Toward a resource poetics in Muriel Rukeyser's Book of the Dead and Mark Nowak's Coal Mountain Elementary. Issue 3 (4th March 2021)
- Record Type:
- Journal Article
- Title:
- Toward a resource poetics in Muriel Rukeyser's Book of the Dead and Mark Nowak's Coal Mountain Elementary. Issue 3 (4th March 2021)
- Main Title:
- Toward a resource poetics in Muriel Rukeyser's Book of the Dead and Mark Nowak's Coal Mountain Elementary
- Authors:
- Parks, Justin
- Abstract:
- ABSTRACT: Muriel Rukeyser's 1936 documentary poem The Book of the Dead appropriates various forms of textual evidence to document a devastating mining disaster that occurred in 1930 in rural Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. Written in the aftermath of the post-2008 financial crisis, Mark Nowak's 2009 text Coal Mountain Elementary revisits the same landscape Rukeyser had sought out seventy years earlier, and makes use of a similar technique as it combines reports of a 2006 mine explosion in Sago, West Virginia, with news reports from Chinese mining accidents and other materials. Both poems dramatise the distance separating extractivism-vulnerable landscapes of the periphery (rural, or in Nowak's case, global) from the accumulation of profits in the core. In reading these two texts side-by-side, it becomes clear that beyond their thematic similarities, the two poems also engage and adapt a methodology I call 'resource poetics', in which extractivist practices are exposed to view through poems' material incorporation of textual artefacts testifying to their ruinous effects. As such, the two poems, situated roughly seventy-five years apart, offer trenchant critiques of modernity in its extractivist mode.
- Is Part Of:
- Textual practice. Volume 35:Issue 3(2021)
- Journal:
- Textual practice
- Issue:
- Volume 35:Issue 3(2021)
- Issue Display:
- Volume 35, Issue 3 (2021)
- Year:
- 2021
- Volume:
- 35
- Issue:
- 3
- Issue Sort Value:
- 2021-0035-0003-0000
- Page Start:
- 395
- Page End:
- 412
- Publication Date:
- 2021-03-04
- Subjects:
- Extractivism -- Muriel Rukeyser -- Mark Nowak -- resource poetics
Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals
Criticism -- Periodicals
Criticism, Textual -- Periodicals
Semiotics -- Periodicals
801.95 - Journal URLs:
- http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rtpr20/current ↗
http://www.tandfonline.com/ ↗
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/0950236X.asp ↗ - DOI:
- 10.1080/0950236X.2021.1886706 ↗
- Languages:
- English
- ISSNs:
- 0950-236X
- Deposit Type:
- Legaldeposit
- View Content:
- Available online (eLD content is only available in our Reading Rooms) ↗
- Physical Locations:
- British Library DSC - 8813.780460
British Library HMNTS - ELD Digital store - Ingest File:
- 16580.xml