EG: If you read those poems when everything is okay in the world and your life is like totally secure and stable and drama free – it’s going to sound dramatic. But then you read it in the real world, and you’re like, ‘Yes!’
CH: Yes, they’ve really spoken to me at times when my life has felt dramatic. As you say, di Prima registers the urgency of all these mundane but intense experiences that are about labour. I’m thinking about ‘Revolutionary Letter #1’, which is my favourite: ‘I have just realized that the stakes are myself / I have no other / ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life / my spirit measured out, in bits, spread over / the roulette table, I recoup what I can’. To me, this is about hidden labour power and the ways that we are often navigating the world using ourselves as material. The body, for example, is an ‘object’ we are working with and is wrapped up in power relations that preceded us.
EG: I think what her poems are also doing is registering time and objects in an interesting way. And there’s a constant shift between the larger social and the individual/personal in her poems, held together by the intimate address. The container of a poem can place things together and generate meaning around objects or ideas that aren’t obvious, which is also a way of understanding how capital functions.
CH: I think the initial word that you previously used to describe this was ‘generative’.
EG: I’d say generative with an asterisk. I was recently trying to describe poetry as a kind of form of demystifying the mystifying forces of capital. And my supervisor rightly questioned it. I was giving poetry this utilitarian function. But maybe it’s more that poetry is a form that can contain constellations and contradictions, and reading it can foster some coherence, even if it’s incoherent, even if it’s not resolved.
CH: I think that that’s a really good way of putting it. It’s like a way of demystifying or putting something into another form that transforms it into a new understanding or feeling.
EG: And it’s crucially, for me, a point of aesthetics, like the word choice and placement matters. The construction of the poem is the point too.
CH: Absolutely. I feel like my writing is a lot more literal than other poets who I really admire, who write in this way that is a different language.
EG: My way of writing the poems is that I want to give, and this is going to sound so stupid, but like giving the reader half of the picture and then they must figure it out. I don’t give them the whole thing because the poem, for me, is not me trying to say something. I’m trying to express a moment of thought in time.
CH: That relates to the last thing I want to talk about, which is transformation. I was thinking of a particular part in a poem you read at a reading a few years back about a cherry pit being digested and then a cherry tree growing out of someone’s mouth and eyes. This seemed to me to be about the process of something being transformed. Can you say something about the transformations that can occur in poetry?
EG: Yes, so many transformations took place for that to come about. So that line was referring to a game I was playing with my friend’s kid who was maybe five or six at the time. She would just give me something and then I would throw something back. We had co-constructed this ridiculous story, and we must have been eating cherries, so I was making up this story about eating a cherry pit and feeling the cherry pit grow inside, and I was describing it to her, and she kept asking so many questions about how and where it grew. It felt co-constructed. It felt like a story, which is funny because I’m not typically a narrative poet. It was a transformation of two people’s minds. It was about digestion.
I’m just going to say a bunch of words now … this is just how my free-associative brain works, so, it’s not a direct answer, but it’s about transformation, digestion, metabolism. And metabolism is both body energy, reproduction, workers, body reproduction and social reproduction. ‘Stoffwechsel’, which Marx writes about, is social metabolism, which then links back to the domestic, the social in the Marxist feminist sense. Kay Gabriel has written about this. So, these concepts hinge on social and reproductive and individual body and food and digestion, so transformation takes me to all these different places. This is what happens in my poetry. It just goes everywhere.
