222 contemporary poetry
the intake, but he wasn’t in a body bag. So our team
took the bag over and prepared him to be brought out.
Otherwise he was just covered up in a blanket. And
it wasn’t very – I don’t want to paint a disparaging
comment. It wasn’t really a professional, I guess, way
of bringing the gentleman out. He was strapped on this
backboard with a blanket covering him up. So we took
him off the backboard and put him in a body bag, put
him back on the stretcher. And I said backboard, but
I think it was a stretcher. Put him back on the scoop.
And then we waited for further instructions from
command. (p. 98 )The graphic human cost of mining is made evident as well as the
co-worker’s desire to enact the retrieval of bodies with respect
and dignity, hence the reference to ‘the gentleman’ and ideas of
professionalism. Apparent also is the worker’s grief and shock,
which are indicated in the confl icting reporting of ‘backboard’
and ‘stretcher’. The extract conveys the traumatic scenes await-
ing accident response teams, and how the tally of numbers
reported by newsgathering agencies translates into immediate
experience.
It is important to note that Nowak’s work builds upon a tradition
of poetry as documentary in American poetry. Earlier poets writing
in the 1930 s and 1940 s, such as Muriel Rukeyser and Charles
Reznikoff, used poetic forms as a way of examining social inequity
through their own investigations. Examples are Rukeyser’s serial
poem The Book of the Dead ( 1938 ) and Reznikoff’s account of the
fate of Jewish families in Holocaust ( 1975 ), which was composed
solely of Holocaust survivor testimony taken from twenty-six
volumes of documentation of the Eichmann and Nuremberg trials.
There are parallels that can be drawn between Rukeyser’s inves-
tigation of one of the worst industrial accidents at Gauley Bridge,
West Virginia, and Nowak’s work. In examining Union Carbide’s
tunnelling of the Gauley tunnel, and the subsequent cases of recur-
ring silicosis amidst miners (due to mismanagement of health and
safety issues), Rukeyser’s documentary sources included local
geography, medical reports, design plans, congressional reports,