Reconstruction 10.3 (2010)
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Chronicles in the First Person Plural: An Interview with Mark NowakAlan Clinton: What are your views of the potential relationships between (creative) writing and activism in general both in your work and in the work of others? What historical and contemporary practices (and figures) seem most promising to you in terms of bringing the word into the world and vice versa?
Mark Nowak: For the past decade, my work has primarily consisted of attempts, in some small way, to shift the historical trajectory of (creative) writing in the first person singular toward the first person plural trajectory needed for activism and social change. This began very early in the decade with my experiments in “delinking”—a term I borrow from Samir Amin—the reception of my work from what felt to me to be the strictly demarcated social spaces and institutions of contemporary poetry. In the first half of the decade, inspired by Brecht’s lehrstücke (“learning plays”), I looked to either facilitate or participate in events at spaces where poetry had been forgotten—trade union halls (UAW, UFCW, CWA), organizing meetings of retail workers, rallies for striking Northwest airlines mechanics and cleaners, etc.
During the middle of the decade (shortly after the publication of Shut Up Shut Down, and as the putting into practice of positions I took in “Neoliberalism, Collective Action, and the American MFA Industry”), I began to facilitate workshops with working people at factories and offices. One example of this would be my “poetry dialogues” with Ford autoworkers at a closing plant in St. Paul, Minnesota (with UAW Local 879) and autoworkers facing possible retrenchment at factories in Port Elizabeth and Pretoria, South Africa (in collaboration with the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, NUMSA). I have since facilitated and discussed poetry dialogues with other South African workers (through DITSELA), formerly striking clerical workers (through AFSCME 3800), Muslin/Somali nurses and healthcare workers (through Rufaidah), service workers and postal workers in Fort Wayne, etc.
As the decade draws to a close, and on the heels of the publication of my transnational photo-documentary on coal mining disasters and coal communities in the United States and China, Coal Mountain Elementary (itself a collaboration with photo-journalist Ian Teh), I’m developing a large-scale new project in collaboration with the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) in Belgium (as well as with other global trade unions and labor activists) that I see as my next small attempt to redirect the trajectory of (creative) writing toward activism—a project that is for me, like the title of this special issue, an “Invention of Activism.”
AC: How did you become a poet and activist? If you’d like, you can limit yourself to the Nietzschean constraint of defining yourself through three specific anecdotes (or less) that would give us a sort of “montage-biography” of your life in these terms.
MN: I’d like to slightly shift your question from “did…become” to “are…becoming” because I believe it is absolutely crucial to discuss one’s role as a poet-activist in the present and future tenses. Far too much (creative) writing in the subgenre we might label “working class literature”—from the classic anthologies that first established the field to Philip Levine’s What Work Is to a new anthology called The Way We Work: Contemporary Writings from the American Workplace (a book that I quite severely critiqued in a recent issue of the journal Labor History)—remains submerged in what are too often merely reveries of work performed (or observed), often decades in the past. Levine’s elegies of a dying, disappearing, or dead proletariat, to cite just one example, are museum pieces of an aesthetics, poetics, and politics that are no longer engaged in either the daily lives of working people or the ongoing class struggle, an art form that has retired to the institution and canon of Poetry (capital P).
By contrast, it is vital for me to see myself in the process of becoming a poet-activist each and every day; it is vital for me, more and more, that my new projects and new books participate not only in repositioning poetic practice (“make it new,” if you will) but also participate in varied movements for social, political, racial, economic, cultural, and environmental justice at the same time. If my work does not do both of these, equally and equally well, then, in my mind at least, it has failed—absolutely failed.
What’s been interesting to me with Coal Mountain Elementary has been the increased breadth of its reception outside of “Poetry.” CME’s critical pedagogy has been covered in magazines like Rethinking Schools; its environmental focus got it named one of the “Inspiring 2009 Books for a Clean Energy Future” in the Huffington Post; and its working-class focus has turned into reviews in places like In Theses Times and interviews with radio shows such as the Heartland Labor Forum out of Kansas City.
I see this as well in the traffic that comes to the blog I began before the book was published, a blog (“Coal Mountain”) that I hoped would continue the trans-national conversation that the book was beginning, a conversation about the horrific safety record of the global mining industry and its effect on working people, their families, and their communities each and every day. A few people come to my blog because they are interested in the book. But the majority come, it appears from the statistics and search terms, because of yet another mining disaster in their community; they come to find local or regional information and they discover that what’s happened in Kentucky or Yorkshire also happened just this week in China, in Pakistan, in South Africa, in Russia, in…
AC: While we’re on the subject of anecdotes, tell us about your time in “the trenches.” What have been some of the most rewarding and/or difficult things you have faced as an activist and labor organizer? What lessons do you take from one or two of these experiences that might be applicable to readers of this issue?
MN: When you asked this question, instead of answering it myself (and in keeping with our attention here on the first person plural) I asked one of the people I was closest to in the (eventually successful) drive to organize/unionize a Borders bookstore in Minneapolis to answer this question for me—Holly Krig, a former Borders worker-organizer (the store closed shortly after it was unionized) who is currently the Lead Organizer at Northside Action for Justice in Chicago:
The thing most attacked over the last number of years has been the idea and practice of solidarity. See “secondary strike.” See “right to work.” See “Taft Hartley.” It is about power in numbers and union density and it’s more than that. The I.W.W. understood this. They knew that an injury to one has real practical and ideological implications for “the working class all.” There must be something beyond the collective bargaining unit—it must exist inside something bigger than negotiating over nickels— however much we needed those nickels.
So, Jason and I, the workplace leaders in the Minneapolis Borders organizing drive, met Mark Nowak. When exactly? Early, because we came to work with him more closely than with the union staff. Or, better, we worked on different tracks. He understood solidarity. His work as a professor and as a writer did not exclude him from our struggle as retail workers. I knew this even before Jason told me that Mark had worked at Wendy’s in Buffalo all those years. Of course, that helped.
We found ourselves speaking at “Meeting the Challenge,” talking about revolutionary unionism. We were with him at the UAW hall in St. Paul, hearing poetry and discussing our retail organizing struggle. I recall looking for my uncle there. He retired pretty recently, after 30 years working at that Ford plant in St Paul. My parents drive a Ford Ranger made there.
It was like an apprenticeship—I learned while I listened, and maybe even as I spoke. They were my words and not mine as I had grown confident that our struggle was one that must be shared—that it was shared, but not yet awakened in a much larger group. Mark knew the organizer’s real skill was listening. He helps play back the parts that resonate. This fosters agency in the worker who will be an organizer. There is no skipping this part.
There it is, the challenge and the reward: Fostering a sense of solidarity in co-workers, retail workers, all the workers leveraged against by the idea that there is no such thing as economic rights. It is ongoing. Mark has followed it to Cape Town, among other places. I met a tenant's organizer from Cape Town last month. When I visit him someday, I'm going to ask around and see who’s heard of Mark Nowak.
AC: Despite your wide-ranging, even global political interests, much of your creative and activist work has been inspired by or taken place in the places you’ve lived. You’ve recently taken on a new position as director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College, moving from Minneapolis to Chestertown, MD. What opportunities do you see for pedagogy and activism in your new position and residence?
MN: My earlier work—Revenants, the opening four serial pieces in Shut Up Shut Down—was very much a reading and critique of urban spaces, particularly the deindustrializing or “shrinking cities” of Buffalo, Detroit, the Great Lakes rust belt in general. Beginning with the final piece in that book, “Hoyt Lakes/Shut Down,” my interest has been expanding to include working people in rural regions like northern Minnesota’s Iron Range, north-central West Virginia, the mining towns of China, etc. Maurice Manning, in his review of Coal Mountain in Bookforum, provides an important framework for thinking about these questions of economy, environment, and scale:
“[C]oal mining is the same everywhere. Most mines are located in remote places with little economic diversity, leaving local workers and their families vulnerable to the only game in town. Despite being tucked away in rural areas, however, many mining operations function on an unimaginable scale: The combined area of mountaintop-removal sites in West Virginia and Kentucky, for example, will be as big as Delaware by the end of the decade; an open-pit mine in Wyoming is visible from space.”
Engaging within and between these scales—from the local to the global—seems to me an absolutely necessary mode of response during this era of globalization. If my new book taught me one thing, it’s that collaborations on a transnational scale are both equally needed and, with some extra legwork, increasingly achievable in our networked age.
AC: You have been rightly critical of much MFA instruction in creative writing, wondering in Workers of the Word if it is possible to produce anything but neoliberal writing in such institutions. As a creative writing professor yourself, what practices do you engage in or imagine that do or could change the institution as such? How do you view your work within the institution? What do you try to pass on to your students?
MN: Several years ago, I was asked to teach a senior seminar on my “poetry dialogues” at the University of Minnesota. Together, we read critical pedagogy (Freire et al), experiments in (creative) writing workshop formats (June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, Ernesto Cardenal, etc.). We also had visiting lectures/talks from Ford autoworkers who had participated in my workshops at the Ford plant in St. Paul. I then asked students, for their final projects, to conduct their own “poetry dialogues” in their places of work (or, if they were unemployed, somewhere in the community). The results were astonishing, including a student who worked the night shift at UPS and conducted poetry workshops in the back of the brown delivery trucks during breaks. He filmed one of his workshops and made a fabulous iMovie/DVD of his work. Another student did workshops with former iron miners in northern Minnesota and ended up being interviewed by the local public radio station about his poetry workshop. I also told the students that, since I was asking them to conduct such a “poetry dialogue,” I would facilitate one, too—which I did with the formerly striking clerical workers at the University (through AFSCME 3800). Near the end of the semester, the clerical workers took the stage to read their strike and post-strike poems to an audience composed of students, professors, department chairs and other administrators, and of course their union sisters and brothers. It was an incredibly powerful testament to the power of the word.
AC: What happens or can happen when workers organize not only in traditional terms, but as authors? What sorts of agency are obtained from writing poetry in the collective settings you describe in Workers of the Word?
MN: At the beginning of my “poetry dialogue” at the Pretoria Ford plant, one worker approached me and asked a pointed (and terrific) question: “What is poetry going to do for me when I am retrenched?” I told him, quite honestly, that I didn’t have an answer to his question, but I hoped that he would continue to participate in what was a two-day, eight hour per day poetry workshop and that he would tell me if the question had been answered by the end of our sixteen hours together.
The first day, all the Ford workers wrote individual poems—in response to the poems I showed them on DVD from their co-workers at a closing plant in the States—about their precarious positions at Ford in South Africa. While many American workers believed that their jobs were being sent to places like South Africa where cars could be produced more cheaply (everyone in my SA workshop was making about $7,000 annually, if I remember correctly), South African Ford workers were facing similar concerns about lay-offs, plant closures, down-sizing, redundancy, et al. These poems were striking in their details and compassion.
Toward the end of the first day, one worker who I will call Comrade P. (everyone, myself included, was addressed as Comrade in the factory) read an incredibly powerful poem about being in a constant state of worry about his job and his future. The autoworker who asked the question, I’ll call him Comrade M., was noticeably moved. After we were done with these individual or “first person singular” poems, I spoke a little about our writing in the “first person plural” the next day. We performed a bit of my play “Capitalization” (on McCarthyism and the PATCO strike) and read some of Alfred Temba Qabula’s classic “Praise poem to FOSATU”—a magnificent poem that I’d photocopied a few days earlier at the National English Literary Museum at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. Again, Comrade M. took notice.
As I was packing up that night, I noticed that my copy of Qabula’s poem was missing. “I though I saw Comrade M. take it,” replied one of my hosts from NUMSA. Sure enough, the next day, Comrade M. returned to our workshop with the poem. And for the rest of that second day he was incredibly active in writing and performing the workers’ chorus poems that were collectively produced by the entire group.
Toward the end of our time together, Comrade M. told the other participants about his initial doubt about what poetry could do for him when he was retrenched. Now, he said, after being so moved by Comrade P’s poem yesterday and the choral poems that the assembled workers had done together, he believed that Comrade P. should be named the poet of their group (a kind of poet laureate for their division). He said that prior to future union meetings, Comrade M. should be given the agenda and that he should compose and recite a poem at the beginning of each meeting. He also said that he wanted everyone to consider performing their poems at the next NUMSA National Congress.
AC: Perhaps we could tie your work with poetry in these labor education groups/ settings to your own books for a moment… Coal Mountain Elementary explicitly uses schooling as a frame for considering the relationship between pedagogy and interpellation. Yet, in Walter Lew’s graduate course in poetics we also noted that the book itself could be seen as a school where we (the readers) are the students. In relation to Coal Mountain Elementary and in a broader sense as well, how, in your opinion, can pedagogy (in whatever environments you wish to discuss) best lead to “inventions of activism”? Do you see activism itself as having/needing a pedagogical dimension, either deliberate or incidental?
MN: Critical pedagogy—from its foundations in Paulo Freire through its development by a wide range of educators, scholars, critics, and historians such as Michael Apple, Howard Zinn, bell hooks, and Augusto Boal, to cite just a few—has been incredibly important in the development not only of my poetic thinking and practice, but in my overall way of being in the world. I’ve spent many years teaching adult education and labor education in a variety of settings: community college classrooms, factories, prisons, public schools, union halls, etc. It is to me, to borrow Freire’s words, the practice of freedom. And I’d be hard-pressed to imagine any scene of activism, large or small, without an educative element.
One problem, particularly in my work with the labor movement in the U.S., is the simultaneous devaluation of the role(s) and importance of cultural work in the larger social movement together with the dry, stolid, acoustic guitar forms of culture that take the stage when “culture” is invited to perform. It’s something young workers are slowly taking the lead on changing—like the “One Day in July” street festival that commemorates the 1934 Minneapolis Truckers’ Strike. The acoustic guitar goes electric (and punk), Brother Ali shares the stage with labor historians… I think the labor bureaucracy in general could get some schooling, so to speak, from events such as these.
AC: If you see an activist form of poetry necessarily moving from a first person singular voice to a first person plural approach, could we equally critique many labor movements for lacking a “first person” or even a “person” in their collective acts?
MN: Historically, perhaps, we could. Or theoretically. But I’d argue that one major cause of the union movement’s slow demise in the United States has been the way in which it has, for decades, privatized itself from larger social struggles. Instead, it has become for working people the equivalent of an insurance company, a Prudential or Geico for organized laborers. Every month you pay your premium (dues), and should something bad happen to you at work, come to us and we’ll do our best to rectify the situation. And I don’t want to sound like I’m devaluing the importance of that. But I believe that organized labor is capable so very much more.
Outside of the U.S., of course, it’s a different story. And this probably takes us back to your earlier question about the pedagogical dimension of activism, the role of critical pedagogy in inventing activism. Creating channels through which working people and the working poor are able to both share their stories and learn more about the tactics of workers like themselves in other parts of the world who are struggling and organizing to democratically improve their lives seems absolutely vital to me today.
One could look, for example, at how the recent occupation by workers of Republic Windows and Doors was, in part, inspired by the factory occupation movement in Argentina. Kari Lydersen’s new book, Revolt at Goose Island, shows this link. And several recent collections of workers’ stories from Argentina are significant here, too: Marina Sitrin’s Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina and the Lavaca Collective’s Sin Patrón: Stories from Argentina’s Worker-Run Factories. My own research visits to those recuperated Argentine workplaces—Zanon, Brukman, IMPA, etc.—in 2004, along with my work in South Africa, has significantly reframed and refined my own thinking on these subjects. They have been a critical pedagogy for me.
AC: Your need to simultaneously “reposition poetic practice” and address important political content in your work is not, of course, merely a personal scruple, but a requirement for reimagining the apparatus of production, labor, and global capitalism in more utopian ways. It is reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s suggestion in “The Author as Producer” that only writing which reconfigures the apparatus of its own production as such can have real political effects, regardless of content. Any thoughts on how you will attempt to do this in your new project with the International Trade Union Confederation?
MN: I always cite a line from the “Introduction” to Facing Reality (co-authored by C.L.R. James, Grace Lee Boggs, and Cornelius Castoriadis) that workers are revolting every day in ways of their own invention, yet their stories and struggles have few chroniclers. My current work with the ITUC is at a very early stage, but if I can say one thing about it at this incipient juncture, it’s absolutely an attempt, as you say above, to reconfigure the apparatus of my own production. I’m attempting to add another political trajectory to my poetic production or compositional process. Instead of working with extant texts or testimonies as I have, predominantly in Shut Up Shut Down and Coal Mountain Elementary, the new work pushes toward the creation (or, in Facing Reality’s terms, “chronicling”) of those previously unchronicled stories of work in the global service sector. Simultaneously, its “production apparatus” is, at root, a collaboration with global trade union confederations, on-the-ground labor activists, and service sector workers, networking us all together in one conversation in the first person plural.
As a sort of literary compass, I keep turning back to Eduardo Galeano’s “Preface” to his Memoria del fuego (Memory of Fire) trilogy: “I am not a historian. I am a writer who would like to contribute to the rescue of the kidnapped memory of all America …I don’t know to what literary form this voice of voices belongs. Memory of Fire is not an anthology, clearly not; but I don’t know if it is a novel or essay or epic poem or testament or chronicle or… Deciding robs me of no sleep. I do not believe in the frontiers that, according to literature’s customs officers, separate the forms.” That passage always seems, to me, a perfect place from which to begin.
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