This poem explores western Pennsylvania, past and present, as a space and culture grounded in fossil fuels -- from ancient dead organisms, to historical tatters of 19th-century mining, to current landscape and social transformations in the era of so-called Clean Coal and Green Energy.
Conceived as a digital work, the piece is nonetheless informed by modernist books including W.C. Williams' Paterson, Charles Reznikoff's Testimony, and Louis Zukofsky's "A" ... with their interests in form, materiality, and language in relation to self, place, and history.
In fact, a remembered passage from Zukofsky served as catalyst for this piece when, in tracking down the reference to "striking coal miners in Penna.", a line from his poem "A"-1, I learned of the infamous Rossiter strike, which transpired in a nearly forgotten town just up the road from where I now write.
In this sense, Coal is also an auto-documentary or an exercise in self-location, as I try to use the composition of the poems as a means of reading the muted texts and landscape into which I have migrated, where coal extraction continues, powering the digital machines with which I make my art. Coal eschews the controlling energy of the lyric voice in order to compose itself as the reader "mines it," using algorithmic rules to fragment and recompose original and found texts and manipulated images in dynamic, varying patterns. The challenge has been in how to "repurpose" without doing violence to these lost discourses, to appropriate materials and, in a sense, reanimate them by placing them into new, poetic contexts.
Kenneth Sherwood, April 2016 - kwsherwood@gmail.com