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Shut Up Shut Down
In the grand, narrative tradition of Gwendolyn Brooks and Edward Sanders, this riveting collection of poetic plays and photo-documentary poems exposes the human cost of corporate greed and gives voice to the growing crisis faced in communities across America. “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.”—Adrienne Rich Mark Nowak is the author of the critically acclaimed debut book of poems Revenants , the editor of Cross Cultural Poetics and the co-editor of Visit Teepee Native Writings After the Detours . He grew up in Buffalo, New York and lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he is active in the labor movement.
- GenresPoetry
161 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
October 20, 2023
pretty beautiful - favorite parts were the first section (frames), and the fictionalized, operatic francine michalek part. earned didacticism. learned a lot!
i wonder why didacticism is smth you have to earn - there's this weird balancing act of beautiful and useful (aesthetics and politics) that work like this has to manage - soooo interesting that nowak's career went from here > coal mountain elementary (less aestheticized disturbance of the original texts, less interesting to me as a result) > no longer writing and just running worker writers school (cool)
i wasn't as into the parts where the aestheticized disturbance/stitching together of texts was minimal, or where there wasn't a strong unifying concept like frames/capitalization
i didn't actually read like the last 20 pp
i wonder why didacticism is smth you have to earn - there's this weird balancing act of beautiful and useful (aesthetics and politics) that work like this has to manage - soooo interesting that nowak's career went from here > coal mountain elementary (less aestheticized disturbance of the original texts, less interesting to me as a result) > no longer writing and just running worker writers school (cool)
i wasn't as into the parts where the aestheticized disturbance/stitching together of texts was minimal, or where there wasn't a strong unifying concept like frames/capitalization
i didn't actually read like the last 20 pp
February 15, 2010
Last year, I read Mark Nowak's book, Coal Mountain Elementary, a work that is not so much a collection of poetry, but a collage of memoirs, interviews, and formal reports exploring the world of coal mining in both America and China. I was fascinated by this book -- so much so that I knew I had to travel back in publication time a bit and read Nowak's earlier book, Shut Up Shut Down.
Shut Up Shut Down is not for every poetry reader -- much like Coal Mountain Elementary, this collection is made up of personal interviews, ekphrastic poems, and found lists. In general, Shut Up Shut Down explores the effects of big business greed on the working class -- steel workers, retail workers, coal miners, etc... The book actually contains bibliographies citing source material. More than anything, Nowak's work reminds me of the work that Muriel Rukeyser did with her collection, The Book of the Dead, which documented the details of the Hawk's Nest Incident, an industrial incident where hundreds of miners died of silicosis.
Shut Up Shut Down is not for every poetry reader -- much like Coal Mountain Elementary, this collection is made up of personal interviews, ekphrastic poems, and found lists. In general, Shut Up Shut Down explores the effects of big business greed on the working class -- steel workers, retail workers, coal miners, etc... The book actually contains bibliographies citing source material. More than anything, Nowak's work reminds me of the work that Muriel Rukeyser did with her collection, The Book of the Dead, which documented the details of the Hawk's Nest Incident, an industrial incident where hundreds of miners died of silicosis.
August 12, 2009
Nowak is a booming giant. Working in the documentary style, he brings poetry back down to earth, into the mines, the shuttered steel mills, the picket line. Moreover, while contemporary poetics tinkers with identity politics, Nowak goes right for the taboo jugular: class. Oh wait, I forgot, there is no class struggle in America.
August 28, 2021
Amazing poetry! If you hate capitalism and think you don't like poetry, give this book a try.
This is a really good, captivating example of collage poetry - most of the text is pulled from, and modified, rearranged, torn up and put back together from, other publications. Some news stories, some interviews, some academic books, some photographs all come together to tell stories about labor, unions, and race & class oppression in creative and brilliantly interwoven ways. This collection plays with language, sentence structure, and the words of others to tell stories they may or may not have wanted to tell, to highlight similarities and meaning across time and space.
"Capitalization" was my favorite - a bitter interweaving of the story of a broken union strike in the 1930s, and Regan's breaking of the PATCO strike in the 80s. It was so well-done.
"June 19, 1982" was the other one that hit me most powerfully. I had heard the name "Vincent Chin" before, but I barely knew his story outside the broadest strokes - I didn't understand what the excerpts about unemployment and strip clubs in the poem had to do with anything... until I looked up the details of the event, and everything Nowak was writing about and the way he deployed a history of "unemployment" and the history of the US auto industry and the imagery of strip club commerce against the brutality of the violent attack clicked into place. IT was very, very good, and upsetting.
The whole collection was bitter and upsetting and powerful and intimate all at once in a way anti-capitalist pro-union labor art uniquely is.
This is a really good, captivating example of collage poetry - most of the text is pulled from, and modified, rearranged, torn up and put back together from, other publications. Some news stories, some interviews, some academic books, some photographs all come together to tell stories about labor, unions, and race & class oppression in creative and brilliantly interwoven ways. This collection plays with language, sentence structure, and the words of others to tell stories they may or may not have wanted to tell, to highlight similarities and meaning across time and space.
"Capitalization" was my favorite - a bitter interweaving of the story of a broken union strike in the 1930s, and Regan's breaking of the PATCO strike in the 80s. It was so well-done.
"June 19, 1982" was the other one that hit me most powerfully. I had heard the name "Vincent Chin" before, but I barely knew his story outside the broadest strokes - I didn't understand what the excerpts about unemployment and strip clubs in the poem had to do with anything... until I looked up the details of the event, and everything Nowak was writing about and the way he deployed a history of "unemployment" and the history of the US auto industry and the imagery of strip club commerce against the brutality of the violent attack clicked into place. IT was very, very good, and upsetting.
The whole collection was bitter and upsetting and powerful and intimate all at once in a way anti-capitalist pro-union labor art uniquely is.
June 2, 2018
These five documentary poems harness the energies of photography, narrative and dramatic form, syntactic fragmentation, anecdote and testimony, intertextuality, chronology and journalistic fact to enact the harmful march of capitalism over the backs of the working class. Although these fiery poems provide little room for optimism, they also provide models of human bravery and a method for potentially dismantling the false consciousness that keeps us all in our striated societal places.
Nowak has shown that poetry, in its multiplicity, in its ability to track many discourses at once, in its recognition of and departure from convention, in its relationship to time and to history, is an apt tool for dismantling oppressive hierarchies, for challenging the complacency that is complicity.
Nowak has shown that poetry, in its multiplicity, in its ability to track many discourses at once, in its recognition of and departure from convention, in its relationship to time and to history, is an apt tool for dismantling oppressive hierarchies, for challenging the complacency that is complicity.
Read
April 25, 2020Wow.
I read this in a single sitting.
I read this in a single sitting.
October 1, 2025
Each frame was *chefs kiss*
October 8, 2020
Powerful prose and poetry chronicling the fall of industrial America through greed and its effect on surrounding areas.
June 9, 2021
“Reading, too, / is class struggle.” (107)
Shut Up Shut Down paves the way for enactments of class struggle, by mobilizing its readers to participate in an alternative semiotic environment where they must grapple with matters of “organization” (or disorganization) on many levels (many dimensions, actually) of significance, flipping back and forth through the book to connect the dots and access the continuity of the work while personally navigating its ruptured surfaces. The textual meaning and clarity of this book have been systematically de-organized in a way that does not serve the reader’s sense of comfort or ease, and which creates an experience of disorientation that perhaps mirrors the systems in which working class people struggle to survive, systems which serve the invisible interests of capital and the owning class with little or no regard for tremendous deleterious impact. Conventional markers of textual organization such as the numbered lyric sequence are present, but rendered utterly vestigial and misleading, while narrative continuity gets linked (implicitly) to textual formatting, and the trajectory of the poem’s discourse gets deployed across pages and sections in stratified layers rather than sitting cohesively within their own totality of meaning.
I have recently seen such formal (syntactic) technologies of reframing in several other 21st century poets -- especially in Bhanu Kapil and Layli Longsoldier. I think that Mark Nowak’s approach bears a kinship with the methodologies of these other works, insofar as it is another case where eccentric syntactic structures are subjecting readers to the sort of structural oppression that the work simultaneously depicts on its semantic level. An ironical kind of “how-do-you-like-it-when-you-are-made-subject-to-this-disempowering-lens” effect is generated in these works, sensitizing the reader to the various acculturated forms of oppression that tend to hide within the poetics of empire.
The absence of any overt writerly self-expression in this work puts it closer to conceptual and anti-lyric poetries in some ways. By using bold and italics to stratify registers of meaning, by centering meaning around capitalization, bracketed text, and photographs, Novak minimizes audible or sonic qualities of voice and voicing in much of the work’s body. The impersonality of the pieces in this book, the fact that they do not marshall an “individual voice,” or call upon a persona narrator to frame their significance, the journalistic mode of address in place of more intimate speech acts, the cultural critique achieved by appropriating and re-presenting historical materials, the craft focus on (mostly) sifting historical events rather than enacting the ritual of the present moment, the presence of the photographs and research citations as raw materials from which Shut Up Shut Down is constructed… all of this contributes to a highly documentary, persuasive atmosphere.
Lyric persists, however, in the form of highly focused and critical word-play in overtly lyrical passages, which are stratified at the bottom portion of the body of each single-page subsection of “$00 / Line / Steel / Train,” “June 19, 1982,” and “Hoyt Lakes / Shut Down.” The evocative and intriguing spatial placement of these lyrical (private, individual experience) passages as tail-ends or foundations or deeper sedimentary layers beneath other mass / public modes of discourse contributes to the framing of the work on the whole as a mirror of social stratification and the dissociation (alienation, disconnection, denial) of the implications of the registers of meaning one for the other. And the language (and significance) of these lyrical passages, stands out as particularly fractured and strained, impoverished, hovering in dislocation.
I believe that all art is propaganda, though some is more exploratory, some more pointed in intent. The question is just, whose interests are served by the work’s agenda. The intentions of this poem are synonymous with, and subordinate to the work of labor organizers: “1. Attracting attention / 2. Creating desire / 3. Convincing the mind / 4. Stimulating action” (53), all in service to workers’ interests.
Shut Up Shut Down paves the way for enactments of class struggle, by mobilizing its readers to participate in an alternative semiotic environment where they must grapple with matters of “organization” (or disorganization) on many levels (many dimensions, actually) of significance, flipping back and forth through the book to connect the dots and access the continuity of the work while personally navigating its ruptured surfaces. The textual meaning and clarity of this book have been systematically de-organized in a way that does not serve the reader’s sense of comfort or ease, and which creates an experience of disorientation that perhaps mirrors the systems in which working class people struggle to survive, systems which serve the invisible interests of capital and the owning class with little or no regard for tremendous deleterious impact. Conventional markers of textual organization such as the numbered lyric sequence are present, but rendered utterly vestigial and misleading, while narrative continuity gets linked (implicitly) to textual formatting, and the trajectory of the poem’s discourse gets deployed across pages and sections in stratified layers rather than sitting cohesively within their own totality of meaning.
I have recently seen such formal (syntactic) technologies of reframing in several other 21st century poets -- especially in Bhanu Kapil and Layli Longsoldier. I think that Mark Nowak’s approach bears a kinship with the methodologies of these other works, insofar as it is another case where eccentric syntactic structures are subjecting readers to the sort of structural oppression that the work simultaneously depicts on its semantic level. An ironical kind of “how-do-you-like-it-when-you-are-made-subject-to-this-disempowering-lens” effect is generated in these works, sensitizing the reader to the various acculturated forms of oppression that tend to hide within the poetics of empire.
The absence of any overt writerly self-expression in this work puts it closer to conceptual and anti-lyric poetries in some ways. By using bold and italics to stratify registers of meaning, by centering meaning around capitalization, bracketed text, and photographs, Novak minimizes audible or sonic qualities of voice and voicing in much of the work’s body. The impersonality of the pieces in this book, the fact that they do not marshall an “individual voice,” or call upon a persona narrator to frame their significance, the journalistic mode of address in place of more intimate speech acts, the cultural critique achieved by appropriating and re-presenting historical materials, the craft focus on (mostly) sifting historical events rather than enacting the ritual of the present moment, the presence of the photographs and research citations as raw materials from which Shut Up Shut Down is constructed… all of this contributes to a highly documentary, persuasive atmosphere.
Lyric persists, however, in the form of highly focused and critical word-play in overtly lyrical passages, which are stratified at the bottom portion of the body of each single-page subsection of “$00 / Line / Steel / Train,” “June 19, 1982,” and “Hoyt Lakes / Shut Down.” The evocative and intriguing spatial placement of these lyrical (private, individual experience) passages as tail-ends or foundations or deeper sedimentary layers beneath other mass / public modes of discourse contributes to the framing of the work on the whole as a mirror of social stratification and the dissociation (alienation, disconnection, denial) of the implications of the registers of meaning one for the other. And the language (and significance) of these lyrical passages, stands out as particularly fractured and strained, impoverished, hovering in dislocation.
I believe that all art is propaganda, though some is more exploratory, some more pointed in intent. The question is just, whose interests are served by the work’s agenda. The intentions of this poem are synonymous with, and subordinate to the work of labor organizers: “1. Attracting attention / 2. Creating desire / 3. Convincing the mind / 4. Stimulating action” (53), all in service to workers’ interests.
February 10, 2013
Nowak's utilization of multiple speakers acts as perspective on history itself. But in the history contained here, the working class finally has a chance to speak against all the background noise. News clippings, found text, and silly rules of grammar act as a backdrop against which are told the stories of steel-workers and common laborers. Indeed, these stories of the working class act as clarification against public opinion, with Nowak rendering first-hand statements by the workers in bold. The text flows nicely, allowing the reader to gradually gleam a story of these laborers and their plight through different forms of dialogue- poems on industrial pictures/short poetic plays/etc. Within all these forms Nowak works to ensure the words of the working man are not lost in the tragic mix of noise and opinions we now know as history. Quite enjoyable.
August 29, 2012
A very strong, very compelling collection of poetry. I've read it twice, and I particularly admire the "collage" of voices (including the testimony of working Americans) that Nowak uses to structure these complex poems. The sequences "June 19, 1982" and "Francine Michalek Drives Bread" are probably my favorites, but I'm not sure it does the book any service to choose favorites when Nowak's power is accumulative, when his innovative structures, his sharp use of historical documents, build from sequence to sequence until you feel as though the abandoned industrial sites he's photographed will forever echo with passion, loss, and dignity of the folks who once labored there.
Poetry as documentary and art. Powerful stuff.
Poetry as documentary and art. Powerful stuff.
July 5, 2022
The more time I put between myself and this book, the more I question whether Nowak was the correct person to write it.
This book was published in 2004. I first read it in 2021. Cultural discourse on representation has changed greatly in the years between, so while "Shut Up Shut Down" is technically good, it feels almost voyeuristic, as if Mark Nowak is mining the trauma of poverty for his own gain. I wonder whether these stories were his to tell.
I understand that the argument would be that poet is giving voice to the voiceless, but by the end of the book, the only voice I remembered was Nowak's.
That seems like a problem if this book was supposed to have a social function, and I think it was.
This book was published in 2004. I first read it in 2021. Cultural discourse on representation has changed greatly in the years between, so while "Shut Up Shut Down" is technically good, it feels almost voyeuristic, as if Mark Nowak is mining the trauma of poverty for his own gain. I wonder whether these stories were his to tell.
I understand that the argument would be that poet is giving voice to the voiceless, but by the end of the book, the only voice I remembered was Nowak's.
That seems like a problem if this book was supposed to have a social function, and I think it was.
December 28, 2022
Forty years of hard work and what have I got to show for it? Nothing. Aerosol cans empty in the middle of the tracks is not conducting the train. I can't even speak proper. Working-class kids writing their names on a wall that is bound to erase them. When you're a steelworker (laughs), you don't get to speak the same language that you would do if you meet people in a bank or business office. On Blackrock Bridge (above Buffalo Creek)--where my grandfather took me fishing after he retired from Bethlehem--someone wrote (before the train came, before the bridge tore down) "FUCK WHITE PUNKS ON DOPE!"
February 17, 2008
Good stuff. Would make a comprehensible introduction to collage in poetry--Nowak's techniques illuminate rather than obscure, seem more intent on humanizing a subject than eviscerating/obscuring a text. Though there is also a fair amount of academicy language spliced in there as well. Regardless, Nowaks willingness to both tell the story of the working class as tied to particular regions/shut downs while still critiquing the racism that prevents "class solidarity" is pretty rare.
January 27, 2008
whoops! I'm not good with the stars yet. Not one star, but five. One of the best books in recent years!
August 9, 2024
Really interesting poetry, with a really distinct and large voice that delivers the line in a gut-punching way.
October 28, 2016
Worker poems. Sometimes difficult, had problems with the one about Vincent Chin. But the book is effective, Id never seen whiteness or racism addressed quite like this in poetic form.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews