Up Close and Poetical: Mark Nowak

Welcome to the third in a series of profiles of featured poets here at Blog This Rock. The series, titled "Up Close and Poetical," aims to introduce you to our featured poets and their body of work. Other profiles can be found here. This profile was written by GMU student and Split This Rock intern Mike Reid.

Coal Mining is dangerous business; for as long as there has been mining there have been accidents. According to the US Department of Labor Mine Safety and Health Administration, there were 17 mine related fatalities in 2009 – and that is just in the US. Chinese officials reported 2,631 deaths in mining related incidents in 2009, down 18% from previous years. These are the types of numbers poet and social activist Mark Nowak wants to make people aware of. Nowak is the author of three works: Revenants focuses on the Polish-American subculture around his home town of Buffalo, New York; Shut Up Shut Down talks about the hard life of America’s steel workers and miners face in the “rust belt.” His newest work Coal Mountain Elementary mixes real life testimony from miners and rescuers from an accident in Sago, West Virginia with the American Coal Foundation’s curriculum for schoolchildren and newspaper articles and pictures of Chinese mining accidents.

Mark Nowak was born in Buffalo, New York and was strongly influenced by the “working class” culture he was surrounded by. When asked about his education, he says “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.” He was educated at Eerie Community College, where he got his first introduction to poetry.

Labor difficulties have been a major focus for Nowak, and he has been in support of and part of the dialogue for multiple different labor groups’ conflicts. Through the United Auto Workers and the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, he designed a transitional worker-to-worker poetry dialogue for Ford plants in the US and South Africa focusing on analyzing, communicating and expressing their thoughts and feelings on the job and effects of situations such as plant closings, downsizing and the tensions that can exist between workers and management. He also founded the Union of Radical Workers and Writers and through them has helped unionize a Border’s bookstore as well as produce essays and volumes about and even by the employees of big box chain and independent bookstores across the United States and Canada.

Mark Nowak currently serves as the Director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. He is also associated with Speak Out Now: The Institute for Democratic Education and Culture and has his own blog with writings and press releases about recent mining accidents at http://coalmountain.wordpress.com/. He is a featured poet at the 2010 Split This Rock Poetry Festival; Nowak will take part in a featured reading at 8:00 p.m. Thursday, March 11 at Bell Multicultural High School, and will help lead a panel entitled Documentary Poetics in the Langston Room at Busboys and Poets (14th and V) Friday, March 12 from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

Mike Reid is a sophomore at George Mason University.

Up Close and Poetical: Bruce Weigl

Welcome to the second in a series of profiles of featured poets here at Blog This Rock. The series, titled "Up Close and Poetical," aims to introduce you to our featured poets and their body of work. Other profiles can be found here. This profile was written by GMU student and Split This Rock intern Michael McGrath.

I’m often reminded of the difficulty many of us experience when trying to find the words to express what we’ve been through. This can be especially true when such experiences forced us to act in ways that were so overwhelmingly transformational; the person staring back from the mirror can look like a stranger. Someone who has found a way to make this type of experience accessible to others is poet Bruce Weigl.

The work of the Split This Rock Festival featured poet, Bruce Weigl, gives voice to the darker side of existence that often emotionally isolates us from society and even the humanity within us. As a veteran of the Vietnam War, Weigl was exposed to the demons of humanity through firsthand experience with horrors of war. In today’s modern America, the ghost which followed Weigl home from Vietnam are etched into the faces of modern warfighters returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For these individuals, Weigl’s work and subsequent career demonstrates hope for the future that even though their lives have changed, they have not lost that which makes them human. For those whom have never lived through such atrocities, Weigl’s work creates a vivid moment of accessibility that guides an audience to share in the emotional experience within his words.

Those new to poetry will find Weigl’s work quite different from the poetry they once dread from high school English classes. Rather than using abstract constructions, Weigl’s words flow off the page in a familiar manner that resembles the way thoughts flow freely through our minds as we experience the events of our own lives. Speaking about poetry, Weigl has said, “The poem itself, means that no matter however horrible the subject, we can somehow go beyond it as people, as human beings.” This connection with the average individual speaks to the importance of his work and the promise of poetry to empower every man, woman, and child.

While introducing Song of Napalm at the College of Southern Maryland’s 1991 Literary Collection Series, Weigl spoke of his struggles to reconcile the horrors he experienced as a Vietnam Veteran through the his craft as a poet. He said, “You learn that as a poet you want to make the words beautiful, yet your subject is so dark and terrible. I think the salvation comes in the belief… that somehow in the act of writing the poem, is an affirmation of life.” This notion of redemption is not unique to warfighters, and serves as a beacon for anyone struggling with the unique demons of their own pasts.

Bruce Wiegl will be a featured poet at the upcoming Split This Rock Festival in Washington, DC, March 10-13, 2010. Weigl is currently a Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities at the Lorain County Community College and has been an active member of the poetry community for quite some time. He has won multiple awards for his work which include such honors as the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Poet’s Prize from the National Academy of Poets, as well as two Pushcart Prizes. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for a poem he wrote in 1998, "Song of Napalm," which drew from his experiences as a warfighter during the Vietnam War.



Michael McGrath has recently come to appreciate poetry after he was dragged kicking and screaming to a live reading. His postings on this blog will be from the perspective of someone completely new to poetry, so he asks that he be forgiven if his views seem under-informed. Michael is a native to the DC Metropolitan area and has been involved in the LGBT community for more years than ought to be said publicly. He is senior at George Mason University majoring in communication with a minor in conflict analysis and resolution. And, if everything goes as planned, he will graduate in May 2010.

Up Close and Poetical: Jan Beatty

Welcome to the first in a series of profiles of featured poets here at Blog This Rock. The series, titled "Up Close and Poetical," aims to introduce you to our featured poets and their body of work.

Jan Beatty writes about class, joining poets like Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, and Jim Daniels among others in a tradition of telling working class stories from lived experience, tackling an American taboo even greater than race. In a 2008 interview, she told Classical QED 89.3 Pittsburgh that class runs through her books, Mad River, Boneshaker, and the latest, Red Sugar, often as an issue of survival. This concern with the lives of those without privilege reflects Beatty’s life and career. Although she currently runs the Mad Women in the Attic writing workshop at Carlow University, Beatty has lived a life of blue collar work. She has been a waitress, an experience that continues to inform her poems, perhaps most famously through “A Waitress’ Instructions on Tipping,” found in 1995’s Mad River. She worked as a rape counselor, briefly in a maximum security prison, and as a welfare case worker. Of the latter, she says, in an interview with KDKA Television, Pittsburgh, it was “tough work,” and she struggled to separate herself from her clients. This connectedness to the lives and battles of others, though, makes Beatty’s poems so moving.

However, when asked if her poems are biographical, or if they tell any one person’s real story, Beatty balks. “Ultimately,” she asserts, “it’s not so important what’s real, supposedly real, what isn’t, but what is the poem conveying.” And her poems convey a sense of the body, of Pittsburgh, and of brutality. There is too much “shying away” from brutality, Beatty told Bill O’Driscoll in an April 2008 interview in the Pittsburgh City Paper, particularly in a world where it is everywhere. She positions her latest book, Red Sugar, as a “tug of war between the romantic and the brutal,” differing from Boneshaker, her 2002 release, in that Red Sugar pushes deeper into the inside of the body. This is what inspires Beatty’s work, this “going deep and looking at the body, a woman’s body, a woman walking around the world.” In her poems, we see the experience of working women walking around Pittsburgh; the city and its economic hardships come alive in her poems, which are filled with such a sense of locality that Beatty might be mistaken for a regional poet. Make no mistake though: the Pittsburgh sensibility has as much to do with Beatty’s working class background as it does with poetic material.

Born in a foundling home, and adopted by a steelworker and his wife, Beatty was the first in her family to go to college. “It took me a long time to get to poetry because of class,” Beatty candidly declares. She wasn’t raised with the idea of becoming a poet or a writer as a career, but as a result, Beatty has made it part of her project to make poetry accessible. Her writing workshop is open to women of all ages, and she teaches at least one student in her 90’s. Her language is straightforward, clear; her poems have working class speakers. “People have a fear of poetry,” she states. “That’s one thing I want to do with Prosody [a poetry radio show and podcast Beatty hosts]… is say, ‘Look, this is for everybody’.”
This move toward accessibility doesn’t result in a reticence about tough issues. A review of Boneshaker in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette claims “rebelliousness becomes the ethos with which Beatty challenges American mores…. [She is] creating a world in which our cultural assumptions don’t hold up.” In Red Sugar, Beatty continues this resistance to norms. She says of her poem “I Saw One of Blake’s Angels,” “I want the speaker of the poems to be indicted most of the time. I hate this idea of the separate observer who’s not involved. I want interaction, I want communication. I want them to ram into each other. I want something to happen.”

Something happens indeed. Beatty’s poems indict the reader as well as the speaker; there’s no slipping away. We remain haunted and changed by what the poems witness.

Jan Beatty will be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 10-13, 2010. See the website for more details: www.splitthisrock.org.

Katherine Howell is the Blog Goddess and Communications and Development Assistant for Split This Rock Poetry Festival; she lives and writes in Washington, D.C. Her review of Jan Beatty's Red Sugar can be found here. Other reviews by Katherine can be found here.