Amy De’Ath: How can we understand your recent poetic work in relation to your involvement in political action in the Bay Area over the past few years?
Juliana Spahr: The poetry might easiest be understood as under the influence of. Not really the reverse. And not as a substitute for.
AD: It’s politics moving in a different direction . . .?
JS: Yeah, maybe it’s a different direction. Maybe it is just an alliance. In some writing I’ve been doing with Jasper Bernes and Joshua Clover, we’ve been talking about poetry as being like the dog barking at the riot police. So not the riot, but beside the riot.
AD: In a roundtable discussion with Joshua Clover and Chris Nealon, you talk about wanting to be a “movement poet,” which is ironic to me because I’m English and there were a bunch of (to my mind) boring men around in England in the 1950s known as “Movement Poets,” like Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, Robert Conquest . . .
JS: Oh really? What’s their movement?
AD: They were reactionary in ways; they wanted to write formal, “anti-romantic” (yet pastoral and nostalgic), anti-experimental poetry as a rebuttal of urban modernist aesthetics. But you, on the other hand, are referring to poetry’s potential to move people to emotion, to political action. Thinking about “identity politics” and its messy relation to “non-identity-based politics,” to borrow the terms from that roundtable, how do you think of that relation in a Marxist-Feminist context? Especially in terms of the affective dimensions of reproductive labour, which is always both material and immaterial labour?
JS: We end up using that term “movement poetries” because Chris Nealon uses it in his work sometimes.1 Other people use this term too, it isn’t like Chris owns it. But I’ve not seen it used that much about U.S. poetries. More about South African poetries. So it’s interesting when you say that in England it might be used to describe Philip Larkin. But I assume Nealon uses it because the other term that gets used to describe the poetries that come out of the seventies and are aligned with various resistance movements is “identity poetries,” and this term is often used dismissively (and also misses that a lot of this work is concerned with cultural resistance, not necessarily with describing an identity). In the roundtable, we’re using it to talk about stuff in the seventies that happened, stuff around the Black Arts Movement, for example. And there is, at that moment, a kind of feminist poetry that develops too. I am interested in this moment because it is a moment where poetry very directly intersects with political movements. And despite my hesitations around a lot of the things that get said about poetry and politics, there’s another way in which I don’t want to dismiss the way that literature and all art forms have often been seen as a crucial part of decolonization movements by the people who are involved in them. So wanting to be a movement poet is sort of said as a joke. As in there is so clearly not a movement anymore that one can be a movement poet for. And yet also feeling nostalgic for that moment when poetry has a closeness with various political things that are happening. And then also I keep wanting to insist that as much as the international traditions of modernism influence my work, so have the international traditions of anticolonial work (even though I am a poet who is part of colonial structures, not the reverse).
But then, when you ask how this might relate to Marxist-Feminism, I don’t really know. When I think of Marxist-Feminism, and here I’m thinking of how it manifests in the 1970s in Italy and while some of these ideas for sure come over to the U.S., I don’t know how to relate that to poetry. It is interesting, though, as in some recent work that Jasper has done (and here I’m thinking of a talk he gave at a conference that I do not think is published yet), to think of some of the attention to reproductive labour that shows up so beautifully in work by Bernadette Mayer and Alice Notley and others as under the influence of these ideas.
AD: Yes, it’s very difficult, and maybe any contemporary version of a “Wages for/against Housework” campaign is impossible in this (post-Fordist) historical moment. I was thinking about Lauren Berlant’s term “intimate publics,”2 which resonates with your critical and poetic work. Can you talk about how you see your own poetry, perhaps along with that of others such as Catherine Wagner and Anne Boyer, as interested in fostering connections among otherwise isolated subjects? How might poetry, even if it is able to foster such connections, move beyond a politics of recognition to encourage a more actively resistant politics?
JS: Yeah, I’m certainly interested in Cathy’s and Anne’s work; I think that term, “intimate publics,” is interesting too. And it is nice to think of both together. And you are right, it is difficult to imagine a contemporary version of “Wages for Housework.” Although there are all sorts of reasons that we can’t imagine it. And among these might be the way that deindustrialization has given us a sort of capitalist version of wages for housework because it has forced more women in the U.S. and other nations to enter the workforce and they have, as a result, hired other workers to do their housework. It’s interesting in a scary sort of way that the kinds of alliances and social ties that were such an important aspect of seventies movement poetries are so much not a part of contemporary poetries. Why is this? What have we, as poets, let happen? Is it even “our” fault? It feels like literary work that makes all the right gestures is being written. Not only by Cathy and Anne but by a million others. There is, for instance, a lot of really good work that is being written that suggests intimate publics and transnational subjectivities, that is anti-national; and yet this work somehow, to just take one instance, is not in any way a part of the huge anti-globalization movement that defines the turn of the century.
I’m trying to write a book on the literature of the 1990s. Or have been trying for the last fifteen or so years. It started out as a contemporary project and now it is historical. Ha. But I’m interested in this moment in the nineties when there is a significant grouping of works written in English that include other languages. Like Myung Mi Kim’s work, for instance. But also Guillermo Gómez-Peña, James Thomas Stevens, Rosmarie Waldrop, etc. I’m interested in thinking about what these works want to say about globalization, about global English. But the question that keeps returning is, why does this literary work find itself unable to connect up with the huge anti-globalization movements that are happening in the nineties? It’s interesting that the kinds of alliances and social ties that were such an important aspect in the seventies are failing in the nineties, and my question is, why are they failing? What do we no longer have? Again it feels like that work in the nineties is making all the right gestures, coming up with ideas of intimate publics and transnational subjectivities, trying to think anti-nationally, and yet it somehow cannot bring itself to be a part of those political practices. I think my answers are turning out to be more structural: if the structures of the seventies allowed literature to be a crucial part of, let’s say, a black liberation movement, the connections around the nineties are entirely different. Those social formations are no longer in play in the same way; the myopic-ness and community-ness of those formations are beginning to be a restraint rather than an empowerment.
AD: Thinking of The Transformation, as well as Army of Lovers, as books which explore the connection between our “private” and sexual lives, and then our “public” political actions and obligations — a misleading binary that these books trouble — do you see this connection, its failures and difficulties, as particularly crucial to feminist (Marxist or militant) politics? What I’m ultimately trying to get at is this question: what is the difference between poetry’s relation to a Marxist politics, and a Marxist-Feminist politics?
And of course I think all Marxism should be Marxist-Feminism — it’s not Marxism without the feminism for me, but it’s still separated, isn’t it, in discourse within the academy, within activism; Marxist-Feminism still seems to be perceived as a “tangent,” or a certain strand of Marxism that women are supposedly interested in! Perhaps we can situate this problem, along one axis, in the context of Berlant’s notion of “gestural economies,” where she talks about the kinds of confidence people have enjoyed about the entitlements of their social location.3 I’m thinking about the way poetry can pose questions about confidence, entitlement, labour, gender-class. Thinking about these things, and their possible relation to a Marxist-Feminist politics, how might you write — or what would a Marxist-Feminist poetics be?
JS: I had a lot of thoughts while you were saying that; one of which is, how to not give a reductive answer to that question of why Marxism thinks that it does not need to be Marxist-Feminism finally. And I feel like my answer would be so annoyed and pissed off in ways that would distort my meaning. There has been a way in which that work keeps happening, work to point out the significance of reproductive labour, to show how gendered relations are required and maintained by a wily capitalism, and I don’t know why people have for so long acted as if they don’t have to think about that. The other thing that seems very crucial to me is the problematic relation between Marxism and environmentalism: that you can have an ecopoetics that thinks it doesn’t have to be Marxist, or thinks it can allude briefly to capitalism, as if the questions around ecopolitics or ecopoetics are merely representational and not actually about capitalism; that Marxism can sometimes act as though these questions around environmentalism are separate, that crisis can happen on some pure economic level.
AD: In that roundtable with Joshua and Chris, I think the three of you agree that there’s a separation between what poetry can do and what activism can do, but I’m still wondering if that relation changes if you shift to a politics and a theory that are thinking about the domestic sphere, affective labour and emotional relationships, bringing up children, things like that. Whether a politics that pays sufficient attention to those spheres would also imply that poetry might have a different use, a different function. That the relation between poetry and politics might be more important in some ways, more potentially transformative, perhaps in the sense that Claire Fontaine propose when they speak of a “sentimental strike,” an affective and physical strike that begins and ends at the level of subjectivity.4 But maybe to think along those lines is to slip into an essentialist feminism . . .
JS: Yes. Again, back to Jasper’s paper, where he does this really good reading of Mayer’s Midwinter’s Day and how it represents reproductive labour. Since his talk, every time I read academic papers about representations of feminine labour (although I’m not sure the term “labour” is even used) in, say, Notley’s poems, I now think, how can a critic read all this stuff about changing diapers and not think about it in relation to Wages for Housework? There’s a way in which those representations of the domestic have often been thought about without any attention to the structural economics of it . . .
AD: Actually I think you also talk about “women’s work” in an essay on Mayer’s Sonnets! Your essay refers throughout to the work — the domestic labour — taking place in those sonnets. You wrote that a while back.5
JS: Yes. A long time ago. Also thinking here of that mom-po moment when all those anthologies about mothering came out. So much of that work was trying to counter these devotional poems about motherhood but very little of it seemed to be thinking about motherhood as being economically structured in all these fucked-up ways. Whereas, when you go back and look at some of that work by Notley and Mayer, it seems that there is a whole bunch of economic discussion in that work.
AD: Perhaps then, the problem has also been perpetuated in poetry criticism — in certain approaches to reading and the naïve empiricisms of certain kinds of formal “surface reading,” for example . . .
JS: Yes, perhaps. It often makes sense to blame the critics. Or at least, they are easy to blame.
1 See Chris Nealon, “The Poetic Case,” Critical Inquiry 33 (Summer 2007).
2 See Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke UP, 2008).
3 See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke UP, 2011).
4 Claire Fontaine, “Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike. A few Clarifications,” http://www.clairefontaine.ws/pdf/readymade_eng.pdf.
5 See Juliana Spahr, “‘Love Scattered, Not Concentrated Love’: Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets,” Differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 12.2 (2001): 98–120.