A Literal Coal Mountain in Newport News, Virginia

“Nowak imagines writing that has the power to change these I’s into a resonating We.“
In many ways Chinese society is inaccessible to most westerners. Sure, a huge percentage of the commercial products we consume come from the East. The “Made in China” tag is ubiquitous. Even so, the culture to a large extent a closed one.
That Nowak chooses to use Chinese coal mining disasters as mirror to the West Virginia mining disasters, reflects his concern with the “We” of these tragic phenomena. Nowak’s poetry “goes somewhere;” just as the coal, once mined, is transported throughout market territories.
Dominion Terminal Associates’ (DTA), pictured above offers as it official motto:

“Coal For The World”
World Class Terminal Providing Export and Coastwise Coal Loading Services, From Eastern Mines to ports all over the world!

For the world indeed. The disasters of the coal mining industry as catalogued by Nowak are accompanied by collateral damage throughout the world. The dust from each collapse, each explosion ends up somewhere, even outside of its localized sphere.
“…in Norfolk [Virginia], but the environmental impacts are also significant. Coal dust particulates, fine particles of powdered carbon, blow off the rail cars and conveyor belts, polluting back yards and potentially affected[sic] human health all the way to the Ghent neighborhood [an affluent suburb]. Norfolk Southern relies upon chemicals to suppress the movement of “fugitive” dust. Rail cars loaded with coal are not required to have covers or tarps comparable to what is required of loaded trucks traveling on Virginia highways.”
Norfolk Southern’s [railway company] Pier 6 predates clean air legislation and pretty much does its own thing with respect to dealing with the dust.
“In contrast, the coal loading terminal at Newport News [twenty minutes away from Norfolk] … was built in the 1980’s. To meet Clean Air Act limits on particulates… the rail car dumper at Newport News is enclosed and water is sprayed on the coal piles to reduce wind-blown dust.” (www.virginiaplaces.org/transportation/coaltran sport.html)
The story of uncovered railway cars loaded with coal passing through and standing in not so affluent neighborhoods (such as my hometown in Norfolk) deserves a separate treatment, but the effects of coal dust in these places surely created health hazards,
So, Nowak’s work, I believe, is one in which the “We” is designed to have us consider how we all are affected by what might seem like issues remote to our own, physically and psychologically. The reality though is that, that we are more alike than different and what emanates from the depths of the coal mine reaches the outer edges of humanity globally. The juxtaposition of the Chinese disasters with West Virginia disasters promotes a common language that these poems are symbolic of. A language that is clear to us even in Mandarin.

To be black, Citizen insists, is to be audibly, palpably, invisible, and the book is in large part a struggle to make that feeling tangible. As she notes, “a friend once told you there exists the medical term—John Henryism—for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure.”

This passage (from one of the reviews we read) resonates with me. So does the the poetry of Citizen. This writing articulates for me (in a very personal way) some of my own experiences as an American citizen. Rankine makes keen observations about everyday experiences in the “black experience” (for lack of better description). She is laying out here the myriad ways that  African Americans experience “double consciousness” and “otherness.” And beyond that, I believe, this work articulates the deleterious effects of cumulative exposure to linguistic (and otherwise),  negative purveyors of marginalization, erasure and invisibility. Her poetry bespeaks the feeling of a low-grade PTSD,  tinnitus,  an irritating, gnat-like presence attendant in every social transaction of a “subordinate” subculture.

One reviewer states that  “Rankine’s lyric is meditative interiority plunged into ice-cold history.” I can  appreciate this observation as my experience is that her poetry is akin to the stream of consciousness literary technique. This “interiority,” as the reviewer characterizes it,  emphasizes the psychology of the experiences Rankine describes. It also helps the reader to understand the necessity of this kind of hyper processing (and the stress that it induces) in the navigation of an ordinary life.

Don’t know what I’m doing wrong, but keep getting remarks like “that’s not a word I recognize.” I need

additional instruction. I have been playing with this for a while and things aren’t getting better.

I understand that Zolt’s poetry revolves around the conflict between Israel and Palestine and is therefore political. I see too that because she uses texts that already exist as raw material, her work is conceptual. None of this helps me when I get to the poem “L’eveil.”  This conceptual work is presented in a four quadrant grid and the idea is that the text in each quad is from a different newspaper. From this the reader is to get a better understanding of how a particular event is reported from four perspectives.

I looked for a way to connect the quads and noticed that in each there were words that relate to war. In “Day one;” for example; the words “conquering,” “war-war,” “Holocaust,” “air strikes.” Beyond this exercise, I am not sure how to make meaning of the work.

Like the author in our reading assignment for today, I am much more comfortable with the section “Innocent Abroad.” In this section, the poems at least appear in a visually familiar format on the page. In the poem “How to shape sacred time,” the “stanzas” appear in orderly five or six line groupings. But that’s about as close to traditional as the poem gets.

There is an ample sprinkling of the expected words such as “Palestine,” “fevers,” “displacement,” “catastrophe,” “destruction,” “Promised Land,” etc. With some effort, I am able to get into the spirit of the piece which again is somehow related to the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

I like the whimsical feeling in “Jews in space (a lunacy).”

This poem offers an intimate slice of Jewish culture as two women engage in

talk about a trip to the moon. When asked “where is this lebensraum?,” the respondent replies that although “Israel has great spas and bomb shelters…the moon’s the only place we’re safe from anti-Semitism.”

It seemed comical at first and loaded with allusions more easily deciphered by the Jewish community. I thought there was  humor in the lines “And my niece, who’s bringing a barbed-wire mezuzah, a dollar bill and a tiny/Torah scroll from Bergen-Belsen” until I learned that Bergen-Belsen was a concentration camp.

The Body of Bubbles: Necropsy Report

WHITE SANDS RESEARCH CENTER
Pathology Report
Necropsy
ID No. CA1376
Sex: Male
Species: Chimpanzee
Date of Death: 29 June 2015
Pathologists: Robert Mason, DVM and Gary Silbert, DVM, Ph.D.

GROSS EXAMINATION:
Dr. Frost called Dr. Mason approximately 10:30 a.m. 29 June 2015 with message that a chimpanzee was found dead and that it “appeared like bloat, the abdomen was reddish purple.”

No additional clinical data was provided with the animal.

The animal was taken from the 40 degree F morgue where it was placed on the necropsy table at approximately 1:30 p.m. June 29,  2015.

The tatoo on the animal’s inner right thigh was 1376.

The animal was a young adult male in good body flesh and hair coat. The animal was in rigor mortis. The mucous membranes of the mouth were a dark purple color (cyanotic). No oral lesions were present. The lower abdomen had liver mortis suggesting ventral recumbency post mortem. The skeleton appeared normal except for an occipital bone asymmetry. No signs of trauma were found externally.

A standard “Y” incision was made and the subcutaneous were examined and no lesions were found. The abdominal and thoracic viscera were examined and the stomach contained watery contents with no solid ingesta. The gastricmucosa and valves appeared normal. The entire digestive tract was examined and no lesions were found. The urinary bladder contained approximately 150ml of clear urine. The kidneys and urinary tract appeared normal. The adrenals, pancreas, spleen, and other abdominal tissues appeared normal.

The heart had multiple petechial hemorrhages on the epicardium especially the right ventricle. No other abnormalities were seen in the heart or associated great vessels.

The lungs did not collapse completely and diffuse red hepatization was in all lobes. The bronchial tree had thick cloudy (purulent exudate) tenacious fluid filling the lumens. Similar exudate was adhered to the lower tracheal wall. The structures of the oral cavity and pharynx appeared normal.

The cranial cavity was opened and the meninges over the entire brain was cloudy with a purulent exudate. The meninges of the spinal cord had a similar appearance.

Bacterial cultures were taken of the meninges and bronchi. Samples representative of all organ systems were collected in buffered formalin.

Gross Diagnoses:

Pneumonia, acute, suppurative, diffuse, all lobes of the lung, etiology_Streptococcus pneumoniae_.

Meningitis, suppurative, diffuse, meninges of brain and spinal cord, etiology_Streptococcus pneumoniae.

Comments:
The presence of suppurative meningitis with pneumonia is most commonly caused by pyogenic bacteria but can also be caused by mycoplasma and other less common organisms. Samples of brain was frozen at -70 C for additional etiologic study if the bacterial cultures and histological examination of collected tissues do not result in isolation and identification of a probable pathogen.  Tests were also ordered of any isolated pathogens.

Note:
_Streptococcus pneumoniae_ subsequently isolated from the bronchus and brain and had identical antibiotic sensitivity profiles suggesting high probability that the animal had a primary pneumonia that extended to meninges.

Male Genital System:  The  male genitalia system is unremarkable.

Robert Mason, DVM, Gary Silbert, DVM, Ph.D.

Fiona Banner’s writing is appealing to me because of the visual style that she writes in. There is an aesthetic “cleaness” (for lack of a better word) that I find attractive. I am referring first of all the block style of writing as evident in the piece from her book The Nam. The work seems to be written in a dispassionate tone. The reporter simply reports what she sees. But the work reveals the Banner’s selective creative processes by her focus on certain stimuli as opposed to others. The following passage, for example, generated some insight:

Stuff falls from what’s left of the trees, really slowly, it’s black and just floats down behind the face. The fire has nothing left to burn but it burns on anyway, so orange. He takes another drag. The whole picture fades out, apart from one raging fire in the middle. A helicopter flies in from the left then another from the right, they cross right in the middle.

The writer’s choice of the word “Stuff” is interesting. The writer’s attitude is extremely casual about whatever it is that is falling. The writer might have been more descriptive here, but her  own poetics push through unconsciously perhaps. Likewise, when “A hand appears in front of it,” no description is offered of the hand.  She does use “really slowly” to describe how the stuff falls. Apart from that the piece follows the  this happens and then that happens format.

I took a look at Banner’s website and found the installation artwork “Glass.”  This work, too, reflects what I feel is a “cleaness.” It is obviously transparent, yet it establishes a presence in the installation space. It does nothing to contaminate its environment and is beautiful in an artsy sort of way.

Silem Mohammad’s flarf poetry is a confusing concept to me. I won’t go so far as to say what is expressed in our reading that “… Flarf and Conceptual Poetry are fucking stupid, ”but the idea does give me pause. What I like about it is that it is an ecologically friendly medium. There is something valuable about taking what is already there and creating something new and hopefully interesting. At this point, however, I am not sure that I have a significant appreciation for this technique; unless I’m missing something.

N. Philips writing is extremely interesting to me because of the history she works with. She takes an actual historical event and creates stories or poems of it that have to be reconstructed almost on a spiritual level in order to be understood. Her work, as our reading suggests, creates the sense that we can’t really know what really happened in the situation, but there is enough there to help us understand that something unspeakably horrible has happened.

Thought this would be a piece of cake. I mean my perusal of Brathwaite’s work. We have a few things in common. I am always interested other perspectives of the diaspora.   What I find is that there seems no central theme to this collection of poems. It is a collection that reports on different matters and with different levels of intensity. The tone in the poem Colombe describes Columbus the explorer. The narrator in the poem observes the explorer come ashore on what is a pristine landscape. The language portends of the catastrophe that follows Columbus’ voyages. I found the imagery of the crabs scattering at his approach very effective in foreshadowing the plunder that was y sure to come.  In Duke, the poet pays tribute to the musician Duke Ellington describing his hands as “alligator skins.” But the tone is one of admiration:  “the old man’s hands are striding through/ the keyboard sidewalks alleyways & ages/from/ Shaka spear and guinea Bird/to/ Caribbean stilt dance/ veve/masquerade….”  p27  This poem is like a musical gumbo with references to Bessie Smith, New Orleans, cymbals, trombones. The poem ends playfully with a nod to the transformative power of music: “& look/ the old man’s alligator hands are young.” “Letter Sycorax” was a fun poem to read. Although it is written in “nation language,” some of it is easy to decode. The poet plays a lot here with the font size and style and the effect is that it holds the reader’s interest. “Soweto” begins ominously: “Out of this roar of innumerable demons/hot cinema tarzan sweat/rolling moth ball eyes yellow teeth/cries of claws slashes clanks.”  Not a happy day at the park here. The poem does not disappoint. There are images of “daughters lost,” “stripped skin,” “hunger of bones,” and many dark scenarios. But the poem is an effective commentary on the atrocity of Soweto.

Coincidental with the advent of the word processor, Brathwaite seems to have developed the “Sycorax Video Style” of writing. To what do you attribute the poets need to evolve from his already effective poetics to this more visual representation?

Why does the poet dislike the term “dialect” in relation to the language of his work? Why is Brathwaite more comfortable with the term “Nation Language”?

How does the Sycorax style affect your reading and interpretation of some of Brathwaite’s poetry?

Does this poet think it important to be adhere rigidly to the printed version of his work? How does this play out in his readings?

I am relieved that it is enough for this assignment to “’appreciate the concepts more easily than the actual performance” because reading “Traffic” after a page or so felt like an exercise in futility.” I did experience a voyeuristic moment in “listening” to the reports from a geographic area I am unfamiliar with. References to bridges and other landmarks I have heard of was also interesting. I thought about the traffic reports from the area I live in and how similar the reports are in tone. I was impressed by how different geographical regions have similar concerns and how these concerns suggest the commonality of all of humanity in the universal sense. I looked for something that would hold my attention until the end of the document. I examined the structure and noticed the incremental timing of the reports. I was encouraged when I read Goldsmith’s comment: “My books are better thought about than read. They’re insanely dull and unreadable; I mean, do you really want to sit down and read a year’s worth of weather reports. … I don’t.”

I can relate. As Goldsmith suggests, “to dip in and out of” is useful in navigating some of this text. I might read the report of 2:11 and not again until 12:41. In doing so, I am skimming to see if anything unusual (for traffic reports) is on the horizon. Not finding anything outside of the ordinary, this reader is resigned to the fact that ordinariness is all there is here.

What is the point?  Based on the readings for today, conceptual writing/poetry is about taking what is already there and changing the context in order to create something interesting if not new.

This concept didn’t work so will with the Michael Brown situation. I think that after this, Goldsmith will include an additional dimension to his theory. That is, he might give more consideration to the sensitivity of audiences and how they may be  affected by topical and potentially incendiary issues before performing and publishing.

Like many others who have thought about the piece “Michael Brown’s Body,” I was curious about Goldsmith’s reordering of the autopsy report to end with the state of Michael Brown’s geni­­­­­talia. Since the end of a piece is a place of prominence, what was the strategic rationale for this showcase psychologically or otherwise? This manipulation of the text has at least the effect of generating/perpetuating this discussion. It is, of course, impossible to ignore the hearkening to that lingering colonial-tinged, racist stereotype concerning the genitalia of the African American male; a by-product of either the commodification of the black body or plain and irrational envy.

“The Cape” evoked in me wistful feelings of a lost past. The use of black and white underscores (as the writer notes) the datedness of the construction. The photo of the solitary figure on the beach contributes to this tone of wistfulness. The figure on the beach suggests also the cold, colorless world of cape living.

Irretrievable loss is symbolized by the insert in motion of the eroding shoreline. The effect of these embedded motion shots is that the reader is always on the lookout for what else might be in the frame. The drawn maps  have motion also and have the effect of adding some life to a dry presentation. I am confused about the letters that appear: Qs. The staircase down to “the black and white beach”  is haunting and leads to nowhere or everywhere else depending on interpretation.

Carpenter’s relationship with her uncle is given light treatment. She wanted him to teach her to whistle, but that never happened. She inserts a lesson from some obscure source. The recorded lesson is quite thorough and is embedded under text about her uncle.

Contour maps and satellite maps and details related to maps appear frequently in this work. Outside sources were helpful in understanding some of this. In the end, the writer suggests that the reader need not take all of this so seriously because most of the imagery is inauthentic; that is “Cape Cod is a real place, but the events and characters of THE CAPE are fictional. The photographs have been retouched. The diagrams are not to scale.“

In “And by Islands” recreates the sense of the placement of islands on a vast expanses of water. The background reminded me of the graph paper used in geometry class. The writer used repetition of “Islands are…,” “They are paragraphs,” “Isolated writing,” and “The castaway….” I learned from internet source that these lines all refer to other, well-known works (intertextuality).

The block of text which refreshes every few seconds simulates ocean waves washing ashore with a little something different caught within each time.

The visual field has markings that look like little islands. There is a piece of an unsophisticated map and a prominently placed compass along with nautical notations.

I found “In Absentia” a whimsical and fun piece. It is somehow an exercise in surveillance suggesting that even when you are not in a given place, observation is still possible. The satellite map allow readers to zoom in and out of neighborhoods and  to open ads (some in English, some in French) for housing for rent. Maps of course are central to this piece.