conclusion 219is, are they aware of why they’re aware of that webpage?’^31 Hoy
contends that Flarfi sts need to recognise that business and market
interests often dictate the results that search engines feature as
their most immediately popular. He adds: ‘Do they wonder how it
is that their poem is determined as it is – that is, of the process at
work on their work by an outside force, one not divine or natural
but corporate? This is a fundamental aesthetic concern as well as a
socioeconomic one.’ It should be recognised that for most Flarfi sts
the Internet is a perfect playground for creating biting playful
social critique and satire, but an awareness of the data offered must
also be regarded with a sceptical eye.
DOCUMENTATION AND POETRY: MARK NOWAK’S COAL
MOUNTAIN ELEMENTARY
The possibility of making a politically responsible poetry from
Internet source materials is evident in the work of labour activist
and poet Mark Nowak. His recent book of poems Coal Mountain
Elementary ( 2009 ) combines photo-document, reportage, govern-
ment reports, workers’ testimony and academic primers.^32 One
could even add that Nowak’s role is as an arranger or compositor
of source material. Nowak in his ‘Notes Toward an Anti-Capitalist
Poetics II’ makes it clear that poetry must be linked with political
activism. He asks: ‘As the US economy transitions from a modern-
ist manufacturing economy to late capitalism’s service economy,
what would a service economy poetry and poetics look like and who
among us is prepared to step forward and imagine it?’^33 The ques-
tions that Nowak seeks to address are enacted through ‘poetry and
through on-the-ground organizing work in corporate bookstores
and throughout working-class communities and anti-capitalist
social movements’.^34 He adds that his own poetics are a form of
writing ‘that is to me, dialogue and dialectical materialism, and
documentary and drama all rolled into one, writing as a vehicle
through which I form and inform’.^35
Coal Mountain Elementary juxtaposes three categories of source
material, which are interspersed throughout the volume and com-
bined with photographs taken by Nowak and Ian Teh. Nowak