ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com

Poetic Profile

 

 

Mark Nowak

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

General Questions

 

1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?

 

I grew up on the east side of Buffalo, NY.  Poetry?  I had no knowledge of it, and don’t remember reading it, until after I finished high school and went to Erie Community College.

 

 

2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?

 

Kraftwerk, Afrika Bambaataa, Jam Master Jay, Tillie Olsen, Amiri Baraka, Negativland, V. N. Voloshinov...

 

 

3) When did you 'become' a poet? When did poet become part of your everyday life?

 

I was reading Gwendolyn Brooks in college, and I read a newspaper article about a child who was set on fire by his father.  Using what I learned from Brooks and “sampling” from the newspaper article, I wrote what was (consciously) my first “poem.”

 

 

4) Where were you educated? Was this important?

 

I was educated in the neighborhood.  People who lived next door to me were steelworkers, bricklayers, bakery truck drivers.  My dad was the vice president of his union for many years.  I went to four grammar schools, two high schools, a community college...  I learned almost nothing about literature, about art, about politics, about life, at any of them.  A professor in the MFA program I went to attempted to have me kicked out of the program because he couldn’t stomach the way I “wrote.”  School: it’s like that poem by Whitman, “I Hear It Was Charged Against Me.”  I did have one teacher in my second high school, senior year, Michael Pikus.  He saw my interest in punk, electronic music, etc., and suggested I look into the existentialists: Kafka, Camus, Sartre.  And because of him, his influence on me, I still believe that one teacher can make a difference in a kid’s life. 

 

For the past year, I’ve been helping my partner open a very progressive high school here in Chicago.  It’s called “City as Classroom School,” down on 25th and Blue Island in Little Village, housed temporarily (in its first year) in the cafeteria of Instituto del Progreso Latino.  The kids from Little Village and North Lawndale will, literally, use the city of Chicago as their classroom, learn through internships, take workshops with Chicago writers like HBO Def Jam poet Kevin Coval, UIC education prof. David Stovall, Defiance Gallery director and graffiti artist Miguel Aguilar, etc.  It’s really quite phenomenal.  And to witness her struggles with CPS (Chicago Public Schools), to witness a system so horribly failing these kids, to witness the neo-liberalization of public education, to witness wealthy white liberals sit on charter school boards to assuage their guilt by helping poor ghetto kids... But try to intervene and change this, well, I now have some small idea of the permanent commitment, or to borrow from Trotsky, the permanent revolution, that making such change will require.

 

By contrast, I just recently visited a school run by the MTD, the Argentine Unemployed Workers Movement, about an hour outside Buenos Aires.  The education, the compassion and energy of the teachers, the space, all of it was breath-taking.  This is what happens when the kids and the teachers “own” their school (the MTD occupied this abandoned school after the economic collapse, and now it’s their own).  It was a similar feeling at IMPA: La Fabrica Ciudad Cultural, a four story aluminum manufacturing factory in Buenos Aires, collectively occupied and now owned by the workers, that also houses a cultural center and a people’s lending library.  Ditto for the Zanon Ceramics Factory in Neuquen, Argentina.  These places I visited all inspire me that “Another World Is Possible”—if the change comes from the under- and unemployed, from the working classes.  If it comes top-down, forget it.

 

5) You come from a white ethnic Polish American background and from Buffalo how do these things effect your work? Do you feel that White Ethnic voices are ignored in the US poetry scene?  

 

White voices dominate the poetry scene, including the postmodern poetry scene.  And by under-acknowledging vernacular poetries, hip hop poetry, and similar movements, white avant-garde poetics re-inscribes the dominance of white voices.  I don’t hate speech.  Far from it.  In fact, like Voloshinov, I love social utterance; it’s the basis for all my work.

 

6) You are a prolific writer and editor of XCP.  How do you separate these works?

 

I see the book culture as an arena that desperately needs organizing.  As writers, I think we’ve become too complacent, too locked into thinking about production and consumption.  We write books, we badger our friends to review them (I can’t tell you how many letters I get like this at XCP!).  My focus in recent years has been on those who stock, shelve, and sell our books.  I formed the Union of Radical Workers and Writers <http://www.urww.org>, and have been working on organizing bookstore workers.  In January, 2004, we assembled what we believe to have been the first bookstore workers organizing forum (“Resist Retail Nihilism”) at the Communication Workers of America union hall in Minneapolis, MN.  We’re in close contact with/collaborating with some of the original Borders organizers from Philadelphia, current unionized Borders workers in Ann Arbor and Minneapolis, and other bookstore and service workers from around the country.

 

7) Sports Team? 

 

The 1980 Soviet Ice Hockey Team

 

8) Vacation Spot?

 

http://www.unitehere.org/hotelguide/default.asp 

 

 

9) Curse Word? 

 

USA PATRIOT ACT (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001).  I also thought the “Free Speech Zones” outside the Fleet Center at the recent Democratic National Convention were pretty vulgar.

 

10) What is your opinion of Avant-garde American writing in comparison to other avant-gardes from other places in the world?

 

(see question no. 5, above)

 

11) In Revenants you focus a lot on Buffalo and Taverns; most avant-garde writers in the USA come from a certain social class and that class does not include Taverns or Buffalo.  How does this canvas open up your work?

 

I remember giving a reading at a university in California.  The poet who introduced me said, “When asked which visiting writer I wanted to introduce, I knew it would be Mark Nowak.  I was reading his book Revenants, and was just so taken by the photographs and poems of ‘dive bars’ in there...”  Well, the photos in those books aren’t ‘dive bars.’  They are the places my grandfather went to meet his co-workers after his bus ride home from the steel mill, where my other grandfather went after he retired from the mechanics’ shop at the railroad, where I went after work for the eight years I fried hamburgers at Wendy’s.  “Dive Bars,” maybe I could add that to my list of curse words?

 

 

Craft Questions

 

 

1) How do you form a poem?

 

Fred Wah got me very interested in the haibun, and so my new book, Shut Up Shut Down, includes experiments with the possibilities of that form in relationship to photo-documentary, labor history, etc.  In one of these serial pieces, “Hoyt Lakes/Shut Down,” I wanted to see if I could find a way to replicate Marxist base/superstructure in poetic form; so I worked at developing haibun structures in which the ideological information at the top of the poem would balance precariously above the direct economic impact as base—represented by the number of taconite miners who lost their jobs in the Iron Range towns in northern Minnesota.  I’m also interested in finding ways to get poems out to readers beyond those who come to bookstores and college campuses.  So I’ve started experimenting with workers’ choruses, verse plays, and the like, and then finding ways to produce those at places like the UAW Local 879 Union Hall across from the Ford Plant in Minnesota, where the audience is a mixture of writers/theatre people and autoworkers from the Ford Plant.

 

 

2) Do you use collage, parataxis cut ups or other tools? In the balance between found language and created language where does your work fall? Do you use many sources?

 

Collage, parataxis, cut ups, yes.  The verse play “Capitalization,” for example, is solely composed of sampled language.  One set of sources centers on Ronald Reagan, his early work as spokesperson for G.E. (and the inherent anti-Communism that accompanied that) and his later firing of the striking air traffic controllers (PATCO).  The second tells the story of a blacklisted union organizer from Westinghouse (the company my father worked for).  The third iterates the rules of capitalization, including examples, from a 1980s textbook; in a sense this third voice is also a study of the Americanizing social control function of language and grammar acquisition.

 

 

3) Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?

 

Synthetic.

 

 

4) Where do you write? Is Ambiance important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?

 

I grew up very close to the Moog factory in Buffalo.  And when I first came across Kraftwerk’s records, I was totally hooked.  I got a Moog Rogue synthesizer in high school and started teaching myself Kraftwerk songs.  And then the release of Afrika Bambaataa’s sampling of Kraftwerk on “Planet Rock,” the growing use of turntables and sampling and sound collage with artists like Jam Master Jay. That music, the music that grew out of it in the mid-1980s (Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Detroit Techno, Public Enemy/Terminator X, etc.), the discs being released by Chicago’s Wax Trax records, and more recently trance, drum and bass, acid jazz... The tape edits, the synthetic beats, the samples... Plunderphonics, Negativland, the Tape-beatles...

 

There’s something about that moment when the factories were closing (1980s deindustrialization) and the sounds of the assembly line, the stamping plant, were returning like electronic ghosts in the music of this period, that creates a certain soundtrack for my work.  I’ve examined it fairly closely in an essay I wrote on deindustrialization and goth-industrial music that should be coming out next year in an anthology dubbed Goth: Undead Subculture. And so when I write, I like to have that soundtrack running, those samples, those beats...