Forms of Affiliation in Mark Nowak's Coal Mountain Elementary

A poem is not about; it is out of and to.

Adrienne Rich, "Permeable Membrane"

Stephen Burt, discussing the documentary poem, "Convention Centers of the New World," written by Raymond McDaniel, observes that "[l]ike [Mark] Nowak" the poet "cares most about speech when the speech is not the poet's own: it is, instead, what the poet's technique preserves" ("New Thing"). As a poet, Mark Nowak has consistently sought to chronicle working-class speech in its historical and contemporary forms, making books out of working-class voices and addressing his poetry to working-class readers. His first book, Revenants (2000), documented the language of his Polish working-class family and their neighbors, in Buffalo, New York, as that language and neighborhood were disappearing from the postindustrial landscape. In his second book, Shut Up Shut Down (2004), he cut and spliced the voices of U.S. workers who were experiencing the violence of deindustrialization.¹ In Coal Mountain Elementary (2009), his most recent book of poetry, Nowak preserves the words of miners and their families in the United States and China as they contend with coal mining's deadly accidents and toxic landscapes.

In this book as in his previous works, Nowak confronts the problem of how one goes about creating a working-class poetics for the neoliberal era. But in Coal Mountain Elementary, he breaks the national frame, creating poetic strategies that articulate an affiliation between coal miners in the U.S. and coal miners in China. The book testifies to neoliberalism's violence through an examination of the human and environmental costs of coal mining on a global scale. Opening Coal Mountain Elementary, we find a haunted city, a hotel where only weeping is heard, a tunnel filled with poisonous gas, and towns submerged in darkness and coal waste. But the text's compositional strategies extend beyond documentary realism. For example, Nowak resists using biography to record the lives of coal miners and their families. Rather, names float and settle throughout the text, sometimes attaching themselves to voices, sometimes drifting free from them. The poem does not differentiate between individual speakers drawn from the archive of the Sago Mine Disaster, nor does it pursue the lives of Chinese miners beyond the frame of the brief news story.² Instead, the book weaves multiple voices together into a "sonic-social" landscape representing the contemporary conditions of coal mining (Nowak, "On Bill Griffiths").³ Parataxis places U.S. coal miners alongside Chinese coal miners, implying both association and equivalence.⁴

Through its individualizing rhetoric, its assault on worker collectives in all forms, and its construction of the subject as "human capital," neoliberalism has not only produced the deadly conditions for miners documented in Coal Mountain Elementary but also, as Wendy Brown has shown us, dismantled the category of labor itself, making it increasingly difficult to challenge neoliberal assaults on collective gains such as pensions, or health and safety regulations in the workplace (38).⁵ If neoliberal reason diminishes the category of labor, weakening its attendant vocabularies, then Coal Mountain Elementary offers a poetics to enliven the political imaginaries of labor and the laboring body. In its many voices, this work creates a counter song, a counterpoint to capital's neoliberal refrain.⁶

Coal Mountain Elementary and Documentary Poetry

Composed entirely out of appropriated texts, Coal Mountain Elementary draws textual material from three sources: newspaper accounts of mining disasters in China, miners' verbatim testimony about the Sago Mine Disaster in West Virginia, archived at the West Virginia Office of Miners' Health and Safety website, and the American Coal Foundation's curriculum for school children. In addition to written text, the book includes photographs of American and Chinese miners and mining towns taken by Nowak and photographer Ian Teh. Textual sources are listed on a "Works Cited" page, and photographs are credited through a "Table of Illustrations," but within the body of the text nothing is attributed, including the photographs, which are not captioned. Visual clues distinguish the sources: newspaper coverage of Chinese mines always appears in italics, while testimony from the...