Mark Nowak : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Author Archive

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know a thing about Philip Levine’s “poetry eternal.” I don’t even know what I’m going to have today for lunch (aka, “all this temporal crap”). Now the order for how the condiments go on a Wendy’s hamburger (mayonnaise, ketchup, pickles, onions, tomato, lettuce, mustard), that I know. Because there’s certain things you never forget after nearly a decade of practice, something “unforgettable (that’s what you are)” about spending a good portion of your life assembling cars or changing bedpans or typing memos or “manufacturing hamburgers” (remember that great idea from George W., right up there with the Reagan administration’s idea of classifying ketchup as a vegetable in the pre-NCLB school lunches). By the way, is “ketchup as a vegetable” a simile? Mmm, mmm, good…
Likewise, I’d say as far as temporal repetitive jobs go, with making your kid breakfast. Taking out the trash. Feeding the cat and the barking thirteen-week-old puppy (and cleaning up his poop in the yard). OK, maybe this is getting too specifically about my morning. Or is it? Is there something about working, about “everyday life” that scales across many of the divides? (Except, of course, if a nanny or au pair made the kiddo breakfast, the maid or cleaning service took out the trash, the dog walker and/or the lawn crew cleared the dog-done deeds along with the excess leaves of grass.)

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08.01.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Mark Nowak

On Bill Griffiths, Skeptical Militancy, & “Ghost Town”

Back in the early 1980s in the anathema that was Reagan-era Buffalo, “Ghost Town” was as close as it got to our anthem. “This town… is coming like a ghost town… All the clubs have been closed down…” Little did I know then that, across the pond, Bill Griffiths (who I’ve mentioned here before at Harriet in “Poetics (Mine)”) was penning a “skeptical militant” verse about parallel scenarios in Thatcher-era Britain.

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07.29.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Mark Nowak

Rethinking Working-Class Literature

Sonali Perera, an Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers, has published an engaging new essay in this year’s first issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies that dovetails in unique and productive ways with much of what I’ve been writing here for Harriet the past two months. “Rethinking Working-Class Literature: Feminism, Globalization, and Socialist Ethics” performs a detailed comparative analysis of the writings of Tillie Olsen (with particular attention to Yonnondio and the documentary poem “I want you women up north to know”) and the Dabindu (sweat or “drops of sweat”) worker-writers from Sri Lanka’s free trade zones.

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07.25.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Mark Nowak

Samadoon

the ratatat and bomb booming …..calls for the lost
compliantly igniting troubles and provocation
my bull elephant
people sheltering …..engaged ever betrothed
to mucus and weakness …..of all diseases
malaria tuberculosis
they’re led astray by killing’s admirers son of Barre and his lot
in ignorance following …..the mistaken animal haired humans
for my people … ..with wickedness poured into them
i pass you this message …..alliterating in ‘d’
Who was it that said “poetry is news that stays news”? [Rhetorical question alert.] Reading today’s NYTimes article “Somali Killings of Aid Workers Imperil Relief” I remembered Cabdulqaadir Xaaji Cali Axmed’s gabay, “Samadoon”, published several years ago in Modern Poetry in Translation.

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07.20.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Mark Nowak

Chimurenga

Very few literary magazines get me excited when they arrive in the mail. As has probably become more than evident to those reading my blog posts the past six weeks, I’m seeking something decidedly different than many USAmerican poetry journals regularly provide when I crack the spine of that pefect-bound or saddle-stitched or stapled paper object that is newly disembarking from its postal envelope.
Enter Chimurenga, whose new double-issue (no 12/13) arrived in my mailbox from Cape Town, South Africa, a few days ago. Transnationally poetic? Check. Innovatively interdisciplinary? Check. Designed by the gods? Check. Unafraid to simultaneously articulate the aesthetic, the political, the cultural, and the economic? Check(mate).

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07.19.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Mark Nowak

Forage

Several weeks ago in my post on the symposium celebrating the work of poet, editor, scholar, and Japanese-Canadian internment activist Roy Miki, I mentioned that a new book by Rita Wong, Forage, had been awarded the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for the best book by a writer from British Columbia or the Yukon. Since then I’ve been able to re-read Wong’s book, and as with her previous collections Monkey Puzzle and Sybil Unrest (the latter co-authored with Larissa Lai) I am simultaneously aesthetically astonished and socially energized by the articulation of deft and daring cultural production to the politics of social and environmental injustices within and among (simultaneously) the local, national, and transnational scales.
Forage opens with a circular photograph (notes at the back of the book inform the reader of the photograph’s origin, the interior of the Victoria Rice Mills with packaged rice in mats and a Chinese worker in the foreground). On the facing page is a crescent-shaped visual poem that moves the “r” sound through the terms rice, rise, and riven. So hums the poetic politics, in sound and image and poem, in the opening salvo of the book. On the next page, the poem “Value Chain” opens with the questions “how to turn english from a low-context language into a high-context language?” and “what is the context for ‘you people are hard workers’?”, questions to which the remainder of the book will offer a series of possible and varied (poetic) replies.

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07.17.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Mark Nowak

Canon Fodder

Several people have e-mailed me recently to ask where I come across the poems and poets of social movements and organized labor that I’ve been discussing here during my interlude upon Harriet, as well as why these poems and their presumed dubious “aesthetic quality” should matter. Yesterday, as part of another project I’m working on, I revisited Robin D.G. Kelley’s seminal Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class and reread (with Harriet in mind) Kelley’s fifth chapter, “‘Afric’s Sons With Banner Red’: African American Communists and the Politics of Culture, 1919-1934.” The quote that opens his chapter title comes from J. Thompson’s poem “Exhortation,” a Claude McKay-“If We Must Die”-esque piece that Kelley discovered “buried in a barely readable microfilm edition of the Liberator.” In addition to his expansion of Marxism beyond the (white, male) figures most critics seem delimited to invoking in academic literary criticism (and readers interested in exploring further should begin with Cedric J. Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, though it is still unfortunately overwhelmingly masculinist), Kelley’s chapter on Black radicalism, class struggle, and poetry provides a unique and engaging overview of the social poetics and poetries of the era—much of it dug up from microfilms and archives.
One of the poems in the chapter that interested me on a variety of levels was “Southern Organizer” [Note: The periods represent indents, which I can't seem to figure out on Movabale Type]:
…….Badges gleam; they dump the sack
…….Into the water, turn and go.
It is peaceful in the Southland; tomorrow
They will hang and shoot some more
Of ours: but tonight, as all true men
…….with southern blood will tell you.
The possum is abroad, the bloodhounds sleep,
And it is beautiful. Comrades.
…….“Let us do this thing together.
Black man, comrade, we must together.
And he is dead. There is work for living
Men to do. We salute him.
We have no tears for him.”

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07.15.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (69)

Mark Nowak

Poetics (Mine)

I’ve spent more than a decade researching the global extractive industries, in part for a project on the I.W.W.-led 1916 Mesabi Miners’ Strike in northern Minnesota’s Iron Range; in part for a new collaborative book (with Beijing-based photographer Ian Teh) forthcoming early next year from Coffee House Press—Coal Mountain Elementary—on coal mine disasters in Sago, West Virginia, and across China in the early years of this new millennium; and in part simply for the nascent pleasure of the (labor) historian in me. I once even went so far as to develop an entire syllabus for an English Department class on the poetry and cultural poetics of the global mining industry and its culture and the wide array of historical and contemporary works in poetry, music, anthropology, photography, and film that uniquely represent and critique it. Then I realized that maybe not everyone shares my passion for this particular stratum of, well, Notes from Underground.
*
“Johannesburg Mines”
Langston Hughes
In the Johannesburg mines
There are 240,000
Native Africans working.
What kind of poem
Would you
Make out of that?
240,000 natives
Working in the
Johannesburg mines.

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07.13.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Mark Nowak

Left of Karl Marx (Part II)

“On the left is a black woman, determined to articulate political and ideological positions that would contest the boundaries of freedom of speech as defined by American bourgeois democracy. These boundaries, while ostensibly ‘real’ rights such as freedom of the press and habeas corpus nonetheless carry limitations, which keep the individual within the structures that define the modern market economy and the definition of the ideal American citizen. On the right are the institutions of the U.S. government such as the FBI, determined to discipline those rights within its historical project of the rise of capitalist freedom. Thus, while American democracy would seek to position itself as the ideal democracy and as the major exponent of international human rights, challenges to this claim continually emerge internally from a range of cultural and political activists, like Claudia Jones, as well as from the global political movements of decolonization.”
So opens “Piece Work/Peace Work: Self-Construction versus State Repression,” Chapter 6 of Carole Boyce Davies’ Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones, a chapter that uses Jones’ massive, two-volume (nearly 1,000 page) FBI file “as the finished product for the [textual, legal] framing mechanism” of the U.S. Government to “use its already preconceived conclusions as legitimate judicial premises for the indictment of radical political practices.”

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07.10.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (23)

Mark Nowak

Left of Karl Marx (Part I)

As has probably become more than evident to anyone reading my entries thus far on Harriet, I’m interested simultaneously in both Poetry and poetry—that upper case canonized (MLA-ized, Norton-ized, Super-sized!) beast as well as its lower case comrade which I’ll loosely categorize (with a change of preposition) by June Jordan’s phrase “poetry [by] the people.” And within the latter, of particular interest to me is “poetry” produced within transnational social movements and especially transnational social movement unionism.
So Claudia Jones is my kind of people.