PositiveFull StopMark Nowak’s Social Poetics draws interest, because it approaches the quandary as a gesture towards revolutionary solidarity, rather than literary prestige, and focuses on the material role poetry can play in workers’ movements ... He rescues from the archive essential anthologies of working-class poets and contextualizes his work by pointing to movements of workers’ poetry that have occurred throughout the world ... Nowak’s writing sets a valuable example in using poetry for what might be its highest objectives: solidarity and liberation. But the book is long, and not every digression yields valiant examples. The truth is, I was disappointed with Social Poetics, more from its predictability than misguidedness, when Nowak revealed his project’s dire antagonist: conceptual poetry. It reads as a petty academic gesture of asserting one style over another, denying the possibility of productive syntheses ... The way Nowak positions Social Poetics in opposition to an exteriorized avant garde feels unnecessary and limiting to the horizons his poetics are helping to reveal ... Ultimately, the book serves as an exciting addition to poetry’s grail quest for a first-person plural, a collective enunciation. Nowak’s writing is attuned to the needs of today in what feels like a new horizon taking shape, part of a larger appreciation for the poetics of relationality and experience, that I think can be aided immensely by Nowak’s vision ... is book provides powerful witness to the verb of poetry—poetry as a social act, whereby workers reclaim autonomy over their creations.
