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Few contemporary poets working in North America have written about labor with more commitment than Mark Nowak, who examines the impact of neoliberalism on the working class in each of his three books of poetry, Revenants (2000), Shut Up Shut Down (2004), and Coal Mountain Elementary (2009). Nowak was born into a working-class family and grew up in a deindustrializing Buffalo, New York. He not only publishes poetry, but has also conducted poetry workshops for worker-writers to facilitate “poetry dialogue” among the global working class. For example, in collaboration with the United Auto Workers and the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, he organized a writing workshop between Ford factory workers in St. Paul, Minnesota and Pretoria, and Port Elizabeth, South Africa.1
In his second book, Shut Up Shut Down (2004), Nowak cuts and splices together voices from US working-class history to document the damage produced by capital’s retreat from America’s northern industrialized cities. To compose the five poems that make up the book, he draws from a variety of sources, such as Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Industrial Facades, newspaper coverage of steel mill closures and the 1981 Air Traffic Controller strike, and Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Pena’s documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin? Sources are referenced on a Works Cited page following each poem, but within the body of the text, nothing is attributed and photographs are not labeled. Instead, visual clues, such as bold or italic, distinguish sources and voices.
Much of the criticism on Shut Up Shut Down has focused on Nowak’s relationship to the tradition of documentary poetry. Poet and critic Michael Davidson identifies the organizing theme of the poem as “one of framing” (2011, 42) through which the poet represents the impact of capital flight on the industrial cities of the northern United States. In another significant study, David Ray Vance coins the term “documentary frames” to situate Nowak within a documentary poetry framework that incorporates the remixing techniques of hip-hop in order to resist a characterization of labor as a “special interest” (2007, 340, 337). Both Jules Boykoff (2013) and Jeff Derksen (2009) discuss Nowak’s work from the standpoint of neoliberalism’s spatial logics, analyzing Revenants and Coal Mountain Elementary respectively. More recently, Gavin Goodwin (2016) has...