I first heard of Elena Gomez when a friend of mine who was living in London DM’d me a link via Instagram with the message ‘another commie poet in Melbourne!!’. I had just started writing poems, so this was kind of like when a parent notices you are in an awkward phase of identity, and naively suggests you hang out with the cool girl at school who is two years above you. I love hearted their message and ordered Elena’s recently published debut book, Body of Work. When I met Elena a year or so later, we were both in a Marxist reading group, which I soon realised was made up of mostly poets. Elena and I were sitting across from each other on low sagging couches while two people between us engaged in one of those conversations poets are often guilty of: the topic is something tangible and relatable, like work and gender, and yet it turns into something that is abstracted to the point that no one knows what’s going on, or if they ever did. At some point in the reading session, Elena intervened and summed up the conversation with a famous line from the Wages Against Housework movement: ‘They say it’s love, we say it’s unwaged work’. I thought, I love this bitch.

Elena has written numerous chapbooks, most recently Crushed Silk (Rosa Press, 2021) and two collections of poetry, Body of Work (Cordite Books, 2018) and Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt (Puncher & Wattmann, 2020). After years of working as a book editor, Elena is currently a sessional academic and PhD candidate researching Marxism, ecology and colonialism in contemporary poetics. In the introduction to Elena’s Body of Work, the critic and poet, Fiona Hile, makes the following observation about Gomez’s poetics: ‘There’s a difference between occupying a seemingly unceasing parade of subject positions through a kind of colonising, thieving, dissipatory borderlessness … and inhabiting them as a form of aesthetic and political revolt’. There is both cynicism and joy in Elena’s poetry. For me, it embodies the layered meaning of what it means to ‘revolt’, to reveal dominant power structures that feel inescapable, and to make fun of them: ‘He spent the night sharpening my left hook as I slept. / We are spilling out love. It is taxable’. In this exchange, Elena and I discuss Marxist feminism, poetry, cynicism and love.

Chelsea Hart: The first thing I was thinking about when preparing to interview you was whether to talk to you about poetry or theory, and I decided I wanted to talk about both. I’m interested in how you think about poetry and Marxist feminist theory (as well as other theories you engage with). Do you see them as distinct or overlapping?

Elena Gomez: I think poetry and theory are both different ways of thinking through some really core questions that drive me. So, in a really oversimplified way: ‘Why is the world how it is? And why am I the way I am in the context of the world? And how do these things interact?’ Theory feels tangible and historical, and it feels like a particular kind of well that I can jump in or draw from. Poetry is like this too but it’s also generative in a different way. I think that’s maybe how they’re distinct for me. I don’t write theory, I write poetry, but I read both theory and poetry. There’s something about the metabolism of poetry that becomes a way of allowing me to think about theory. Thinking through myself or through my engagement in the world, maybe. For me, poetry is necessarily always in relation to everything else.

CH: So, the different forms inform each other. Like you’re metabolising theory through poetry, and you’re also generating something through the form of poetry?

EG: Yes, I’ve been playing with this idea of the metabolic in poems because I’m always trying to work out whether it’s a transformation or a creation. Is it just being transposed into a different form?

CH: Well, I mean, that’s a good question. Like, is it a creation or transformation? I’m also quite into this idea of transformation through writing, which I want to talk more about with you because it relates back to Marxist feminist theory. Particularly the idea that nothing is ever created from in and of itself – or nothing (and no one) is created without work/labour, or any other relationships involved. And it seems to me, poetry is also a creation and a transformation that happens through writing. Right?

EG: I always love talking to you about this because you always bring labour back into it, which is always there. Marxist feminism sort of has that eye on what’s invisible. What I find useful about it is that it is both a response to a Marxist mode of critique and also an embodiment of it. I’m talking about how feminised labour becomes sort of buried or embedded within different social forms or relationships. Poetry has that in it, as an object or thought that contains a lot of invisible aspects.

CH: That makes a lot of sense to me. I feel like we’ve already gotten to a good point here where it’s like, poetry contains all of this other work that precedes it – knowledge, writing, relationships, modes of existence – and it’s very unique in that way. All writing kind of is like that, but poetry to me seems distinct, or I feel like that’s what I’m getting from what you’re describing as well. What do you think?

EG: So, for me, the poem is a construction of space and a moment in time. It’s a container within which everything, like theory and being, and experience, and work and the limits of time or the sort of the ways that living under capitalism all compresses on us as people in different ways. The poem contains all of that because of its compression, but also, because of that compression – and its particular aesthetic freedoms – it also has the capacity to look beyond it. So, poetry can kind of render as well as reimagine what it’s rendering. It expresses themes that we often can’t otherwise capture …

CH: Is it like an excess or something?

EG: Yes. Well, excess, in two different ways. There’s excess in the capitalist sense, the production of surplus and whatever is leftover and not repurposed capital. There’s also what Margaret Ronda writes about in her book Remainders, looking at contemporary ecopoetry and this idea of what’s at the edges and remaining under capitalism. I think of rendering in terms of what is beyond or outside a capitalist totality.

CH: Yes, I think I get what you mean. Like, there’s like this classic Marxist reading of ‘surplus’ – that like, profit is made through the extra time and labour of a worker, beyond what is necessary. And that’s where bosses make their money (by squeezing excess labour from workers). But then, if you’re thinking about things in a Marxist feminist framework, there’s also room to think about the invisible excess labour that is not just material but is felt as well.

EG: I want to jump to something that may preempt what you’re going to ask me about. But one example of this might be love and care, which you’ve written a lot about, including the labour within love and care. But there’s this thing where love and care exist regardless of the dominant social-economic force of the world, which is currently capitalism, but now it gets perverted or funnelled. Co-opted. So, anything like it appears differently within capitalism, and it’s not necessarily false, but it’s like it’s pulled into a system formed around value production, as opposed to being constructed for it. Love, care, heartbreak, they exist already …