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Coal Mountain Elementary

by Mark Nowak, Ian Teh (Photographer)

3.91 of 5 stars 3.91 · rating details · 58 ratings · 10 reviews

A singular, genre-defying treatise from one of America’s most innovative political poets, Coal Mountain Elementary remixes verbatim testimony from the surviving Sago, West Virginia miners and rescue teams, the American Coal Foundation’s curriculum for schoolchildren, newspaper accounts of mining disasters in China, and full-color photographs of Chinese miners by renowned p...more

Paperback, 190 pages

Published April 1st 2009 by Coffee House Press

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Jul 05, 2010 Jesse Houle rated it 2 of 5 stars

Recommended to Jesse by: Jenny Jade Albert

Twas a quick quick read. Also a rather depressing one. The last article is that of a suicide, two suicides actually. This ending is typical of many of these artsy, wake-up kind of books and while it succeeds in getting me pissed and angry and interested, it doesn't do anything constructive with that anger which bothers me. Painting a picture is good. Painting a depressing picture is important when shitty stuff is happening in the world. But leaving us to only feel overwhelmed, depressed and hope...more Twas a quick quick read. Also a rather depressing one. The last article is that of a suicide, two suicides actually. This ending is typical of many of these artsy, wake-up kind of books and while it succeeds in getting me pissed and angry and interested, it doesn't do anything constructive with that anger which bothers me. Painting a picture is good. Painting a depressing picture is important when shitty stuff is happening in the world. But leaving us to only feel overwhelmed, depressed and hopeless is not constructive and doesn't help any cause very well.

On my way from GA to Jamestown, NY I spent a night in Charleston, WV. There I attended a party full of those youthful activist types and had some great conversations. A consistently breached subject was coal... from mountaintop removal, to safety, to the "big lie of clean coal" a lot of coal was discussed.

With those discussions still knockin' around my noggin as I rolled into Jamestown, I found myself discussing them and Jenny recommended this book to me. I found it painted a very good picture- a portrait of coal-mining disasters. I guess, beyond the book not providing any constructive conclusions, I just wish it was a little more complete and that it covered more angles.

It very cleverly juxtaposes three things: news reports from coal mine disasters in China (which apparently happen constantly and kill many thousands every year), verbatim firsthand accounts of a coalmine disaster in WV, and the lesson plans of three lessons in a non-profit organization's curriculum for WV coal-mining towns' K-8 students.

Perhaps most telling were the lesson plans. I feel like the other descriptions were used to wrench your guts and provide a context for what's being taught to kids in these towns. And I'm guessing they're assuming you'll conclude that there's a great deal of misinformation and assimilation going on- brainwashing if you will of these kids, to help perpetuate the business-serving, human-exploiting coal-mining industry.

My issue though, is that in the simplistic approach only 3 lesson plans are used. It is not explained who funds or runs the non-profit and it does not explain the typical approach of the teachers which teach the curriculum. So while one can obviously see that the lessons overlook some pretty hefty issues by instructing kids to "mine for chocolate chips in their cookies" as a way of learning the profit-loss agenda of coal companies, it isn't clear what else is being taught or how it's all being taught.

I also thought a very interesting contrast was shown between the Chinese and American stories. The WV accounts were all of one disaster, all firsthand. The accounts from China were all news reports and covered a barrage of disasters over a year's time. I wonder how much different or maybe how similar the stories would seem if the accounts were given from the opposite perspectives. Are the Chinese more prepared, more desensitized to coal disasters because it happens so frequently and on such a mass scale? Are Americans taking for granted that we have such rare occurrences. Are Chinese companies covering up more than American ones?

I could go on but for now I don't have time. It's a valuable read but in some ways it frustrated me. I'd certainly love to discuss the book or coal mining in general with anyone who wants to.

Maybe it's my current mood, but art such as this that functions solely as a depiction bothers me twofold. It has the chance to function as (and often does) very biased propaganda that only perpetuates the dangerous and destructive cycle of misinformation. It also seems like a possibly lazy, but at least non-constructive way to pull at heartstrings and get people upset (perhaps, dare I say it, to sell copies or just to ease one's confused and overwhelmed conscience) without providing them a balanced context or a good springboard to do anything valuable with everything that they have good reason to be upset about and want to change. I hope this book doesn't only do what it could to some, which is extend the stagnancy so common in individual's feeling angry with no outlet, feeling helpless against big issues and big companies.(less)

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Apr 30, 2009 Joe rated it 5 of 5 stars

Coal Mountain Elementary is ostensibly labeled as poetry, but it is also a radical sort of reportage or (and this title has always seemed cumbersome) "creative non-fiction." The book is a selection of photographs by Ian Teh and excerpts from testimonials from the 2006 Sago Mine disaster that killed 12, newspapers covering Chinese mining disasters in 2005 and 2006, and lesson plans prepared by the American Coal Foundation to teach elementary, middle, and high school students about coal, mining, a...more Coal Mountain Elementary is ostensibly labeled as poetry, but it is also a radical sort of reportage or (and this title has always seemed cumbersome) "creative non-fiction." The book is a selection of photographs by Ian Teh and excerpts from testimonials from the 2006 Sago Mine disaster that killed 12, newspapers covering Chinese mining disasters in 2005 and 2006, and lesson plans prepared by the American Coal Foundation to teach elementary, middle, and high school students about coal, mining, and coal culture. I say that what Nowak does is select and not collage because the units of prose that are excerpted are paragraphs and each excerpt occupies its own page. Collage would suggest more disjunction than seems to be intended and more of an effacing of the source of the collaged material. Compare an excerpt from Nowak's previous book, Shut Up Shut Down--

It was a mill town, he says, singing "mill" with a blend of affection and pity. A trace (far removed): my grandfather stepping off the Clinton Street bus and into a Kaisertown gin mill, Bethlehem Steel (still) scratched across his face. A mill town is not a goddamn residential neighborhood. Loading crates unloaded, oil drums bent and empty, glass shattered (past tense verbs) where the window frames (never/the/less) remain. When I walk on the sidewalk (here, or hear), I know when it's heaving from tree roots.

--to a page in Coal Mountain--

Then after that, we just walked around. I had a family member come and check on me. I walked over to the pit and just stared at the pit for a long time, just hoping to see them walk out.

Here Nowak lets the source interviewees speak more for themselves, for their voices to become fuller. While the first passage reveals all kinds of authorial interventions into the source text and through the friction between the different texts at play leaves the reader with more space to play in and make meaning, Coal Mountain is far more interested in routing its reader to one set of disjunctions, that between one passage and the next--between expressive pictures and the bare bones of lesson plan instructions, between the dramatic arc of testimony in regard to Sago rescue efforts and the flatness of disaster as reported by newspapers. It's tempting to say that Shut Up Shut Down is the more complex text and that Coal Mountain is less complex and more didactic. But it's Coal Mountain's dedication to a singular task that makes it what it is: it wants to tell you through its various strategies that the job of coal mining is frequently deadly, mine owners are negligent, and that there are forces out there that want you to ignore this aspect of the industry. And, perhaps more importantly, through the litany of contemporary Chinese mining disasters sustained over 176 pages, that the exploitation of the labor of miners is an ongoing problem.

Phil Levine is the poet of labor for a number of generations of readers. However, his poems on the working class and the industrial landscape of Detroit are increasingly flooded in a sepia light. As we move forward, the conditions of the laborers in his poems seem more of a thing of the past. Similar poems written from the position of the lyric I further bury labor into the past and as a condition which the writer of the poem has overcome--something that forms a piece of the speaker's narrative. Or, worse, they find equivalences between the labor of writing and the labor of the body. Nowak goes to great lengths to give present the voices of the poems' workers within a narrative that, instead of transcending the state of the heavy-industry worker, leads us to confront its most miserable aspects:

I tried to check everybody's--I checked everybody's pulse. I felt for a pulse. And I think most of them had hemorrhaged, hemorrhaged out, and there was some physical evidence there that you could see. I mean, that I thought, you know, with the hemorrhaging, most of them had hemorrhaged and some of them, there was foam, a lot of foam, and a pulse. They were icy cold. And they appeared to be deceased.

It does seem (as blurbs claim) that Nowak is reactivating another way of writing about work in American poetry and documentary. If you're at all interested in work, documentary, even maybe ethnography(?)/folklife(?) in poetry, this is certainly worth your time.(less)

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Aug 20, 2009 Ian rated it 3 of 5 stars

I really, really wanted to like this book more -- especially after being bowled over by "Shut Up Shut Down." But, for me, the piece just didn't fully gel.

The text alternates long quotations from Chinese newspaper article about mine disasters, with testimony from the Sago mine disaster, with photographs taken both in West Virginia and China, with school lessons put together by coal industry advocates. And while it seemed a smart way to break up the text, it ended up with the feel of a loose colla...more

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Oct 16, 2012 Alyson Hagy rated it 5 of 5 stars

I've read this book twice, and it still has its grip on me. Nowak has done some remarkable work creating poetry from official documents/interviews/photographs/found texts in other books, but COAL MOUNTAIN ELEMENTARY is his masterwork so far, in my opinion. The interplay among the news stories from China (regarding a series of horrific mining accidents over a few months in 2005-6), the edited transcripts of testimony from the Sago Mine explosion in the U.S., and the "school assignments" designed...more

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Mar 05, 2013 Allan rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book had me at its design. It overlays a coal mining community´s school math curriculum with excerpts from news clippings of coal mining disasters in China, along with more detailed reports of a coal mining disaster in the US. Powerful material each in their own right, but the juxtapositioning layers nuance along with the powerfully emotive history of tragedies that encompass coal mining.

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Dec 10, 2012 Sydney added it

WOW!!!! I took a workshop on writing collage text and the instructor recommended this book that uses "found" language. As someone who collects found objects, I immediately ordered and read this book--in one sitting. The mixture of court transcript, news coverage, and a children's text book is pure poetry. And profound!

I immediately wanted everyone else to read it too.

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Jul 09, 2009 Katie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Nowak translates the resolve of his daily activism on behalf of working people into art in all three of his books of poetry, Shut Up, Shut Down, Revenants, and his most recent book, Coal Mountain Elementary. Deceptively simple, Coal Mountain Elementary combines photographs, newspaper articles, eyewitness testimony, and parts of an elementary school curriculum to relay the human consequences of coal mining. The book reveals how people across the globe are daily dehumanized to support an unsustain...more

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Jan 11, 2010 Joe Brunory rated it 3 of 5 stars

i liked the simple layout, the free form presentation that was more questioning than accusing. an excellent subject though, coal mining workers in u.s. and china, their work, their families, their deaths, the industry.

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Oct 10, 2009 Karen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Coal Mountain Elementary is one of those books I really want to write about, but have a hard time doing so. It’s not so much a book of poetry, but a collage of words and photographs. The book is a collection of reports and mini-memoirs of mining disasters in China juxtaposed against the memories of those involved in the Sago Mine Disaster here in the United States. Nowak also includes poems based on lesson plans involving coal mining history and communities. Regular readers of this blog know my...more

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Dec 04, 2012 Molly rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: poems, claimstaking

Orchestrated rather than written--a collection of accounts, with photographs, testimonies and newspaper clippings, along with lesson plans, contrasting, calling attention to privilege and deep neglect.

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Apr 08, 2013 Joel marked it as to-read

Mar 27, 2013 Countryblumpkin rated it 2 of 5 stars

Feb 19, 2013 Ali Freeman rated it 5 of 5 stars

Dec 26, 2012 Irina rated it 3 of 5 stars

Dec 26, 2012 Wendy added it

Shelves: poetry-library, documentary-poetry

Dec 11, 2012 Carin marked it as to-read

Dec 10, 2012 Joy Hoffman marked it as to-read

Dec 08, 2012 Martha marked it as to-read

Shelves: poetry

Apr 05, 2013 Cancercorp Humphrey rated it 4 of 5 stars

Nov 22, 2012 Daniel Flores rated it 2 of 5 stars

Nov 12, 2012 Brgstn marked it as to-read

Nov 10, 2012 Loretta marked it as to-read

Nov 06, 2012 Hannah rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-for-school, poetry

Oct 29, 2012 Ashley Kes rated it 3 of 5 stars

Oct 28, 2012 Alicia Farmer marked it as to-read

Oct 04, 2012 Spout Press added it

Sep 12, 2012 John Interior marked it as to-read

Jan 01, 2013 Abby Hagler rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry, read-in-2012

Sep 03, 2012 Dana marked it as to-read

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