Poetry Is a Verb
An interview with Worker Writers School Founder Mark Nowak on his new book Social Poetics, a people’s history of poetry
WWS members at PEN America, courtesy of Mark Nowak
In his essay, “My Adventures as a Social Poet,” Langtson Hughes writes, “Social forces pull backwards or forwards, right or left, and social poems get caught in the pulling and the hauling.” This movement—the poet in the midst of—is at the center of what activist, critic, and poet Mark Nowak offers us in his new book Social Poetics, a people’s history of poetry. An extraordinary guidebook on the history, current state, and future of working-class poetics, the book asks: what happens when poetry becomes a central subject of the working class? How do social poetics push back on what is naturalized into non-existence under capitalism?
At the heart of the book are the members of the Worker Writers School (WWS), an institute founded by Nowak that organizes poetry workshops in global trade unions, workers’ centers, factories, and other labor organizations. The WWS workshops are “an experiment in the creation of alternative social spaces of solidarity and new modes of struggle,” Nowak writes.
While poetry’s use is consistently in question, WWS offers poetry as a verb. Social Poetics works around the schedule of the hustle, rephrasing the question “can art be political action” in order to provide a framework for artist workers of all sorts. In this, the practice of social poetics protects and preserves the materiality of poetics over the immateriality of institutional arts and individuated status. Writing poems together, Nowak tells us, is an antidote to the fragmentation of modern labor practices.
As we collectivize around what’s next, we are thinking about all of our roles in a social change ecosystem. The imaginaries, poets, and storytellers have an urgent responsibility in the construction of a new world, and Social Poetics points us in the direction of what is to be done. It is not that there is an “outside” to literary spaces, but that poetics emerges from the warehouses, factories, meetings, and uprisings that have been partitioned off from mainstream canonization. Revolutionary solidarity is wrapped up in the collapse of aesthetics hierarchies; in George Jackson’s words, “prestige must be destroyed.”
We got the chance to ask Mark some questions about Social Poetics, emergent solidarity, and the value of poetry.
— ATM
ATM: When did you begin to write poetry? Poetry rarely introduces itself as a social thing—how did poetry become social for you? Or has it always been?
Mark Nowak: Today is the day I found out that Florian Schneider, one of the co-founders of Kraftwerk, died. I began to write, to believe I could write or “make art,” on the day back in 1981 or thereabouts when I first heard Kraftwerk’s “The Man Machine.” I was a teenager in Buffalo at the height, or maybe more accurately the depths, of deindustrialization. While everyone else in my neighborhood and in my high school was listening to Rush and Van Halen, I heard this utopian sound of synthesizers and the robotic beats. In those sounds, I first became a maker of art. I was working at Wendy’s on Buffalo’s east side—I spent the entire Ronald Reagan presidency working there, 1980-1988—and I saved every dollar I could from my paycheck in order to buy a Moog Rogue synthesizer. For the next six years, I bought more synthesizers and drum machines, played in electronic and goth bands, recorded a 7” single, did regular gigs in Buffalo and Toronto. While writing the lyrics for the bands, I took a creative writing class at my community college and eventually started studying poetry. So, my connection to language, to writing language down, began in the collective social spaces of band rehearsals, making music and art with others, not in, as Wordsworth famously said, “emotion recollected in tranquility.”
What brought you to founding the Worker Writers School?
I had been teaching poets-in-the-schools and poets-in-the-prisons programs for about fifteen years. I’d learned so much from my students as poet-in-residence for a year at Nawayee Center School, an alternative school for Indigenous young people in Minneapolis. Poet Allison Hedge Coke was kind enough to invite me to work in a fabulous online program for incarcerated Indigenous youth that she was running, and she brought me out to the South Dakota schools to visit. Just so many important experiences. Then, in the summer of 2004, my wife and I took a trip to Argentina to visit the factories around the country that workers had started to occupy after the economy collapsed. I tell the story in much more detail in Social Poetics. But, basically, we saw how cultural workers who had supported the factory workers to occupy their workplaces had been given spaces to run workshops in the factories. As someone whose parents and grandparents had spent their lives working in behemoth Bethlehem Steel and Westinghouse factories in Buffalo, I thought, why can’t I bring my workshop practice here, too. That’s eventually how I started teaching poetry workshops at the St. Paul Ford Assembly Plant in Minnesota and the two Ford factories in Port Elizabeth and Pretoria, South Africa, out of which the Worker Writers School (WWS) was born.
Your oeuvre includes three books (Coal Mountain Elementary, Shut Up Shut Down, and Revenants); and you publish the work of members of the Workers Writers School in various capacities. Why this book now?
Social Poetics took me a really long time to write—eleven years. I’d see my friends coming out with two, three, five new books and I’d still be hacking away at this one. I tried so many forms: a collection of letters to the worker poets, a more straightforward autobiography/memoir, a version modelled on Raymond Williams’s Keywords, etc. Nothing worked. Then, one day, I got an email from Daniel Oliver Tucker who was curating an exhibit on the Young Patriot Organization. The YPO was a group in Chicago who, in the 1960s, began organizing poor white migrants in sync with the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords. Tucker asked me to write something on the YPO’s poetry magazine, Time of the Phoenix. That’s when I hit upon using Howard Zinn’s idea of a “people’s history” to write about the practice of community-based poetry. So, I wrote an essay, “Panthers, Patriots, and Poetries in Revolution,” where I talked about the YPO poetry magazine as well as poetry by the Black Panthers (Erika Huggins), the women of the Weather Underground, and June Jordan’s anthology of youth poetry from the same time period. This idea of a “people’s history of the poetry workshop” was what I began to research and write about, and it eventually expanded into the first chapters of Social Poetics and provided the framework and approach for the rest of the book.
We are in a weird, paradoxical moment where resistance has become coined and marketable. In almost every direction it feels like capital is co-opting creativity. What does an aesthetic look like that subverts cultural capital?
In Social Poetics, I talk a lot about trying to balance self-determination and collective action, that space between the first person singular (“I”) and the first person plural (“we”). Working to be more deeply entrenched in that space between the I and the we until the line one day disintegrates between them, that’s my practice. Because capital, including cultural capital, wants to focus exclusively on the first person singular. How, as an organizer, do I work to shift my first person singular cultural capital to the first person plural. My role as an organizer in the first person singular should eventually evaporate, disappear into the space of the first person plural where everyone is on the mic, on the stage, organizing for the social transformations we seek. George Jackson once wrote, “Prestige must be destroyed.” That’s a sentiment I can understand and a vision I can work toward in everything I do.
Working to be more deeply entrenched in that space between the I and the we until the line one day disintegrates between them, that’s my practice.
What does it mean to think about “social poetics” in a time of social isolation?
I come back to the words of Joe Hill: “Don’t mourn, organize.” Sure, I was devastated that the week my book was supposed to launch, New York State and eventually much of the country and much of the world quarantined and began to practice social distancing. I cancelled about fifteen book launch events from Chicago to London and Paris. But, pretty quickly after that, our #CoronavirusHaiku project—with frontline workers in service, retail, and healthcare who are writing haiku about their working lives—gained momentum.
Today, the WWS poets have been published in journals and even appeared in a front page story at the Times Union newspaper in Albany, been on Pacifica radio and Free Speech Television shows, read at Zoom poetry readings with other poets like Tyehimba Jess, Martín Espada, Aja Monet, and others. The workers have been so interested in writing haiku that they’ve wanted to start meeting for workshops on Zoom twice a month instead of our regular one a month meetings. And, because of the technology, we have been able to bring back some of our members who have moved to Ohio and back home to Trinidad. So that’s been really exciting.
We’ve been following the #CoronavirusHaikus closely and they’re such a wonderful exercise! Why did you choose the haiku specifically?
It just developed organically, to be honest. Back in September, we did a day-long event (or, as we call them, “assembly”) at the People’s Forum, a new social movement incubator in NYC, called “Study Hall: Radical Study and Stuart Hall.” Bill Ayers and Eli Meyerhoff spoke on the idea of schools as spaces for (and against) radical study; Ruth Wilson Gilmore, with Nicole Fleetwood as her interlocutor, spoke about how Stuart Hall inspires our studies and our struggles today (she’s got a new book coming out, co-authored with Paul Gilroy, on Stuart Hall). But the day opened with a presentation by Hiroaki Sato, whose book, On Haiku, had recently been published by New Directions. After the forum, we spent the next six months studying the radical haiku tradition in the US: Japanese American internment camp haiku, haiku by participants in Celes Tisdale’s poetry workshop at Attica right after the insurrection in the early 1970s, haiku by Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka (who created his own form called “low coups”).
When the coronavirus swept across New York City, workers turned to this haiku tradition they had been studying to speak about their lives as frontline workers in service, retail, and healthcare. Here’s one I love by Lorraine Garnett, a domestic worker, originally from Jamaica, and a member of the WWS:
Saved by haiku
afraid -- museum bedroom
what if bones are found?
So much to unpack there; so much in just seventeen syllables, just three lines.
WWS workshop, courtesy of Mark Nowak
You experiment with many other forms in the workshop as well: the tanka, the renga. What do formal constraints do for community writing exercises?
This, to me, is a continuation of what I was saying earlier about self-determination and collective action, but at the level of poetic craft. At the WWS, we try, even down to the level of poetic form, to work within that space between the “I” and the “we.” A form like the renga allows us to do just that because it’s a collectively written poem. You can read one of the WWS collaborative renga poems in Social Poetics. It opens with a 3-line stanza by Davidson Garrett, a taxi driver, then moves to a 2-line stanza by taxi driver Seth Goldman; both are long-time drivers and members of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. This is followed by 3-line and 2-line stanzas by Lizeth Palencia and Hazel Lynch, both members of Domestic Workers United. The renga is an experiment in simultaneously expressing our personal perspectives and writing in community, writing collectively. At the WWS, we are constantly trying to work with traditional forms and invent new forms that allow everyone to write in that space between the I and the we.
One of our favorite parts of the book is your chapter on “imaginative militancy,” which you say you first encountered in Kim Moody’s essay “Towards an International Social Movement Unionism.” Imaginative militancy offers a place to conjoin aesthetic practices to political ones. This offers a way of seeing art and politics not as at odds with each other but rather as inextricable from each other’s projects. How are art and politics interwoven both in your own life and in the workshop space?
I see art and politics as a pair of shoes, really. Why would I want to make my way through the streets and subways and schools and workplaces with only my left shoe on? And what is the WWS, really? Is it a literary organization? Is it a worker center? Is it a social movement? Why does it have to be only one of these things? Who says it can be only one of these things? Why can’t it be all of them? In the literary world, we talk a lot about cross-genre writing. Maybe the WWS is a gross-genre social organization, a cross-genre social movement, a cross-genre workers center. I like this idea very much, actually. Yes, the new cross-genre possibilities.
The book is a history of uprisings and poetics, which is also an insistence that literary work emerges out of spaces not traditionally deemed “literary.” I’m interested in how this history helps shake some of our attachments to the canon.
I think that Social Poetics, especially the opening chapters, clearly outlines how important poems from historic workshops have been either repressed or erased from the canon. I don’t want to simply add them to the canon, though. I’m arguing for a much larger transformation. For my next project, for example, I’m editing an expanded anthology of writings produced in the workshops led by Celes Tisdale inside Attica after the uprising. Many of these poems have existed only in Tisdale’s closet for the past forty-five years; others were published in a small anthology by Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press in the mid-1970s, but they have been out of print for decades.
We’re hoping to have the Poems from Attica anthology out by next summer, just in time for the 50th Anniversary of the Attica uprising. Poetry played a significant role in those times. I want to, as you say, “shake some of our attachments” to the literary community that has yet to deem these writings of significant value. If we are serious about dismantling the prison industrial complex and the school-to-prison pipeline—if we are serious about prison abolition—these writings from those who survived September 13, 1971, are incredibly important to that process. This is true for countless other similar anthologies from the 1970s up until today. It’s not about the literary canon; it’s about these much larger issues and the role that the poetry workshop has historically played and can continue to play in what we hope to be a more social and a more socialist future.
The name of this magazine—ATM—is an oxymoron. We are thinking about forms of care that are not inherently reliant on capital. I am curious about how stretching our imagination might expand our understanding of aid, and help us reconfigure structural dependencies. What pays you in this world? What do you have to pay?
Something that has really helped me think through these questions is the recent turn (or return, to be more precise) to social reproduction theory. Although writers like Angela Davis and Silvia Federici have been making these arguments for decades, recent books have really brought this important theory back to the forefront: Social Reproduction Theory, edited by Tithi Bhattacharya; Feminism for the 99%, co-authored by Bhattacharya, Cinzia Arruzza, and Nancy Fraser; Susan Ferguson’s Women and Work; and others. For so long, labor activists as well as poetry anthologies have targeted the site of production: the factory, the assembly line, the strike. Read most working-class poetry anthologies from the 1980s and 1990s and what you’ll find is a largely patriarchal poetry written by white male professors who worked in a factory for a few years as undergrads. Social reproduction theory offers a space for something different; it creates a space for us to look at the full twenty-four hour work day, those hours after we punch out from our jobs and struggle to reproduce ourselves (and our families) to return to work the next day. We hear about this so often at the WWS, especially in the writings of the members of Domestic Workers United who spend all day taking care of somebody else’s baby or somebody else’s elderly parent, then need to go home and do the exact same things again, for themselves and their own families. And, all too often, they have to do this for an unlivable wage in a city like New York.
What does “wicked” mean to you?
Capitalism is wicked. Seeing the unemployment rates soar as people lose healthcare during a global pandemic is wicked. Wicked is the unacceptable world desired by the global elite. And wicked will be the great social transformations we will rise up and fight for to rebuild the world again, not for the few, but for everyone.
You can read more #CoronavirusHaikus from WWS members here.
Liked this piece? Support Domestic Workers United, an organization of Caribbean and Latinx nannies, housekeepers, and elder caregivers in NY organizing for power, respect, and fair labor standards for all.
You can order Social Poetics directly from Coffee House Press here.