 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Coal Mountain Elementary
Saturday Apr 18, 7PM @ Red Emma's
“Coal Mountain Elementary" is an imaginative and shocking reminder of what it means, in the most human and poignant terms, to be a miner, whether in this country or in China, or for that matter anywhere in the industrial world. It is also a tribute to miners and working people everywhere. It manages, in photos and in words, to portray an entire culture, the culture of the miner and his family, and it is a stunning educational tool.
A poet and labor activist heralded by Adrienne Rich for “regenerating the rich tradition of working-class literature,” Mark Nowak regularly leads transnational poetry workshops between American and international trade unions. The author of Revenants and Shut Up Shut Down, he is also a frequent contributor to the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog.
A singular, genre-defying treatise from one of America’s most innovative political poets, Coal Mountain Elementary remixes verbatim testimony from the surviving Sago, West Virginia miners and rescue teams, the American Coal Foundation’s curriculum for schoolchildren, newspaper accounts of mining disasters in China, and full-color photographs of Chinese miners by renowned photojournalist Ian Teh.
Mark Nowak is the author of the critically acclaimed debut book of poems Revenants (reviewed in Jacket 18 by Deborah Meadows) the editor of Xcp: Cross Cultural Poetics, and the co-editor of Visit Teepee Town: Native Writings After the Detours. He grew up in Buffalo, New York and lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he teaches at the College of St. Catherine and is active in the labour movement. He has also recently set up the Union of Radical Workers and Writers (URWW) to collaborate on common trade union issues with bookstore workers, librarians, writers and other workers involved in the book trade.
Nowak’s unique work in bringing innovative aesthetics and working-class communities into dialogue has resulted in a dynamic array of projects and publications. Following a model he designed at Ford plants in the United States and South Africa (through the United Auto Workers and the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa), Nowak’s transnational worker-to-worker poetry dialogues create a unique opportunity for working people to analyze, communicate, and express (through poetry) their ideas and emotions about their work, particularly in workspaces experiencing the effects of downsizing, plant closings, worker-management tensions, or strikes.
Comments