| Shut
Up Shut Down
Reviews
Amiri Baraka,
from the afterword:
“Nowak relies on his life as a person…with
the sturdy underpinning of class…and brings it
back, humming. And sleek with seeing and hearing! We
get a sharp eye, a literary & philosophical broadening
of what used to be labeled ‘working class poetry,’…deepened
with a hard but contemporary lyric and narrative. A
much needed parade.”
Adrienne
Rich:
“I could liken this book to a verse drama or film
in which voices mix and cross, documentary history meshes
with dialogue, photography is framed and given meaning
by language. But the cumulative effect of Shut Up
Shut Down outdistances such description. The several
long poems that make up this book build into each other
with devastating force and understatement, breaking
poetic boundaries, regenerating the rich tradition of
working-class literature. Nowak is a highly gifted and
conscious artist, carrying, like the oldest bards, a
group narrative which must be told if his listeners
are to understand who they are and on what their lives
depend—and this, in our time, means all of us.”
David
Roediger:
“‘Labored’ is the last adjective most
artists would want to see applied to their work. But
Mark Nowak's Shut Up Shut Down threatens to
change that. Elegant and inventive in form—mixing
plays and photography with poetry—it is labored
in that other best sense of the word. Nowak captures
the lives, freedom dreams, hurts and struggles of working
women and men amidst repression, racial division and
deindustrialization. Songs and statistics mix promiscuously
in verses deeply informed by a knowledge of labor history
and an ear for working class speech. This is a work
as powerful in its hope as in its indictment of misery.”
Rodrigo
Toscano:
“As the (historical) segmentation & atomization
of the American Working Class continues, a potentially
debilitating neutralization of its culture occurs. Its
artistic trajectories are not only constantly under
siege (erased, minimized, distorted) but also exploitatively
appropriated, repackaged, and all-too-often defused
of their radical democratic potential. It is in the
very midst of this cultural-political crisis that new
forms of intelligence, resilience, and social innovation
suddenly rebound onto the stage. Mark Nowak’s
writing is part and parcel of this process. Shut
Up Shut Down’s carefully textured narratives
are not of the ‘recovery’ variety, but rather
are born of a bold projection of a class’s needs
and desires. Ethnographic insight and methodology is
coupled with contemporary techniques of narrative sampling
(with all the funkiness that comes with it). The result
is a strident constructivist aesthetics that dares to
speak to its own of a democratic vision, while at the
same time putting the Ruling Interests on notice. Now,
that’s entertainment!”
Also
Available by this Author:
|
