EG: I have a terrible habit when I talk to people, where they’re like, oh, this awful thing happened. And I say, ‘Yeah, of course, it did because that’s your boss, or that’s your landlord, or here’s the obvious power dynamic of your material conditions. Why are you surprised?’ And that’s not a helpful response. Like, this person doesn’t need capitalism explained to them right now!
CH: For me sometimes, being cynical can obscure resistance, or where people are working against capital. That’s also part of the totality of capitalism, to make us think other worlds and ways of being are impossible.
EG: Marx has that line about capitalism containing the seeds of its own destruction. I don’t know the exact reference.
CH: True, that’s a good line to bring us back to. Like, when we’re trying to figure out other ways of relating (beyond the nuclear family and wage, etc.), they must draw back on these old models. Because we don’t have other materials to work with. Like, we are not in communism, and we don’t know what that looks like.
EG: Yes, and it’s like collective work to make something happen so no one person can envision it.
CH: On that note, I’m interested in revisiting this idea of ‘excess’. I’m thinking of your work and Amy De’Ath’s writing on poetics and Marxist feminism and how poetry can challenge hidden social relations (like race and gender). I also wonder how poetry can gesture to other modes and ways of being.
EG: When I think of poetry, and this is not unique to me, it encompasses the construction of the poem, the poet’s relationship to the poem, the imagined reader, and the actual moment of encounter that the reader has with the poem, and all of those make up the experience of the poem, and most of is unknowable to one or both parties. Because of the relationship poetry has to language and the relationship that language has to how we experience and engage with the world and each other. Poetry is this concentrated form that does many things at once. That experiential aspect of it is maybe in a political sense, in a Marxist feminist sense, the relationship between a feminised experience of being doubly exploited – and how the movement itself was a response to Marxist groups in Italy and this actual interruption of what Marxism was doing in that space.
CH: I like the way you used the term ‘interruption’ there.
EG: I was looking for the word ‘intervention’, but I said ‘interruption’.
CH: Interruption is good because it sort of makes clear the relation with poetics.
EG: The experience of a poem and the experience of life and the transmutability or the figurability of subjects and their relationship to each other is kind of generative. Reading poems through a Marxist feminist lens illuminates particular social relations as well as experiences that are either ignored or not encountered.
CH: What poets can you think of that use poetry in this way, one that engages with reproductive labour and challenges the structures that we’re currently living in?
EG: Yes. I mean, Chelsea Hart obviously.
CH: Oh, that’s so lovely.
EG: The parallels you noticed in my work with Amy De’Ath’s come from my reading her work, both poetry and theory and finding her useful in theorising Marxist feminism through a literary lens. She has written about Bhanu Kapil, a brilliant poet I recommend. So, besides Amy De’Ath and Bhanu Kapil, there’s also Alice Notley, Diane di Prima, June Jordan and Bernadette Mayer.
CH: Diane di Prima is also one of my favourites. I wonder how you’ve engaged with her writing.
EG: I think the relationship between her life and her poetry has been really important for me because I didn’t come across her poetry first. I first read her book My life as a Woman. This work is about living in New York and raising children, having this ongoing relationship with Amiri Baraka. She was a single mother writing poetry, making magazines, doing all this kind of real anti-capitalist exciting work. And all of this was going on for her at once.
CH: Yes, and that’s an interesting factor – like having kids, using drugs, being an activist that made her a target for the FBI. All inseparable from the way she writes.
EG: Truly, like, it was this way of being a poet that kind of made total sense and combined so many aspects of life and art. And then reading her poetry and then seeing like, okay, this is real, and its aesthetic kind of qualities are very specific in this way. I don’t normally enjoy this sort of poetry, it’s not especially lyric. But it’s palpable and true. And you don’t need a university degree to understand it. They appear at the moments of rupture; people quote and circulate her poetry. It has an extremely social function. Wendy Trevino’s poetry reminds me of di Prima. The aesthetic function is specific and urgent. It’s as though the poet has no time to make a lyrically dense and beautiful work. She needs the poem to get a message to you. The poem has a function, a job.
CH: The poem as work – as resistance work. And the urgency of that during her work as a single mother, and as an activist.
