Social Poetics

Mark Nowak

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781566895675
• eBook ISBN: 9781566895750
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

A people’s history of the poetry workshop from a poet and labor activist heralded by Adrienne Rich for “regenerating the rich tradition of working-class literature.”

Social Poetics documents the imaginative militancy and emergent solidarities of a new, insurgent working class poetry community rising up across the globe. Part autobiography, part literary criticism, part Marxist theory, Social Poetics presents a people’s history of the poetry workshop from the founding director of the Worker Writers School. Nowak illustrates not just what poetry means, but what it does to and for people outside traditional literary spaces, from taxi drivers to street vendors, and other workers of the world.

Notes

Chapter 00. Social Poetics (An Introduction)

1. Langston Hughes, “My Adventures as a Social Poet,” Phylon 8, no. 3 (Third Quarter, 1947), 205.

2. For more on Langston Hughes’s interactions with various leftist organizations of the time, see, for example, James Smethurst, The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930–1946 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), and William Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). For Hughes’s experiences in the former Soviet republics, see Zohra Saed, ed., Langston Hughes: Poems, Photos & Notebooks from Turkestan (New York: Lost & Found [CUNY], 2015). In his final notebook entry, documented in Saed’s volume, Hughes writes on the social(ist) transformations he witnessed in his travels across central Asia: “A present of trial and error, to be sure, good things done and bad things—but what a social change. The land belonging to the poor people, and the palaces belonging to the poor people, and the earth and the whole Soviet sky belonging to the poor people—poor people no longer because they own the world. Of course, if you do not care about poor people, you do not care about these changes” (Saed, 39).

3. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997), xvi.

4. Meridel Le Sueur, Worker Writers (Minneapolis: West End Press, 1982 [1939]), unpaginated.

5. Amiri Baraka, Home: Social Essays (New York: William Morrow, 1966), 167.

6. Baraka, Home, 170.

7. Steve Chawkins, “Amiri Baraka Dies at 79; Provocative Poet Lauded, Chided for Social Passion,” Los Angeles Times, January 9, 2014, http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-amiri-baraka-20140110-story.html.

8. I’ll discuss Ngũgĩ’s prison diary and the play that landed him in prison in more detail in chapter 02.

9. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Writers in Politics: Essays (London: Heinemann, 1981), xii.

10. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-Colonial Kenya (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1983), 30.

11. Ngũgĩ, Barrel, 41, 44.

12. Ngũgĩ, Barrel, 51.

13. Ngũgĩ, Barrel, 59.

14. Ngũgĩ, Barrel, 65.

15. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Oxford: James Currey, 1981), 3.

16. Ngũgĩ, Barrel, 69.

17. C. L. R. James and Grace C. Lee [Boggs], with Cornelius Castoriadis, Facing Reality (Detroit: Bewick Editions, 1974 [1958]), 5.

18. See, for example, Raúl Salinas, Raúl Salinas and the Jail Machine: My Weapon Is My Pen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

19. Nikky Finney, “Personal Is Political: Toni Cade Bambara of Simpson Avenue,” The Feminist Wire, November 21, 2014, http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/11/writing-and-storytelling.

20. See, for example, Tom Woodin, “‘More Writing than Welding’: Learning in Worker Writer Groups,” History of Education 34, no. 5 (2006), 561–78. Also, see Tom Woodin, Working-Class Writing and Publishing in the Late Twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).

21. See, for example, Ryan Wong, “A Brief History of the Art Collectives of NYC’s Chinatown,” Hyperallergic, February 7, 2017, https://hyperallergic.com/330442/a-brief-history-of-the-art-collectives-of-nycs-chinatown.

22. See, for example, Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero, eds., Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings (New York: Morrow, 1975); Miguel Algarín and Bob Holman, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (New York: Holt, 1994); and Urayoán Noel, In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014).

23. Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 29.

24. See, for example, Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983); Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013 [1983]); and many others.

25. Susan Ferguson, “Capitalist Childhood, Anti-Capitalist Children: The Social Reproduction of Childhood,” unpublished paper cited by Tithi Bhattacharya in her introduction to Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, ed. Tithi Bhattacharya (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 2.

26. Nancy Fraser, “Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism,” in Social Reproduction Theory, ed. Tithi Bhattacharya, 35.

27. M. M. Bakhtin, “From Notes Made in 1970–71,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern M. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 155.

28. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “The World Social Forum and the Global Left,” Politics & Society 36, no. 2 (June 2008): 257.

Chapter 01. A People’s History of the Poetry Workshop: Watts, New York City, Attica

1. E. P. Thompson, “History from Below,” Times Literary Supplement, April 7, 1966, 269–80. This quote originally appeared in Thompson’s preface to his monumental study The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966 [1963]). The “poor stockinger” quote appears on page 12 in Thompson’s book.

2. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 00. Social Poetics (An Introduction)
• 01. A People’s History of the Poetry Workshop: Watts, New York City, Attica
• 02. People’s Workshops: Kenya, Nicaragua, South Africa
• 03. New Conjunctions
• 04. Imaginative Militancy
• 05. Transnational Poetry Dialogues
• 06. First-Person Plural
• 07. Consonance
• 08. Emergent Solidarities
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Permissions
• Index
• Funder Acknowledgments
• The Publisher’s Circle of Coffee House Press