neighborhood”), and ends with that marker of Capital, “property”. What about the relations between poetry and race and property across the prairie do you want readers to understand or question as they read your new book?
C.S.: I see that poetry, race, property, and geography are not one but form a very rag-tag and uncertain army, one with shifting ranks and alliances. What’s interesting to me here is that it’s possible or even necessary (at least for me) to read each one in the context of the others. This is, of course, not a new thing in the world—when I look back over the book and pause over the poets I quote (Gwendolyn Brooks, William Carlos Williams, Kamau Brathwaite, others) I see the jagged unexpectedness of their work, the big incorporations. I mean here that I see the range and worldliness that their language bangs up against—I address their work with mine. Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture and the Robert Taylor Homes were starting places for me in terms of the book—when I taught in downstate Illinois my black students were eager to let me know that they didn’t come from the Robert Taylor Homes. I admired the long lines of Prairie School architecture. But the Robert Taylor Homes is a horizontal project as well and the two things sit in uneasy juxtaposition in my mind.
I note Thornbrough’s qualifications alongside her cautious definition work. What does it mean to be black? Well, that varies from place to place. Pit this against NAFTA.
Mark: Finally, toward the end of the book there’s a piece titled “Republican National Convention 2000” that seems to have its finger on the “previous” button on the television remote, flipping back and forth between political coverage and Caligula. If your movie-going self could program films to run simultaneously with the 2008 Republican and Democratic conventions, what films would you choose? And why?
C.S.: Watching John McCain on some late-night talk show I found myself thinking of Young Frankenstein. McCain’s wish to distinguish himself from his dear old O.G., George W. Bush, put me in mind of Gene Wilder correcting people as to the pronunciation of the name—“It’s Franken-steen,” he would say. And, as the monster, Peter Boyle’s all id to Wilder’s less-than-completely-in-charge super-ego; the project of the flick is Wilder trying to teach the monster to at least look reasonable, to put on the ritz.
I work a bit with the Frankenstein myth in the book—maybe that’s why it comes so readily to mind here in response to your question about the Republicans. What’s more interesting of course is the transformation of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” itself—danced marvelously by Wilder and Boyle—from its 1920s minstrel beginnings (see Harry Richman’s performance on YouTube) to the 1940s version (the one in the movie) that invites listeners to “Come let’s mix where Rockefellers walk with sticks.” Minstrelsy’s there, the ancestor to American entertainment spectaculars—the rippling flags and dance numbers—and the convention ain’t nothin’ if it ain’t a spectacular.
For the Democrats? The movie on the other channel has to be Night of the Living Dead, the 1968 low-budget flick that’s so smart and so scary and that is still—in my humble opinion—the best integrated movie of all time. I’m sure you know the plotline—young white brother and sister drive out to central Pennsylvania to put flowers on their father’s grave and are set upon by animated corpses desiring to eat them. The woman escapes to a farmhouse and there meets a young black man played by Duane Jones: introduced fifteen minutes into the movie, he fills the screen as the unambiguous and obvious hero, a dashing man in rolled-up sleeves with a plan for survival. Others arrive; much mayhem ensues and there’s humor around media coverage of “the epidemic”; and much irony. Through it all Duane Jones strides like a lawyer from Harvard. He’s resourceful, eloquent and did I mention that he was black? On him—in the big world of the movie—the fraught continuation of fraught civilization depends. The living dead of the title gather outside the barricaded farmhouse. Who are they? Choose your metaphor: terrorists, harbingers of environmental catastrophe, hucksters, brain-dead mall rats, gluttons, anti-intellectuals, the homeless. What’s happening in the little neighborhood inside the farmhouse? Inside you get the depiction and performance of tremendous argument, not much sex. If you’ve seen the film, try not to think about the way it ends.

Enter Laurent Salgues’ stunning film Rêves de poussière (Dreams of Dust), which eerily also arrived in my mailbox this weekend and which I had an opportunity to watch both late last night and again early this morning with the news from Ouagadougou still fresh in my head and in my heart. Rêves de poussière opens in a barren geography of Burkina Faso seemingly ablaze in orange tones—long, slow establishing shots that will frame the arid, arduous landscape of the next ninety minutes of (mostly global Northern) viewers lives. Slowly, individuals begin to appear as if prairie dogs, poking their skulls, torsos, and finally their entire selves from holes dug forty meters into the earth. Welcome to mining conditions in much of Africa (and elsewhere across the globe) nearly one hundred years after “Johannesburg Mines.”
The narrative of Salgues’ measured and carefully-unfurling film traces a moment in the life story of a Nigerian migrant worker named Mocktar who arrives in a gold mining camp in Burkina Faso looking for a survival wage. The conditions at the camp are rudimentary and hauntingly familiar to those you’d read about in American mining towns in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Workers pound rocks usually absent of the precious mineral with pestle, mortar and muscle; mine guards secure the camp by searching the belongings of each person who enters and departs (like our own airports in this age of permanent suspicion and surveillence); beer and Fanta soda (orange, of course) are available—only at the mining-company controlled outdoor canteen; and the working conditions are nothing short of utter physical, psychological, and social brutality.
What kind of poem
Would you
Make out of that?
Salgues constructs a work of creative expression that—if we place it in conversation with, say, Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead and Hughes’ “Johannesburg Mines” and the mining photographs of Sebastião Salgado and Milton Rogovin or any of the other works I mentioned in my previous post—articulates yet another node in the aesthetic, the social, and the ethical under not nearly late enough capitalism. As we follow Mocktar forty meters deep into the desert foxhole that is his crews’ mine shaft and from which he later emerges at the point of collapse from lack of oxygen, into the physician’s office after he crushes his thigh with his pestle (this after his employer shouts “The Nigerian is going to put me out of business!” to speed up his work on this miniscule moment in the global production line); as we learn of Mocktar’s tragedy-laden past, meet the mining-widow Coumba and her daughter Mariama who will briefly become an eternity in Mocktar’s ever so brief present, and peek at the absences that will likely saturate Mocktar’s laborious future, we begin to imagine that space where the first person singular meets the first person plural on the global scale, that space—(as I wrote in “Poetics (Mine)”), the simultaneously past and present and future, that quasi-(anti-)-montage-temporality that poems [and films] somehow so powerfully and so often produce)—where we are permitted to read the news this weekend from Ouagadougou and know “at least 31 people have been killed” at an even deeper, more individual and hopefully more collective, global, human level.
In a (poetic) word: Rêves de poussière (Dreams of Dust) is, as Langston Hughes asked, one kind of (cinematic) “poem” I would hope to be made out of that.

Phinder: I wrote Ragas while working as a parking lot attendant. In fact the whole Ms. was written during my late evening shifts. During that time I attended university in Vancouver and was part of an ad hoc network of culturally diverse writers interested in advocating around themes and issues of race, identity and class and the lack of inclusion in Canada’s literary, publishing and poetry circles. My friend Sadhu Binning introduced me to his work poetry about his life as a Canada Post employee and introduced me to a larger body of work around this emergent genre. What I read adhered to a communal value of how work contributes to the notion of a healthy self and society. But something important was missing for me in that emergent genre that I felt directly linked to the type of work one did, to one’s race, class and ethnicity. In some ways I felt a kind of co-opting force that would structurally bleach out the space of racialized poetics if I adhered to a pure aesthetic. I began working on a series of poems that placed the subject not within the communal ideal but within the broader power structure and industrial architecture of work; and I wrote about my condition. What I learned from writing Ragas is an emergent poetic around migrancy as a metaphor for a post modern life. As a parallel to that creative process was learning to become a critical thinker. One of the more prescient critical works I was interested in was a translation of the Mikhail Bakhtin’s four essays contained in Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson’s book The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. In some ways, working in small quarters (a parking lot booth) allowed me to write a parallel world of poetic constriction where the immigrant is not rendered as a human, but as part of a industrial asset, so in the poem “The Booth,” I employ the normalized tonality of technical language in listing off the various assets of the booth and then morph the list without losing the tone of that language to make a statement about the placement of the living asset(s). As I write and describe this, I see that the reality of the migrant and the poetry of that reality has not lost relevance in 2008; and more than ever, I think that these themes are even greater in context to the global industrial complex and world we live in.
Mark: The service-sector theme continues in your second collection, Basmati Brown: Paths, Passages, Cross and Open. How would you relate what you state in the introduction to be your larger theme, “Exile,” to a poem like “Dishwasher”?
Phinder: Exile for me speaks to multiple real and imagined spaces with this notion of searching for a way to find home or create home. My work as a poet is to mine them and render them in a broader meta-narrative of how migrancy plays out as part of a human architecture that codifies and articulates prescribed real and societal spaces in which people can settle, live and create notions of home. The blood narrative of my family (I am Punjabi by ethnicity, and my family come from a Sikh faith background) is one that does not begin with some stamp of landing in a new land or a citizenship test. It has a meta-history that links in with other threads, other locales and many submerged themes and motivations for how a family moves over four continents to find a sense of home in one generation. In “Dishwasher,” I create a space in which the reader is provided a perspective of seeing and understanding how a service sector job codifies one into silence; even in the midst of knowing the arbitrarily imposed code, the employee will not speak beyond what is the employment role. I think many are familiar with this idea and probably have seen it and are awkward about even speaking about it. In this context one is exiled from one’s self, the temporary community of employees there in that moment, and exiled from those words that probably many North Americans view as a given.
Mark: The poem “canadian, eh!, or depends on who you ask!” interrogates notions of citizenship, the nation/national, classed travel, eyes that “never saw colour again…” Can you speak to how some of these themes arrive at, develop, morph, and sometimes disappear in your poetic practice? Are they still there in the newer work that you’ve been writing since Basmati Brown came out in 2000? And if so, how has your (poetic) relationship to them changed (if it has)?
Phinder: What I hoped to build through the inner architecture of the poem (Canadian eh!) was to narrow the negative space between the two stories of migration and build a kind of parallel inference: one from Great Britain circa 1965 and India circa 1970. I did this by pulling out the archetypical elements of childhood and young adulthood and anchor them on common threads of human experience and ensuring the vernacular was as common as my experience growing up, through the description of the two generic immigrants in a post WW II world. The aim was to distill the irony that exposed what was a massive gap and unreality of how certain immigrants arrive, settle and grow into a space of home and community, while others spend most of their lives shape shifting into norms that are at best temporary, transitory and provisional, and designed not to inspire acceptance or part of a community, but may seem “normalized.” As a working poet, I try to contain my praxis within the realm of my engagement of, through and within the world I live in; and, in some ways that requires the kind of parallel poetic world that allows for disruption of language, abrupt changes in tone and language, and an obsessive interest in creating a reading experience that is as uncomfortable in the world on the page, as it is the real world that I live in. These approaches continue in the Ms. I have been working on over the years, called Dereliction and Other Poems, and many of the poems indirectly link to the themes linked to marginal spaces.
Mark: Your work quite uniquely mixes more traditional, direct lyricism and lyric observation with linguistic experimentation, code-switching, multiple languages (English, Punjabi). Poems like “Soil of Excess (Tabla Poem)” and “between a sikh temple and the ywca” press these devices in, to me, quite powerful ways. How did this melding of direct lyricism and linguistic experimentation first develop in your work? And what has been the reaction to it in a literary world that often divides precisely into opposite encampments over formal issues such as these?
Phinder: I recall how important it was to perform the “Soil of Excess” poem with Tabla accompaniment; that would enhance the tonal utterances of my word constructions. I recall the lyrical always present in my father’s songs sung at family gatherings which were musical renditions of poems written first. The lyrical has always been part of my learning from studying the British Romantics through to the diffusion of the lyrical in the multifarious musings from modernist poets such as T S Eliot. The approach I have taken and threaded into the work comes from Canada’s west coast poetry communities, and specifically from two life spaces: in the English language, I am and have been inspired by the textual dynamics of writers such as George Bowering, Jeff Derksen, Larissa Lai, Ashok Mathur, Michael Turner and Rita Wong. In the Punjabi language, where the lyrical grows from the roots of the farms that are part of the original landscape of the “homeland,” there is a deep commitment to the lyrical and spiritual, and for the community of writers that grew up with a heavy dose of Indian Socialist Secularism, the lyrical is ever present in their social realism: Sadhu Binning, Ajmer Rode and others come to mind and two South Asian journals on the west coast in the past 15 years: Rungh and Ankur. I see myself not as a purist but really a mongrelized self that continues to learn and thread diverse poetics into the subject and poetics I create; that is a result of growing up in a British post modernist and blighted urban landscape during the 1960s and 70s where many Indian and Carribbean immigrants settled and worked; and it was also the formative years in which writers such as Salman Rushdie began their initial forays into language experimentation, bilingual trope design and magic realism; as well as beginning from activist roots. Growing up in different places and nation states, I find myself collecting the debris of my past and piecing things together to create a semblance of normal. In terms of how the literary world responds; that is complex, just as I am finding that sometimes there are those who support your work, and there are those who would not be too disappointed if my work were to be forgotten or erased out any formal canonical space. I have to admit the diffusion of various forms inspires critical inquiry in the poetry communities I work in. I am also quite comfortable with defending my mongrelized aesthetic. I have been told that my books inspire heated discussions around race and class, in college and university courses; I think that is a good thing.

1,) The Jamail Center for Legal Research at the University of Texas School of Law has made available online, via the journal Legal Studies Forum, Benjamin Watson’s important essay on Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony: The United States (Recitative). Reznikoff’s work has fundamentally shaped my own thinking about poetics, governmentality, and written/spoken discourses (right up there in my book with post-Marat Sade Peter Weiss and everything by Anna Deavere Smith). Watson’s essay breaks a path for legal-literary scholars to engage in the important scholarship yet to be done on Reznikoff’s exacting use of legal cases in each of his 450+ “eyewitness accounts in verse”. Watson’s paper initiates this process and, importantly for future scholars, provides a table of cases (including Reporter Citation, Case Name, and Testimony Citation) in which “Reznikoff’s notes and manuscripts provide enough information to establish links between… cases and poems, which comprise about one-third of the published total.” Here’s a bit of what it looks like in Watson’s appendix:
30 A. 681 (1894) Bodee v. State …..I, 235, 11
33 A. 1017 (1896) Yoders v. Township of Amwell …..I, 172, 1
39 A. 33 (1898) Perret v. Perret …..I, 199, 11
41 A. 1083 (1898) American Tobacco Co. v. Strickling …..I, 238, 2
42 A. 60 (1898) Maryland Steel Co. v. Marney …..I, 244, 11
44 A. 524 (1895) Tyler v. Concord & M.R.R …..I, 248, 2
44 A. 809 (1898) Buch v. Amory Mfg. Co. …..I, 242, 8
2.) While I’ve mentioned the volume before, I just want to add one additional point about Marc Falkoff’s Poems from Guantanamo Bay: The Detainees Speak, which I taught in three unique and distinct classes of students last semester (leading up to a visit to the Twin Cities by Falkoff and Flagg Miller, who translated some of the poems and wrote a fine preface to the book.) Dan Chiasson’s New York Times review speaks volumes to what seems to me to be the unfortunately omnipresent critique of politically-engaged poets/poetry by non-political writers in this country. In fact, I can’t think of a single student (some graduating nurses, some hoping to be future lawyers or social workers or scientists, some even struggling to be poets) who, after reading Falkoff’s book, didn’t bemoan Chiasson’s harshly dismissive review. I mean, would the Times allow a reviewer to use phrases like “ersatz-gangsta patois,” “teenage sonneteer,” and “exactly zero literary interest” in a review of any mainstream, not-outwardly political American poet? Or are the phrases instead more akin to the groupies of one band critiquing another, like when Toto fans and Joy Division fans meet in some alley, circa 1979?
3.) And speaking of newspaper literary reviewers (while still on the subject of legal-literary poetry and poetics), I want to make a shout out to R.D. Pohl, whose work for the Buffalo News over the years has always been crisp, insightful, dedicated, and engaging. Unlike the foxhole critique salvo’d across enemy lines by Chiasson in the Times, Pohl has always been fair-handed to poets and writers from a vast array of aesthetic positions. Here’s just a snippet from his most recent column, “Will Radovan Karadzic’s poetry be admitted as evidence?”: “Before Karadzic was a demagogic, ultra-nationalist Serbian politician, he was a “self-romanticizing macho fantasist” poet whose extreme religious ultra nationalism and “poet-warrior” stance gave him some cachet in the literary world. Prior to and immediately after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, he attended several international writers’ conferences, where he was introduced as “an important anti-Bolshevist voice…” In 2005, New Hampshire based poet Jay Surdukowski–who is also a practicing attorney and scholar in the field of international law–published a legal brief entitled “Is Poetry a War Crime? Reckoning for Radovan Karadzic the Poet Warrior” in the Michigan Journal of International Law. Now that Karadzic is in custody, much attention has been directed to the brief.” Pohl’s article, as always, introduces his newspaper and online readers to unique materials that are unafraid to link the poetic, the political, the legal, the cultural, the moral… I hope my hometown newspaper realizes what a gem they have in R. D. Pohl.
4.) Finally, I want to add a few words about a fantastic new collection just out from Salt Publishing in the UK, Jill McDonough’s Habeas Corpus. A collection of fifty sonnets, each detailing a public execution here in the USA, Habeas Corpus is a stark and startling reminder of just one unfortunate chapter in our democratic history. From the opening “Early 1608: George Kendall” to the closing “May 13, 2005: Michael Ross” (and with everyone from Nat Turner to John Brown to Leon Czolgsz, Sacco & Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, and Timothy McVeigh in between), McDonough’s collection frames USAmerican history from the perspective of the about-to-be-executed. In closing, here’s one sample sonnet, “January 31, 1945: Private Eddie D. Slovik”:
Twelve riflemen with loaded rifles, lined
across from Private Slovik. One of the guns
is loaded with blanks, but they all take aim to find
him in their sights, blindfolded, shocked in the sun.
The priest has pinned a target to his chest.
Deserter. Coward. He’d written his C.O.
that he was left behind in France, confessed
I’LL RUN AWAY AGAIN IF I HAVE TO GO
OUT THEIR. The men he deserted thought he’d get
let off with prison time, dishonor. When
the twelve heard they’d been picked they never thought
they’d really kill him; they hadn’t killed their own
since ’64, but in ’45 they’d start:
a firing squad, too stunned to hit his heart.

Seeds of Fire assembles together contemporary poetry that does not cower from forging lyric gestures to a “controlled burn” against the agog globalization of the now (and seemingly the next, and the next…). Jayne Cortez’s “Global Inqualities,” for example, chisels the haves together with the have nots: “There’s no food shortage/in the belly of/a minister of agriculture/Chief economic advisors are/addicted to diet pills/…Somebody else is sucking on dehydrated nipples…” Organized labor makes its appearance in poems like Martín Espada’s “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100”; creative critiques of the scientific, the environmental, and “the proletarian seed” come to center stage in Kimiko Hahn’s “Ipomoea purpurea”; poems by Adrian C. Louis and devorah major, E. Ethelbert Miller and Grace Paley, Barbara Kingsolver and Adrienne Rich and Patricia Smith and a host of others protest and prophesize and, in every instance, poeticize across the compact and contentious 175pgs from “the Other USA.” Imagine a lineage extending across Tillie Olsen and Sterling Brown and Thomas McGrath and you’ll be at the edges of the aesthetic geography that this volume seeks to extend.
And for those of you in the New York area, several contributors will be reading from the volume at the Bowery Poetry Club on August 7 at 6pm. Proceeds to benefit the Middle East Children’s Alliance.