Sunday, January 14, 2024 Excerpt from “Winter” by Mark Nowak
vultures who swoop down upon a dead deer. Sedition, from the late
Middle English, violent strife. So much vitriol. Covid vaccinations. So
much has been unmasked. From the Latin, sed (apart) & ition (-ire, go-
ing). Vagabonds and visionaries. Vandals and ventriloquists. So many
vowels and violations. I was invited here by the President! Not
shrinking violets but growing violence. Storms, viceroys, to the victors
go the spoils. Spoiled brats. Vacant and vacated lives. In the vicinity
where their beliefs might go unvanquished. Vanguards of past power.
Advocates of today’s havoc. Volatile. Vulgar. But the skies are begin-
ning to darken now as the daylight begins to vanish. Clouds of tear gas
begin to wash over waves upon waves of great white men who still vie
to preserve their overlord, their kingdom, their king. They were so very
close, almost on the verge of it. Except for the widespread vendettas.
Unacknowledged vulnerabilities. Venture capital. It’s all so very Amer-
ican. All the vermin. Vexations. And all that American venom. It’s so
vast. Old volcanoes spewing volcanic ash.
About the Poet
Mark Nowak is a poet, writer, social critic, and labor activist whose books include Revenants (Coffee House Press, 2000), Shut Up Shut Down: Poems (Coffee House Press, 2004), Coal Mountain Elementary (Coffee House Press, 2009), and Social Poetics (Coffee House Press, 2020). This poem is from WINTER, Nowak’s abecedarian documentary poem about January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol. It is available now as a free download from Kenning Editions and will form a portion of his forthcoming abecedarian collection “… AGAIN” from Coffee House Press in 2025.
A native of Buffalo, NY, Nowak is a professor of English at Manhattanville College and the founding director, in collaboration with PEN America, of the Worker Writers School an international organization which links the global working class to literary practice. He edited Coronavirus Haiku (Kenning Editions, 2021), guest-edited the “Why We Write” issue of Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 2021), and wrote an introduction to Celes Tisdale’s When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal (Duke University Press, 2022).
Nowak has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim and Lannan Foundations as well as the Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism from Split This Rock. He has taught at St. Catherine University and Washington College, where he also worked as the director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House. He has led poetry workshops for workers and trade unions in Belgium, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, and South Africa.
The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.