Mark Nowak

Personal History
Nowak grew up on the east side of Buffalo, NY. He didn’t read poetry, or even consider it as an art form until he started attending Erie Community College. When asked about his education, he said the following, “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.”

Influences
Writing did not come easily to him. While studying for his masters, a professor even tried to have him kicked out because he “couldn’t stomach” the way he “wrote”. He did connect with one teacher though. In his second high school, a man named Michael Pikus “saw my interest in punk, electronic music, etc., and suggested I look into the existentialists: Kafka, Camus, Sartre. And because of him, his influence on me, I still believe that one teacher can make a difference in a kid’s life.”

Nowak has listed other artistic influences, including Tillie Olsen (a socialist writer and activist), and a number of synth electronic musicians from the 70s and 80s. One of his favorites, Kraftwerk, is known for their use of sampling, a process that translates seamlessly to Nowak’s poetry. “I grew up very close to the Moog factory in Buffalo. And when I first came across Kraftwerk’s records, I was totally hooked. I got a Moog Rogue synthesizer in high school and started teaching myself Kraftwerk songs. And then the release of Afrika Bambaataa’s sampling of Kraftwerk on “Planet Rock,” the growing use of turntables and sampling and sound collage with artists like Jam Master Jay. That music, the music that grew out of it in the mid-1980s (Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Detroit Techno, Public Enemy/Terminator X, etc.), the discs being released by Chicago’s Wax Trax records, and more recently trance, drum and bass, acid jazz... The tape edits, the synthetic beats, the samples... Plunderphonics, Negativland, the Tape-beatles...”

Personal Work
His first experiment in sampling occurred while reading Gwendolyn Brooks in college. While trying to emulate her style, he found himself quoting a newspaper article he’d read about a child being set on fire by his father. He identifies this poem as his first real experience as a poet. His work is considered to be postmodern, although he doesn’t identify with the movement because of the “dominance of white voices”. (He is Polish-American, and calls himself “white ethnic”) He believes that his poetry is “synthetic” in process, not “organic”.

When asked how he formed his poetry, Nowak had this to say: “Fred Wah got me very interested in the haibun, and so my new book, Shut Up Shut Down, includes experiments with the possibilities of that form in relationship to photo-documentary, labor history, etc. In one of these serial pieces, “Hoyt Lakes/Shut Down,” I wanted to see if I could find a way to replicate Marxist base/superstructure in poetic form; so I worked at developing haibun structures in which the ideological information at the top of the poem would balance precariously above the direct economic impact as base—represented by the number of taconite miners who lost their jobs in the Iron Range towns in northern Minnesota. I’m also interested in finding ways to get poems out to readers beyond those who come to bookstores and college campuses. So I’ve started experimenting with workers’ choruses, verse plays, and the like, and then finding ways to produce those at places like the UAW Local 879 Union Hall across from the Ford Plant in Minnesota, where the audience is a mixture of writers/theatre people and autoworkers from the Ford Plant.” In recent years, Nowak has been helping to establish a progressive high school in Chicago. The school uses the city as a classroom, providing students with internships and nontraditional workshops with graffiti artists and Def Jam poets.

Mark Nowak will be visiting UCSC on November 4, 2009 at 7 pm in the Humanities Lecture Hall (Hum 206).