Interview #188 — Elena Gomez

by Shastra Deo

Elena Gomez is a poet and book editor based in Melbourne. She is the author of Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt, Body of Work, and several chapbooks and pamphlets, including Crushed Silk published by Rosa Press.

She is currently undertaking a creative PhD at the University of Melbourne in Marxism, ecology and colonialism in poetry.

Elena spoke to Shastra about boredom, (not) needing to be a ‘good’ poet, and turning to the past with one eye on the future.

Why poetry? In your essay, ‘Looming poetics’ (Overland), you write, ‘Of all the art forms, poetry offers the most concentrated form of radical critique. It is both practice and encounter.’ Is this what brought you to poetry? Or what keeps you with poetry?

This is a question I am constantly asking myself. Why poetry? Why writing at all? I’m not convinced I can give a satisfying answer to this, but as a concentrated form of radical critique, I suppose I think about what poetry does to language, and how it is both of the world that we live in, a representation in part of our material conditions. Poetry is always encounter, to me. There is something communal about it to me, and this probably keeps me with it always. That is, I like to imagine poetry can do all of these things for how we think, and how we make sense of material and immaterial experiences. I never know how true this is, but maybe there’s something in the idea of the potential that is enough for me. I think, too, what brought me to poetry was a sense of freedom that had not taken hold of me all the years that I tried to write fiction or narrative. I just couldn’t make that form work, but still thought of myself as a ‘writer’, When I finally had this thought, after reading just a little bit of poetry, and spending time with poets, it just kind of felt right somehow? I also wonder if there was something about poetry as a practice for me not needing to be ‘good’, or at least, the idea of what ‘good’ was felt more open. That’s not to say I don’t care about whether I’m a ‘good’ poet (there’ll always be some part of me that cares), but I guess that the driving compulsion for it was regardless of quality. I wonder now, since having written ‘Looming poetics’, whether I would now flip that around and say that poetry is encounter, but sometimes, it’s also practice.

You’re the author of Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt (a book-length, Marxist-feminist poem), Body of Work (a poetry collection), Crushed Silk (a chapbook), “A GLAZED WINDOW W/FAT BORDERS//[TAUT & DISCOLOURED]” (a mixed media/poetry amalgamation), and many other works. How do you approach writing in these varying forms, in all their differing durées and temporalities?

Honestly, I tend to get bored easily. I get bored by my own thoughts and ideas, and sometimes I get a little bit too obsessed with something, and then by the time I’m done with it, I need to get as far away from it as possible. But then, no matter what, there are some questions or problems I can never really escape. I think questions about capitalism and labour and gender and race are always somewhere in my consciousness, but they don’t come out in the same way, or are obscured or complicated by other problems. By problems, I should clarify, I mean those little thought hooks that get caught in your head, a vague idea or image or something that you want to write about to ‘solve’ or at least, to simply express. In terms of how I approach these, I sometimes have the form in my head to begin with, for example, I might decide I just want to spend time with collage for a while. Or I want to try a durational practice, or find some strange constraint to have a play with. Sometimes it’s a historical figure or period—with my last book it was Alexandra Kollontai, but last year, with the help of an Australia Council grant, I also completed a draft of a shorter chapbook based on the Norwegian antifascist textile artist Hannah Ryggen, whom I’m still somewhat obsessed with, even though I had to set her aside for a short while. And in that sense, I had to sort of accept the temporality of that project. I think time-based constraints are something I tend to return to. I can thank Bernadette Mayer for this—her work has had a profound influence on me since my earliest days of writing poetry. Have I answered your question or rambled? What is time? Can I break it open with poems? That might be my next plan.

A perfect answer; thank you! I’m interested in the way your work plays with subjectivity rather than identity or (auto)biography. This comes through particularly powerfully in Body of Work, but even your poetic response to Bolshevik feminist Alexandra Kollontai in Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt has delightful shades of this. To paraphrase Butler, how do you decide who is speaking, in what voice, and with what intent?

I love this observation so much! I am going to say first, thank you for articulating what it is that goes on here. To answer this question, though, I think that ‘playing’ you notice comes from a sort of inability to decide. That is, there is never a clear settled voice for me, or perhaps there are too many voices, and these are all competing for the page. As much as I’d like to think I’m deciding the who, and the what, I can’t help but feel as though it’s more something I’m trying to listen to. The intent is also never really fully formed for me until I’ve written it.

Sorry to put you on the spot, but… Your preface to Body of Work begins with a line that feels like a confession: ‘I once wrote to a poetry advice column because I was afraid of my emotions and the havoc they wreaked on me.’ Does this still hold true?

Oh oh! Yes, Diana Hamilton was the author of this advice column on Harriet blog, it was many years ago, and I wrote in with that question because I couldn’t feel emotions in a way that allowed me to write poetry, or yes, that they wreaked havoc in a way that exploded all my self-doubt and pain around the quite boring minutiae of a writing process (literally the part where you have to sit still for a certain amount of time to get anything done). Diana had the best response to my question, and I think now that emotions wreak havoc on me in a different way. I have learnt in recent years (thanks to some big life-changing events, and also therapy), that emotions are useful too. And if they still wreak havoc on me, I’m better prepared to understand them, or allow them in. This has probably made me inversely, somehow, treat writing poetry with a little more pragmatism. There is I think a way for me to write that’s optimal, which is with, or alongside, my emotions, but not so loud that the driving desire to write is not drowned out. Usually it’s the driving desire of figuring out something weird, or expressing a new ambiguous idea that’s been floating within me. Emotions are necessary, and perhaps what’s changed is that I’m less afraid of them.

Could you speak on the titles of your books, Body of Work and Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt? ‘Body of Work’ reminds me of Studs Terkel’s Working, which you quote in ‘Looming poetics’: ‘This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence—to the spirit as well as to the body.’ The body of work that is the text, produced by the body of the worker. Whereas ‘Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt’ seems to revel in the imperative speech act, the directive ‘doing’ rather than ‘being’. Are there parallels to be drawn between the being and doing of your poetics?

The first was a sort of joke, I suppose—it’s the body, and work, and the body at work and all of that, while also of course being, in the collected poems sense, a body of work. And Terkel’s book was absolutely influential on my thinking too, especially around that time. Body of Work was collected and the poems written just before and maybe during the first half of my MFA, while Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt was the work that I produced for my MFA, so there are a fair few common threads and parallels, I think, though the latter had more of a purpose to it from its inception, perhaps. It’s always funny to think about the relationship of being and doing in poetry—doing is being, for me, when it comes to most things. I’m not so interested in philosophical questions. I’m ambivalent about drawing any parallels, because I’m not sure what it is to ‘be’. If there is anything I can observe on the relation of being to doing, it’s only a glib, or maybe obvious one: that for me, the doing is what constitutes any being, if we are to think of it as such. Even then, though, my poetics is interested in process, action, living, moving. It’s not always a forward, linear sense of action or movement, but my poems, I believe, avoid ‘thinking’ too hard.

You argue that intergenerationality and the relationship between past and present are integral to a Marxist-feminist poetics. Reflecting on the ‘poet mothers’ who have guided your creative practice, what do you hope your potential ‘poet descendants’ will learn from your work?

Shastra, what a question! I need to preface this answer with a huge caveat: I find it very difficult to imagine having any poet ‘descendants’ at all! I also wonder now, whether I need to rethink this framing entirely, now that I’ve written a whole thesis on it (whoops). Kathi Weeks gave an online talk earlier this year about Marxist feminism as archive, and she sort of challenged the whole concept of familial linearity as another reproduction of feminised labour. Which, yep. She said it much better than I’m describing now. But let’s pretend for a moment that there’s even one person out there who might read and learn from my work. I hope it’s this: that the materiality of your life can be your poetic material too—you can make poetry out of anything you want (with a caveat that it does not cause harm to others), and also, that it’s okay to want to be a ‘good poet’, whatever that means to you, but it’s also okay to simply want to write poetry—you can be as ambitious or unambitious as you want with it. Also: fuck capitalism.

What are you working on at the moment? (The real question I’m asking here is ‘What is your PhD about and why isn’t it Godzilla?’)

Look, my tutor last semester asked me a very similar question (Hi, James Jiang). And ngl, there’s a small chance Godzilla will make an appearance. It’s early days, though—I’ve only just finished my first semester. I’m doing a creative PhD in poetry, which will be an exploration of Marxist ecology and ecopoetics, or to put it another way, the relationship between land, colonialism and capitalism in poetry. So this is taking up most of my time at the moment, but I’m also hoping to find a place for some older work I made a few months ago, and returning to old work is always a bit of a treat—I love that encounter with past Elena.

Speaking of past Elena: in your interview with Alice Allan for Poetry Says, you note that ‘the conditions of a poem’s production are also relevant, as well as what’s in the poems themselves.’ While writing your MFA you were working full-time as an editor at a publishing house; now, your labour and work centres around freelancing as well as another higher degree by research program. Have these differing temporalities of work come through in your poetics?

Time has expanded for me in some ways, especially after the past year in Melbourne’s lockdowns. I came here to say that I don’t think it has come through, but actually, it has: my days are chaotic yet expansive now, and it’s started to lengthen my poems, or at least I feel as though I don’t always think about writing a poem, but I get ideas that seem to desire to become a chapbook or something longer. There’s maybe also just a different kind of attention to the world around me now that my day is not structured around an arbitrary nine-hour day. I would love to say it means I’m reading more, but I seem to be filling up my time with activities that don’t pursue anything other than my wellbeing (jiu jitsu and knitting are my main timeholes now).

What does it mean for you to be writing in this time, this situated impasse?

Writing in this time is in many ways a privilege, and I don’t spend enough time thinking about the decisions that have been made before my own time that led to me being here. I don’t just mean my family’s migratory histories, but also my settler relation to this stolen land, and what it means to be both the recipient and enactor of colonialism still dripping in blood. The time we live in now is also one that allows us to see with so much more clarity the forces and actions hundreds of years ago that shaped how we live today. I’m thinking about the first farm, the first coal mine, the first shipping container, the first slave ship. You’ve described it as an impasse, and it feels like that to me—unlike the urgency of this moment’s crises, there’s something a little less urgent about my questions, which are always turning to the past in some way, with one eye on the future. I’m not fully comfortable with primitivist approaches to history nor would I consider myself any sort of Promethean thinker, but there’s some complex relation of these two ideas in which something like a solution might reside.

What is the smallest way you’re manifesting your ideal, post-capitalist future?

Since you asked for the smallest: I have been trying to learn how to unlink my sense of self-worth to my productive capabilities, or even to the idea of ‘achieving’, which takes, ironically, a lot of work to do. I can’t tell if I’m actually an ambitious person or a lazy person who was socialised to be ambitious from a young age, but either way, learning that it’s okay to just … not do something. It’s good. Also, I do as little housework as possible.

Do you have any advice for emerging poets? Or emerging reviewers?

For emerging poets and reviewers alike, I say: read widely and try to practice journalling. Writing about what you read for your eyes alone is at once both soothing and invigorating. To the poets I say, don’t be afraid to write bad poems. Write what you need, try writing a sonnet or sestina once in a while, write in response to another poet, write an elegy, and, as Diana Hamilton advised, find other poets to read your work—share and exchange ideas, start reading groups, poetry circles, covens, whatever.

To emerging reviewers, review within and outside your usual poetry reading, and aim to show us what you think the work is doing, and why, before you get to your opinion. That doesn’t mean you need an example quote after every sentence, but whenever you get stuck, turn to the work itself. Don’t get caught up trying to evaluate constantly, but don’t be afraid to say what you think, or to show us your reading of what the work is doing. Study your favourite critics and observe how they structure their review. You will develop your voice through writing.

Who inspires you?

I don’t really know how to answer this question! I feel as though most of my friends inspire me in some way or another, but it’s a strange relation to have towards a close friend. What does it mean to be inspired anyway? I guess I’m in awe of many of my friends, whether in awe of them as a poet or person or both. Can I describe the type of person who inspires me? If so, I would say someone who is kind and generous with their time and expertise, but does not stand for bullshit, either.

Thinking about this more, I might also say in response: those who are tirelessly working for the benefit of others often inspire me—I’m thinking of the people at the Renters and Housing Union, and the Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union. The Free Her campaign by Sisters Inside, and the abolition movement more broadly. All the workers and delegates in the small but growing union movement in book publishing and retail, and those making real changes to hold white institutions to account. I see the union movement and efforts to diversify the industry as entirely linked, and I strongly believe that transparency and equality will improve conditions and representation (though, of course, that’s not to say that we need only focus on the first). The arts industry here does not run on the smell of an oily rag, but on hours and hours of unpaid or low-paid labour. It really needs to be razed. I’ve found many of those working towards this inspiring.

What have you been reading/listening to?

I have been rereading Samuel Delaney, thinking about sentences and worlds. I’ve also been dipping a little into Edward Said. Poetry-wise, I’m reading Ella O’Keefe, Evelyn Araluen, Fred Moten. And PhD reading—Aimé Césaire, Mike Davis, John Bellamy Foster. I’ve been trying to catch up on podcasts lately, but a friend recently put me on to Loyle Carner, so I’ve been enjoying him, also Maple Glider’s new album is giving me LIFE. And Rhiannon Giddens usually makes an appearance every so often. I can never go very long without putting on a June Jones song.

How do you practise self-care?

I keep very active. On top of jiu jitsu I regularly strength train. In both cases I have training partners and coaches I learn from and have fun with. At the start of this year I learnt how to do a full bodyweight pull-up and it’s a feeling of joy and affirmation that’s on par with having a poem published. I also learnt how to knit this year, and my dear friend encouraged me with that, and has been helping me with all my beginner questions. If you’re wondering whether all my self-care revolves around learning complicated new hobbies and putting my body through the ringer, the answer is yes.

But in truth, resting completely is another self-care practice for me. That means I do have slug days, and I try to listen to my body or mind when it needs a break. I write in a journal every morning too, sometimes very silly things, but it has been a nourishing habit to build over the past year and a half. And I must give a big shout out to Thirst Club, my beautiful, nourishing, fierce group chat, whose members have supported and taught me so much in these ways, among others.

What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?

I want to delay answering this while I think about it, so I’ll describe my family background briefly. My mother was born and raised in Nagpur, India, in a Catholic family (though her background is Goan). My father was born and raised in Malaysia, but his parents were from Kerala, and I think were moved to Malaysia by the British so his father could work for them on a rubber plantation. My parents met in India at university, and when they married they lived in Malaysia. I was born there, but our family moved to Australia when I was one. I have older siblings who spent the first decade of their lives in Malaysia, and younger siblings who were born here. My parents both spoke other languages as well as English, so we grew up speaking English at home, and I don’t know any other language.

So when I think about the question you’ve asked, it’s one that I still don’t really know how to answer. I’ve never felt ‘Asian’ in my life. Only recently did I start even referring to myself as South Asian. Before that, when people asked where I was from (naturally, one of the most original and interesting questions you could ask a non-white person!), I would name the city I lived in previously (we moved around a lot in Australia). I never knew if I was ‘Indian’ (a country I’ve visited once), or ‘Malaysian’ (a country I was born in and visited twice). My father’s family are known as ‘Malayalee’, but this doesn’t quite mean anything to me. For most of my life my relation to this identity was based on a handful of culinary experiences and a particularly Indian expression of Catholicism (which is very distinct, and not at all like Irish or Australian Catholicism in my view).

This is all to say: I don’t know what it means to me. And I’ve been able to get by most of my life not minding—my own poetry and writing is not concerned with identity, as you observed so astutely above. But these days, perhaps coinciding with a few big life events, and my subsequent education around emotions, I’ve been feeling the pain of that disconnection more. Or if not a pain of disconnection, a longing perhaps for a relation to identity, which is a new experience. My family has never stayed in one place. My mother was twice removed from her home country, my father once from his, but it was never ‘his country’ to begin with, and most of my siblings don’t live in the same city now. There are many Indian or South Asian experiences I simply do not relate to, and it’s often alienating and, to be completely honest, a little bit painful. So I think I’m still actually working out what it means to be Asian Australian. It’s going to take some time to figure out.