Thesis/Dissertation Sheet Australia's Global UNSWSYDNEY University

Surname/Family Name Gomez Given Name/s Elena Maria Abbreviation for degree as give in the University calendar MFA Faculty Art& Design School Art & Design Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt: Gender, Labour and lntergenerationality Thesis Title in Marxist-feminist Poetics

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE) The book-length poem titled admit the joyous passion of revolt, which comprises the practice component of this MFA, is a durational long-form piece written over four years across 75 AS pages in which I make a linguistic exploration of labour, care, solidarity, gender and bodies, drawing on my subjectivity as a non-white cis woman and worker in an arts industry subsided by the unpaid labour of a largely female workforce, to open up a space that explores gendered and embodied experi.ences of life under neoliberal capitalism. The paper component argues how this poem forms an extension of a decades-long tradition of poets and Marxist-feminists of previous generations, emphasising the intergenerational quality intrinsic to Marxist-feminist poetics. I then set out the theoretical underpinnings of my poetry: identifying the thematic qualities of Marxist-feminist poetics as concerned with waged and unwaged domestic work, gender, race and bodies. I chart cartographies of Marxist-feminism (vis-a-vis Rosi Braidotti), establishing the temporal spaces that form the basis of this thesis. Next, I give close readings of sections from Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day and Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters, providing a literary analysis of the aesthetics and subjectivities that constitute Marxist-feminist poetics. I read these poems alongside my own practice, as someone who writes in the space and tradition of those poets who have come before me, intertwined with a politics and ethics of solidarity, care, labour struggles. In this chapter I show how my poetry practice contributes an aesthetic and political intervention into the fields of Marxist-feminist scholarship and contemporary poetry through its aesthetic qualities as well as through the conditions of the poem's production. I conclude by reiterating the parameters and conditions of Marxist-feminist poetics and its generative possibilities for the field of poetry, feminism and anticapitalism. This practice-led project argues that Marxist-feminist poetics creates space for gendered and raced subjectivity to be considered as part of anticapitalist and workerist struggles, and that it is intergenerational: it emerges cyclically and builds on gains and failures of its forebears. This thesis demonstrates and analyses how poetic enquiry can illuminate a Marxist-feminist poetics, and the repercussions such a reading has on how we might conceptualise the practice and production of poetry along class and gender lines.

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Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt: Gender, Labour and Intergenerationality in Marxist-feminist Poetics

Elena Gomez

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts

UNSW Art & Design

September 2019

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements v

Introduction 1

Chapter One: Literature Review 8

1.1 Marxist-Feminist Temporalities 9

1.2 Critiques of Work in Marxist Feminism 16

1.3 Contemporary Marxist Feminism and Poetry 18

Chapter Two: The Intergenerationality of Marxist Feminism

& My Turn to ‘communist poet–editor’ 25

2.1 Kollontai and ‘Women’s Work’ 28

2.2 Genealogies of Marxist Feminism – Towards a Conclusion 36

2.3 Marxist Feminism in the Workplace 38

Chapter Three: ‘Poet Mothers’ and Social Reproduction –

A Marxist-feminist Reading of Bernadette Mayer and Diane di Prima 43

3.1 The Working Conditions of Marxist-feminist Poetry 45

3.2 Motherhood and Revolution 50

3.3 Capitalism and Its Objects 58

3.4 Capitalism, Marxist Feminism and Poetry 61

Conclusion: Future Directions for Marxist-feminist Poetry 65

Bibliography 67

ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project would never have been completed without invaluable support I received from many people. This is true for any research undertaking, but feels especially potent for this project, given its themes of solidarity, knowledge-sharing, and care labour.

I acknowledge that this MFA was written on the lands of the Gadigal people of Eora nation and the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung people of the Kulin nation.

I was very lucky to have two brilliant supervisors, Dr Astrid Lorange and Dr Verónica

Tello. I admired Astrid’s poetry before I met her, and was lucky to later count her as a friend and comrade. She provided me with endless encouragement and a generous and sharp intellectual engagement. Verónica understood exactly what I was trying to achieve with this project and challenged me in all the best ways to interrogate my ideas as deeply as possible. Both supervisors taught me how to write and to think in ways that have profoundly changed my relationship to language, thought and Marxist-feminist practice.

At UNSW Art & Design my research found the perfect home, where I was able to centre my practice and let my intellectual and creative curiosity find full expression. Thank you especially to the Higher Degree Research administrators who provided much-needed support and guidance, especially at the submission end of things. In 2016 I received a

Higher Degree Student Travel Grant, which allowed me to attend the American

Comparative Literature Association Conference in the United States. The seminar I participated in, on Marxist feminism and poetry, was co-convened by Dr Amy De’Ath and

Dr Juliana Spahr, and introduced me to some wonderful thinkers whose work was immensely helpful in the early shapes of this project.

Returning to communal knowledge-sharing I’m so fond of, I must acknowledge with gratitude those who participated in the various reading and writing groups I joined over the years: the Capital reading group, which began my Marxist and poetic education, the feminist

v reading group, which introduced me to Kollontai and Ratbot Collective, a writing group for graduate students at UNSW, which introduced me to some impressive writers and thinkers and allowed me the space to share and exchange ideas about language and communism.

I thank those friends who listened to and read all manners of scraps of ideas throughout this project, especially Romi Graham and proofreader Andrew Brooks.

My parents, Malcolm and Eugenia, always encouraged and supported me in whatever my interests were, including this project, even when they did not necessarily understand them. To Malcolm especially, I desperately wish you could be here as I crossed the finish line. In the final sprint of this project, I channeled your discipline, drive and generosity, and remain grateful for everything you gave me.

Finally, thanks must go to my partner, Rory, whose patience and kindness kept my head on its shoulders over the past four years, not to mention his extra shifts of emotional and domestic labour, and whose own generous and rigorous approach scholarship, politics and poetry is something I strive towards.

vi INTRODUCTION

Poetry, for both its practitioners and its readers, is a literary mode through which we engage with the complexities of lived existence. This life, in the 21st century, is inadvertently mediated by capital; but to recognise that capitalism is the system within which we live and work and make art does not in itself constitute a political act.

Recognition must also be accompanied by a critique of capitalism. The critique of capital that I seek to mobilise here, in these pages and in the practice component of my MFA, is informed by, and pursues, a Marxist-feminist poetics. What is a Marxist-feminist poetics?

To put it simply, I posit that a Marxist-feminist poetics is characterised by a preoccupation with social reproduction, as a theme and as an object of inquiry and critique, while at the same time being invested in the temporalities of women’s work. Time itself has been shaped by capitalism in relation to how we work and live. By being invested in the temporalities of women’s work, a Marxist-feminist approach can trace a historical materialist understanding of how a poetics is conditioned by temporality (working days, weekends, overtime, sleep), while also observing the cycles of feminist temporalities on a larger historical scale, with the benefit of decades of hindsight. Marxist-feminist poetics is invested in probing the modes of work that women do; the structures and spaces where this work takes place (home, office, online, in organising) and temporalities inhabited and invoked through this work. Some of the questions I ask here include: How does Marxist feminism appear within and shape poetic production? How can poetry be a means to critically animate the spaces and temporalities of Marxist-feminist poets, and their often- invisible labour and histories? In engaging these questions, my research aims to lay bare the centrality of poetic practice to what I term Marxist-feminist poetics, as both a means to critically engage with and intervene in capitalist modes of production, and offer insights into alternative ways to work and be therein.

1 In this paper, by centring my practice and the conditions of work and gender that inform how I write not only thematically but also materially, I explore how my poetic practice might itself be Marxist feminist – how poetry is written in and among wage labour and reproductive labour; how it is written under the conditions of contemporary capitalism. My profession as an editor for a book publisher shapes the conditions of my waged work. Not only constrained by the office as both a physical and psychic space, this role is characterised by low pay, long hours, and intellectual and care labour (in terms of the editor’s relationship to an author), as well as being a female-dominant workforce. It is work that has shaped my interests in poetry, Marxism and feminism.

AIM The book-length poem, admit the joyous passion of revolt, aims to show how and why poetry animates and interrogates Marxist feminism in the present.

It was composed over the four years I have been completing this MFA, written under temporal conditions that have shaped my subjectivity, such as the restrictions of reproductive labour and wage labour. It was written with the aim of uncovering how a practice of Marxist-feminist poetics is formed. As I wrote my poem, it became clear to me that my concept and practice of Marxist-feminist poetics are always intergenerationally mediated – spectres of the past haunt my text. The works of Anne Boyer, Diane di Prima,

Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer and others, were also present, beside (and in) the text, when I wrote. My poetry critically engages with their spectres, writing through and against poets from earlier generations. I do so because my poetry sits within this genealogy, extending into both the past and the future, but also because for me a Marxist-feminist poetics is also always an attempt to activate marginalised practices and labours from other poets. This project is an attempt to forge solidarity and collectivity with those Marxist- feminist poets with whom I have an affinity, without whom my contemporary practice

2 cannot unfold. Intergenerationality is central to this project – the past and present are intimately intertwined in Marxist-feminist poetics.1

This paper, a companion to the poem, will reveal how aesthetic qualities in poetry

(textual references to domesticity, labour, minor objects and quotidian minutiae, arrangements of text on a page) and temporal restraints and conditions (how the subject position of a mother, worker and writer shapes one’s working day and time for poetic production) can help identify a Marxist-feminist poetics and how this in turn allows us to develop a framework for understanding poetry’s potential. My MFA project aims to illuminate the generative possibilities of poetry for addressing and responding to gendered relationships under capitalism’s apparently totalising structure.

OVERVIEW This paper integrates temporality and spatiality into its structure. In Chapter One I survey literature from historical Marxist feminism and contemporary poetics to lay bare the theoretical works to which my project responds. I give an overview of the temporal structure of this thesis, identifying three main periods of Marxist feminism in terms of generations that build from moments of crisis. These broad periods also inform the content and themes of my book-length poem. The first period I identify comprises the years leading up to and including the 1917 Russian Revolution (1890s to 1917) and the early Soviet era (1917–1924), with Alexandra Kollontai as a focal point, who, as one of early Soviet Russia’s most influential Bolshevik feminists, was pivotal in the development

1 See Rosi Braidotti, ‘A Critical Cartography of Feminist Post-postmodernism’, Australian Feminist Studies 20, no. 47 (2005): 169–180, in which Braidotti points to ‘ignorance of the history of women’s struggles and of feminist genealogies’ as a sign of dislocated gender politics in contemporary institutions. She emphasises cartographies, genealogical consciousness as a crucial component to her feminism.

3 of Marxist and feminist political practice.2 The next period of crisis I identify, and which

I’ve found to be a generative and productive period for Marxist-feminist thought, is the

1960s–70s in western society – specifically Italy, the US, the UK and Australia. The 1970s

– a period of intense economic crisis that saw the transition from Fordist to post-Fordist modes of capitalist production – also saw a rise in Marxist economic thought, particularly in Italy, where the Italian workers’ movement, Operaismo, became active. It was this

‘generation’ of Marxist feminism that produced key feminist texts in Italy and the United

States.3 The third and final period of Marxist-feminist poetics my research engages with is our contemporary moment, whose beginning was marked by the 2008 global financial crisis.4 Poetry and criticism in this most recent iteration of Marxist-feminist revival have

2 My poetry has interrogated how Kollontai’s own writing embodied many concerns of Marxist feminism that have remained relevant to this day, and in this paper I make explicit the themes in Kollontai’s life and writing that helped produce the beginning of my interest in this project. 3 One of the key feminists texts from this period, which I turn to later in this paper, is The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, co-written by Italian feminist Mariarosa Dalla Costa and American feminist Selma James, who were both involved in the International Wages For Housework Campaign. 4 The 2008 global financial crisis is considered an economic event that began a new era of capitalism and respondent anticapitalism. See, for example, Kate Connolly, ‘Booklovers turn to Karl Marx as financial crisis bites in Germany’, The Guardian, 15 October 2008, accessed 7 July 2019, theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/15/marx-germany-popularity- financial-crisis, which includes interviews with booksellers who noticed the sudden spike in sales of Das Kapital vol. 1. Juliana Spahr, Joshua Clover and Jasper Bernes also identify the link between the 2008 crisis, Marxism and poetry in their essay ‘A Thimbleful of Cultural Heat’, Jacket2, 14 January 2014, accessed 7 July 2019, jacket2.org/commentary/thimbleful- cultural-heat. They note that ‘Marx has returned to broader discussion since the 2008 crisis’, and write: There are doubtless several ways to think about this general motion of ‘Marx and poetry,’ and several scales in which to think. The great economic crisis of 1973 stoked an already extant North American poetics loosely (sometimes closely) tied to New Social Movements and the new left in general, explicit in its political content. This made a sort of pair with an emergent poetry claiming a form-based ‘politics of the referent’ – a pair not always as frozen in static opposition as we sometimes recall. Regardless of their real relation, these are examples of a moment in which Benjamin’s ‘politicisation of aesthetics’ (itself proposed in the midst of a global economic crisis, increasingly political in character) was explicitly on the table – in some way exceeding the bromide that all poetry is political.

4 begun to address the gap of scholarship regarding Marxist feminism and poetry. In this paper I identify two key texts in this ‘generation’: Sam Solomon’s Lyric Pedagogy & Marxist

Feminism, which studies social feminism and poetry via the Cambridge poets in the 1970s, and Amy De’Ath’s thesis, Unsociable Poetry: Antagonism and Abstraction in Contemporary

Feminized Poetics, which explores relationships between Marxist theory and feminised poetry.

These broad generations have each been informative in my development of not only a poetic voice but also this specific research project. As I will show in the following pages, this attention to historical periods indicates the intergenerational approach in developing a blueprint of Marxist-feminist poetics.

In Chapter Two, I establish the intergenerationality of Marxist feminism in practice, focusing on Alexandra Kollontai, a figure who mobilised women workers and was dedicated to politicising the ways gender roles could be changed and conceptualised in the transition from capitalism to communism. I identify Kollontai’s Marxist-feminist positions around work and women and capitalism, showing how we can make connections to contemporary forms of gendered labour. Her politics affirmed the centrality of personal relationships in building a communist state, and was not limited to the work of women factory workers but also addressed the gendered nature of love and care, the invisible labour of housewives and mothers. Extending this notion of care to contemporary service roles, we can see echoes of Kollontai in contemporary feminism concerned with care labour5, as well as in the arts industry, including book publishing, where care and service are vital and gendered components of such work. This chapter aims to establish the temporal and thematic links of Marxist feminism over generations across the twentieth

5 For example, one might look at Caring Labor: An Archive at caringlabor.wordpress.com, an archive of feminist texts focusing on affective and care labour, run by students in East Bay, California from 2010–12, as part of their organisation to protect a childcare facility that was threatened with closure, which was ultimately successful in keeping the facility open.

5 century, beginning with Kollontai as a formative thinker in this area, while showing how such links can be laid bare in a poetic inquiry as seen in my book-length poem.

My poetry is descendent of its ‘poet mothers’, who include Bernadette Mayer and

Diane di Prima. In Chapter Three I give a close reading of selections from their respective poems to identify the conditions of production and aesthetic qualities that identify them as

Marxist-feminist poems. The purpose of this close reading is to show, through examining a poem’s form, how the intergenerational quality I identify in Chapters One and Two does not in its own right mark a Marxist-feminist poetics, but informs and sits alongside the poem’s literary qualities. In other words, we cannot comprehend a Marxist-feminist poetics without engaging with poetry on a formal level. In addition to a close reading, this chapter considers more broadly other poets who’ve influenced my work, including Alice Notley and Denise Riley (whose writing careers have spanned a number of decades and continue today), as well as Audre Lorde and June Jordan (the latter’s collection Directed by Desire6 was formative in my education on poetry’s potential to speak to race, activism and gender alongside aesthetic innovation). Because Marxist-feminist poetry analysis is a somewhat underdeveloped field of poetic inquiry, my paper aims to use the close readings of Mayer and di Prima to deconstruct and analyse the ways these poems can be identified as Marxist feminist. By examining their poetry’s formal qualities, including themes and objects within them, I aim to show how such an analysis can provide a space for us to encounter these poems in new and generative ways and how this space is vital to the development of a politics within and beyond it.

To name the poets who have guided my practice as ‘poet mothers’ is deliberate. In doing this I place at the forefront of the research the centrality that intergenerationality occupies within Marxist-feminist poetics. Following the close readings in Chapter Three, I

6 June Jordan, Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan, eds. Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles (Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2007).

6 build upon Rosi Braidotti’s articulation of the concepts of temporalities and cartographies to map out the scope of Marxist-feminist poetics that my practice has developed from.

These temporalities and cartographies have allowed me to consider my practice more broadly as an intervention into the political, aesthetic and temporal concerns that comprise

Marxist-feminist poetics across shifting histories. I extend Braidotti’s theory to consider the limits of time and space in relation to my practice: how my poetry and the conditions of its production are shaped by my experience as a worker, as a woman, as a politicised, gendered and raced subject under capitalism, and as a result of workplace struggles. I am concerned with how poetry practice sits among demands of waged and unwaged and reproductive labour, how it is conditioned by, and conditions, the way a poet might ‘steal back time’.

This paper, read alongside the book-length poem, comprises my practice-led inquiry into Marxist-feminist poetics, and aims to lay bare the ways in which poetic inquiry reveals gendered and classed subjectivities under capitalism not only by illuminating these themes, but also in the act of poetic practice itself.

7 CHAPTER ONE: LITERATURE REVIEW

As a practising poet, I could easily say that the majority of my life experiences as well as much of the art and literature I’ve consumed over the years have influenced my poetry.

These have ranged from the move I made from Brisbane to Sydney aged 20 to pursue a career as a book editor, or my experiences being raised as a Malayali and Goan daughter of

Catholic immigrants who were thoroughly Anglicised in language, but not in culture, to

Joan Jonas’s Volcano Saga (1989), the television series Friday Night Lights (2006–11) and The

Good Wife (2009–16). But in the shaping of my MFA project, there have been specific texts that provide a useful mapping of the broader concerns my research and practice address, beginning with my relationship to Marxist-feminist politics and the struggles of those who came before me.

This thesis sprang from an encounter with Alexandra Kollontai’s writing, and from this beginning it has extended to consider more broadly the temporalities of Marxist- feminist poetics. Alongside Kollontai’s own writing, part of my understanding of temporality has come from key texts that have dealt with Kollontai. These texts comprise her ‘recuperation’ during the 1970s by feminist historians and Marxist feminists interested in how history had dealt with ‘the woman question’.7

In the first section of this literature review I map out some of the texts that engaged with Kollontai’s work in the 1970s, and what this meant in the larger context of the

Marxist-feminist project in that era. I then turn to the key theorists and texts of that period, which shaped this moment of Marxist feminism, and who in turn shaped my own political

7 ‘The woman question’ is specifically raised by August Bebel in the introduction to his book Women and Socialism, trans. Meta L. Stern (Hebe) (New York: Socialist Literature Co., 1910). The phrase is widely used in regards to thinking about women’s oppression as part of the totality of capitalist social and economic relations. See also Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx’s response to Bebel, titled ‘The Woman Question’, Westminster Review (1886).

8 and poetic development. I will touch on Selma James, Silvia Federici and Mariarosa Dalla

Costa, and their writing and organising around domestic and reproductive labour, including the International Wages For Housework Campaign. Finally I turn to current literature, particularly recent scholarship on Marxist-feminist poetry. My project seeks to show how poetry can produce a generative engagement with Marxist feminism in the contemporary moment and so the works of Sam Solomon, Amy De’Ath and Anne Boyer have been useful to mapping the terrain of this subject. The works discussed below are intended not as an exhaustive list but as a critical overview of the subject areas from which my research has emerged, and which it deals with. There is a consistent theme throughout every moment where Marxist feminism emerges, and that is the inability for either capitalism or the left to deal with the gendered problem of social reproduction and reproductive labour.

Unpacking this gendered problem is important for understanding how we consider a

Marxist-feminist poetics alongside its politics.

MARXIST-FEMINIST TEMPORALITIES Though Kollontai had initially been a prominent and central figure in the Bolshevik movement (a hard left faction emerging from the within the Russian Social Democratic

Workers’ Party that was initially led by Vladimir Lenin), she fell into obscurity as Russia turned to Stalinism in the 1930s and the Cold War made it difficult for those who might have been interested in her to access her work. During the 1970s women’s liberation movement, feminist scholars took an interest in Kollontai and began to translate and critically engage with her political writing. Alix Holt translated into English a selection of her speeches and pamphlets with commentary in a collection published in 1977, while

Barbara Evans Clements, Cathy Porter and Beatrice Farnsworth each published

9 biographies of Kollontai in 1979–1980.8 It is also worth noting that in 2014, Haymarket

Books republished the Cathy Porter biography of Kollontai, suggesting that the renewal of interest in Kollontai as an important feminist and socialist figure is not confined to the earlier women’s liberation movement.

In Australia, the Australian Left Review published an overview of Kollontai’s life by

Mavis Robertson in 1979, who noted that ‘many of her ideas are those that are discussed today in the modern women’s movement’, and attributed ‘a revival of interest in Kollontai’ to this movement.9 Robertson’s account of Kollontai gives a brief biography of her life, canvassing the literature that had come before, largely from historian and translator Alix

Holt and French socialist and former colleague of Kollontai’s, Michael Body. Robertson summarises Kollontai’s key political arguments around women and labour, and the weaknesses in those arguments (notably that she was ‘over-optimistic on the potential of the working class to develop new forms of personal relations’10), acknowledging that ‘there are gaps in her theory – which also includes a certain idealization of motherhood’.11

Ultimately, Robertson argues, Kollontai ‘developed for Marxism a whole body of ideas.

She is a pathfinder who shows that the institution of the family, attitudes to love and personal responses and concepts of morality are not fixed and immutable but socially conditioned and economically based.’12 Such analyses of Kollontai’s political writing shows how she traversed temporal and cartographical spaces in the development of Marxist feminism in the twentieth century.

8 Barbara Evans Clements, Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979); Cathy Porter, Alexandra Kollontai: The Lonely Struggle of the Woman Who Defied Lenin (New York: Dial Press, 1980); Beatrice Farnsworth, Aleksandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminist and the Bolshevik Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980). 9 Mavis Robertson, ‘Alexandra Kollontai: An Extraordinary Person’, Australian Left Review 1, no. 68 (1979): 1. 10 Ibid., 10. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 9–10.

10 What makes Kollontai’s recuperation in the 1970s worth noting is that her ideas were not reproduced uncritically. In 1978, New Left Review published an essay by Jacqueline

Heinen that gave a detailed analysis of Kollontai’s fourteen lectures, delivered in June 1921, situating their historical context while also unpacking the contradictions within Kollontai’s work in greater detail than Robertson’s article. Heinen focuses less on convincing the reader that Kollontai is an important thinker to pay attention to, but demonstrates this nonetheless by taking Kollontai seriously, which she does through critique and close engagement with her ideas. Heinen notes, for example, that Kollontai, though critical of the ways in which women were exploited as a gendered class, was uncritical of Soviet work ethic and was not self-reflexive enough to challenge the very notion of women’s work.

Heinen writes that ‘excessive attention to productivity in discussing the problems of abortion, communal living and child-care expresses a view of the social division of labour which cannot be accepted’.13 This attention to Kollontai’s weaker points shows how critique functions productively for an intergenerational Marxist-feminist politics.

As the above texts by Heinen and Robertson reveal, they both understand Kollontai’s aims, while also pointing out the problems in her political positions and arguments – namely, her idealisation and limited perspective on why women’s work is indeed always only women’s work. These critiques of Kollontai’s work provide generative questions that remain relevant decades after the women’s liberation movement recuperated her. These questions take up problems Kollontai faced within the socialist movement in her own day: the problem of trying to conceptualise women’s liberation as distinct yet related to the project of liberating all workers. At the same time, these critiques approach the problem of articulating the subjectivity of ‘women workers’ without accepting an outdated notion that only women can do ‘women’s work’.

13 Jacqueline Heinen, ‘Alexandra Kollontai and the Oppression of Women’, New Left Review (July 1978): 46.

11 Ruth Connell, writing in Australian Left Review in 1980, surveyed the previous decade of women’s liberation and socialist feminism, noting Kollontai’s achievements in one of the very first passages as someone who ‘saw personal relationships as an essential part of each individual’s experience, and as such, central to the struggle of each individual for a better life’.14 The article summarises in broad strokes the movements of socialist feminism throughout the century, but in beginning with Kollontai, it acknowledges and affirms her work as an original incarnation of Marxist feminism. The character of Marxist or socialist feminism in Connell’s view is one that must take into account the personal/private struggles alongside those of political economy, and that ‘this feminist mode of analysis makes revolution necessary’.15

***

The recuperation of Kollontai’s writing and political projects from the early twentieth century by 1970s feminists coincided with a broader feminist movement that was concerned with the question of reproductive labour, which in contemporary theory is often understood under the umbrella of social reproduction theory.

Social reproduction is not a term without its complications, and isn’t necessarily interchangeable with Marxist feminism. Silvia Federici notes:

Contrary to an assumption that runs through recent works on social reproduction,

to look at social reality from this viewpoint is not itself to take a Marxist or a radical

stand generally speaking. Social reproduction theorists have included a wide range of

14 Ruth Connell, ‘Socialist-feminist Theory: An Appraisal’, Australian Left Review 1, no. 68 (1979): 11. 15 Ibid., 13.

12 promoters of capitalist development. Thus, as an analytic category ‘social

reproduction’ cannot be adopted as a form of a political identification, as it is

done by feminists describing themselves as ‘social reproduction theorists’.16

The difference, Federici points out, between simply noting the nature of social reproduction under capitalism and Marxist feminism, is that the Marxist-feminist project she and others began in the 1970s was about ‘unmasking the socio-economic function of the creation of a fictional private sphere, and thereby re-politicising family life, sexuality, procreation’.17 For Federici, the feature that demarcates Marxist feminism from social reproduction theory is its revolutionary purpose, which is rooted in the understanding of the existence of exploitation not recognised by other revolutionary theorists:

It was discovering that unpaid labour is not extracted by the capitalist class only

from the waged workday, but that it is also extracted from the workday of millions

of unwaged house-workers as well as many other unpaid and un-free labourers.18

In recent years, Marxist-feminist theory has continued its intergenerational approach to addressing questions of gendered exploitation under emergent moments of capitalism. A

2013 issue of Endnotes journal distinguishes social reproduction in the Marxist sense from social reproduction in the Marxist-feminist sense. The difference is found between Marx’s concern with ‘the reproduction of the social totality’ and Marxist-feminists’ concern with

16 Silvia Federici, ‘Social reproduction theory: history, issues and present challenges’, Radical Philosophy 2, no. 04 (Spring 2019), accessed 3 May 2019, radicalphilosophy.com/article/social-reproduction-theory-2. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid.

13 ‘production and reproduction of the commodity labour-power’.19 By emphasising this distinction, Endnotes pinpoints a core feminist intervention into Marx’s theory of social reproduction, and directs it more specifically to a gendered understanding of labour power and value.

In a similar political and temporal orbit, Maya Andrea Gonzalez reframes questions of reproduction, value and gendered labour in a contemporary context, drawing upon and developing the earlier theoretical work of Marxist feminists in the 1970s. By revisiting

Leopoldina Fortunati’s text The Arcane of Reproduction and the activities of the Marxist- feminist group Lotta Feminista more than twenty-five years ago, Gonzalez place Marxist- feminist theories of labour and gender at the centre of her account of social reproduction.

In doing so, she highlights how intergenerationality remains necessary in our contemporary moment and how intergenerationality involves learning from, recuperating and building upon previous feminist struggle, including its failures and lessons.20

For Marxist feminists, feminist analysis and struggle centre on defining reproductive labour and accounting for, unpacking and challenging the unwaged and undervalued nature of it. Fortunati’s The Arcane of Reproduction showed how a Marxian analysis only partially describes the process of production and reproduction under capitalism. It cannot be extended, as it is, she argued, to account for a theory of reproduction under capitalism, and

‘that an analysis of the entire cycle of production cannot be made until reproduction has been analysed too. This latter analysis can only be made if Marxian categories are not used

19 ‘The Logic of Gender on the Separation of Spheres and the Process of Abjection’, Endnotes 3 (September 2013), accessed 18 April 2019, endnotes.org.uk/issues/3/en/endnotes-the-logic-of-gender, 20 See Maya Gonzales, ‘The Gendered Circuit: Reading the Arcane of Reproduction’, Viewpoint Magazine (28 September 2013), accessed 15 April 2019, viewpointmag.com/2013/09/28/the-gendered-circuit-reading-the-arcane-of-reproduction. Gonzales recuperates Leopoldina Fortunati’s The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital, trans. Hilary Creek (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1996), particularly from Fortunati’s critics who dismissed her based on ‘Fortunati’s analysis with a single criterion: the exactitude with which it recapitulates the central points of Capital.’

14 dogmatically and if they are combined with feminist criticism.’21 The theoretical interventions of Fortunati, Gonzalez, and other Marxist feminists were animated in practice many decades earlier by Kollontai’s organisation and mobilisation of women workers doubly exploited for their class and gender status.

The project of Marxist-feminist theorists has largely been to emphasise gendered oppression experienced by women of the working classes within a movement that centres the typically male, typically industrial proletarian subject. This has resulted in a focus on the position of ‘housewives’ and the labour they perform in a domestic sphere that is unwaged and considered ‘unproductive’ but in fact contributes to reproducing the labour force and therefore reproduces capitalism. In her essay ‘The Proletarian is Dead: Long Live the

Housewife’, Claudia von Werlhof addresses the disconnect of women from the traditional workers’ movement at the outset, writing: ‘The women’s question is the most general – not the most specific – of all social questions, because it contains all the others and, in contrast to all the other questions, it leaves no one out. This is neither feminist conceit nor arrogance, but is inherent in the functioning of our society itself.’22 The essay was published towards the end of the eighties, seventeen years after Marxist-feminists

Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James published one of the first major texts on domestic labour and the women’s work, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community.

Werlhof’s essay reveals the constant struggle of the Marxist-feminist movement not only against broader society, especially more bourgeois or liberal feminist discourse, but also within the left-wing communities these women had participated in.

21 Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction’, 10. 22 Claudia von Werlhof, ‘The Proletarian is Dead, Long Live the Housewife’, in Women: The Last Colony, eds. Maria Mies, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Claudia von Werlhof (London: Zed Books, 1988), 168.

15 CRITIQUES OF WORK IN MARXIST FEMINISM The post-2008 financial crisis, which brought about a revival of Marxism and Marxist feminism, returned to many of the questions and problems raised by Marxist feminists in the 1970s, and Kollontai before them. The related but separate Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, which reverberated in solidarity movements in other cities around the world, including Sydney (where I had recently moved to), coincided with the development of my own political consciousness. It was also at this time that Marxist theory was investigating the nature of contemporary capitalism, and its precarious, boundary-eroding qualities. In The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork

Imaginaries, Kathi Weeks sets out to account for the problems particular to the development of the work ethic under late capitalism in the US and western society more broadly. She identifies those who have historically positioned themselves against the dominant narrative of positive work ethic: ‘those who failed to internalize the gospel of work – a history of

“bad subjects” who resist and may even escape interpellation.’23 Weeks identifies and develops a position against the prevailing neoliberal capitalist mindset that views one’s attitude towards work as a sign of one’s morality. My poetry is also concerned with the dominant narratives of capitalism, and addresses the possibilities beyond such a world, particularly with regards to women’s waged and unwaged work.

Returning to the temporality of capitalism and its relationship to contemporary

Marxist feminism and social reproduction theory, we might turn to Nancy Fraser, who identifies the broad stages of capitalism as the ‘liberal, competitive capitalism of the nineteenth century, the state-managed capitalism of the postwar era, and the financialized

23 Kathi Weeks, The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 79.

16 neoliberal capitalism of our time’.24 Macushla Robinson observes that one major factor in the unpaid and undervalued component of reproductive labour under capitalism is love.

Robinson builds on Silvia Federici’s Wages Against Housework – a primary text from the

1970s Italian Marxist-feminist movement in which Federici clarifies and provides the theoretical basis of the ‘Wages For Housework’ social campaign25 – writing: ‘The love that capitalism feeds upon is undervalued because it is seen as naturally occurring and therefore not labour.’26 Robinson notes the tendency, in western capitalism, for western women to be ‘freed’ from certain sectors of the labour market (domestic work, childcare, aged care, etc.) and for those sectors to be filled by workers of the global south. While this is more of a side note for Robinson, who goes on to argue that all women as a class are similarly exploited in this way regardless of global position, Fraser acknowledges more explicitly that contemporary capitalism is ‘underpinned by ongoing colonial and postcolonial expropriation’.27

Such a situation is described in hypothetical form, but these are real workplaces, such as that described in LIES journal, in which a registered Care Nurse Assistant – Jomo – working at an aged care facility documents the minutiae of their working life, managing the unpredictable and consuming needs of multiple patients against the constraints of the

24 Nancy Fraser, ‘Crisis of Care: On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism’ in Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, ed. Tithi Bhattacharya (London: Pluto Press 2017), 22. 25 Federici clarifies that ‘to view wages for housework as a thing rather than a perspective is to detach the end result of our struggle from the struggle itself and to miss its significance in demystifying and subverting the role to which women have been confined in capitalist society.’ Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework, (Bristol: Falling Wall Press and The Power of Women Collective, 1975), republished in Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 15. 26 Macushla Robinson, ‘Labours Of Love: Women’s Labour As the Culture Sector’s Invisible Dark Matter’, Runway 32 (2016), accessed 23 May 2019, runway.org.au/labours-of- love-womens-labour-as-the-culture-sectors-invisible-dark-matter. 27 Fraser, ‘Crisis of Care’, 25.

17 employment conditions such as abuse and under-resourced staffing and general exploitation of the largely migrant care workers:

We, the CNAs, are displaced, forced from our home cities, farmlands, and families,

into this nursing home, a job that falls short of our American dream. Divided by our

languages and backgrounds, Filipino, Ethiopian, Chinese, Eritrean, African

American, white American, we seek moments of cohesion and solidarity with each

other. The bosses maneuver our alliances by threatening, coercing and scaring us,

splitting us into neat separate blocks of yellow, black, brown, white. They stuff us

into our allocated slots so our interactions are saturated with tension and stress. In

spite of them, we edge closer, out of place. Their reaction is immediate. As soon as

we come together, they try to tear us apart.28

Jomo’s account employs literary methods. Subtitled ‘Pages from a CNA’s Notebook’, it is a personal account of Marxist-feminist workplace organising that shows both the perils of this (from a hostile employer) as well as the potential for true solidarity from workers who share the exploitative conditions of care labour. The piece opens with a quote from a Rilke poem, showing us how poetry can animate a Marxist-feminist political struggle.

CONTEMPORARY MARXIST FEMINISM AND POETRY The contemporary moment in the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis has seen an accompanying poetic and political revival of Marxist feminism. A 2018 feminist manifesto in New Left Review29 cites the current nexus of neoliberal economics and liberal feminism (a feminism characterised by Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘lean in’ movement, a corporate

28 Jomo. ‘Caring: A Labor of Stolen Time.’ LIES vol. 1 (2012): 99. 29 Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser, ‘A Feminist Manifesto’, New Left Review 114 (Nov/Dec 2018): 113–134.

18 feminist model which encourages women to become more ambitious in the corporate and public sectors, aimed almost exclusively at middle class, professional, mostly white western women) as possible reasons for the recent revival of Marxist feminism. The manifesto points to Poland where, on 3 October 2016, women organised a mass strike to protest the government’s abortion ban (the ban was eventually overturned), and elsewhere, where women’s strikes have taken place in other countries over the past few years, as evidence of this revival.

Brunella Casalini also picks up on these strikes as indicative of a contemporary revival of Marxist feminism. She notes: ‘The 8 March feminist strike [a grassroots women’s strike, which began in Argentina and spread to a global movement] was characterized by the willingness to emphasize and render visible the strict link between masculinist violence towards women … and the dynamics of precarization, impoverishment, and exclusion caused by neoliberal capitalism.’30 This 2017 strike, Casaline argues, is similar to the 1970s women’s movement in its interrogation of ‘the intersection of capitalism and sexism or pointing to the foundational role the production of gender differences has played in capitalism.’31 That women’s struggles are never only or merely ‘women’s issues’ was a central argument similarly made by Claudia von Werlhof in the 80s.

Though there exists a vast field of Marxist literary theory, and feminist literary theory, too vast to detail in this paper, little has been made of the concept of Marxist-feminist literary theory. And, in turn, Marxist-feminist political movements have for the most part been separate from literary, poetic production. That said, there have been recent scholars to note this gap and start to fill it.

30 Brunella Casalini, ‘A materialist analysis of contemporary feminist movements’, Anthropological Theory 17, no. 4 (2017): 497. 31 Ibid.

19 Sam Solomon traces socialist feminist poets in Cambridge in the 1970s against developments of literary criticism and pedagogy at Cambridge as an institution. His research comprises close readings of the poetry of Denise Riley and Wendy Mulford, examined alongside their prose and political writings. By focusing on these ‘Cambridge’ poets during a time of shifting pedagogical and political focus in higher education as well as the women’s liberation movement, Solomon situates the temporal moment of this poetry as inextricably linked to the political struggles of the poets involved. By closely reading

Riley’s creative and critical work on single motherhood, work and political struggle,

Solomon shows us that a Marxist-feminist poetic practice can go beyond the poems themselves and into organising. He also shows the differing but complementary purposes of each form of writing – Marxist-feminist poetry for poets like Riley and Mulford is not a mere reproduction of their political struggle, but the site of exploration of said struggle through language.

Amy De’Ath’s dissertation, Unsociable Poetry: Antagonism and Abstraction in Contemporary

Feminized Poetics32, begins by taking up Marx’s theory of value and real abstraction, that is,

Marx’s recognition that while abstract labour does not exist (i.e., all labour is concrete labour), capitalism’s dominating feature of commodity exchange means that labour’s abstraction appears at the point of this exchange, and that this concept of abstract social labour is the foundation of his labour theory of value.33 In other words, the process of commodity exchange is what determines the abstraction of labour. De’Ath uses this understanding of abstraction in our contemporary moment of capitalism – she writes that

‘in the years since the 2008 global financial crisis, there has emerged a renewed critical

32 Amy De’Ath, ‘Unsociable Poetry: Antagonism and Abstraction in Contemporary Feminized Poetics’ (PhD diss., Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, 2017). 33 Ernest Mandel summarises Marx’s contribution of abstract labour and labour theory of value in his introduction to volume one of Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990): 42. Marx introduces this concept in the first chapter of Capital, ‘The Commodity’.

20 effort to understand real abstractions as both the source and the consequence of a process in which the organization of capitalist society is form-determined by value’34 – in order to show how what she terms feminised poetry

constitutes an important part of that theoretical effort, and that it does so by

pursuing a dimension of ‘theory’ which draws its power from the dialectics of

aesthetic experience. Second, it argues that feminized poetry—by which I mean

poetry that emerges from the subjective experiences and histories of those who

occupy a structurally subordinate gendered position in capitalist societies—deserves

better reading methods than those currently dominant both inside and outside of

the academy, and in this regard makes a case for the necessity of theory, and

especially, Marxian theory.35

De’Ath’s thesis knits these theories with a poetic interrogation, offering us a way to think about the ways feminised poetry addresses these theories through lived gendered and racialised experiences, and shows how ‘categories of race, class, gender, and so on are “real abstractions” produced and reinscribed by capitalism’.36 That is, such identity categories are intrinsic to capitalism. Her assertion of the boundaries of her research are not dissimilar to my own – she argues that her readings of the poets in her thesis are not intended to stand in as representatives of their ‘cause’, ‘not simply because gender is only one aspect of the political concerns these poets express, but because gender in their work appears less as a declaration of feminist politics and more as a series of constitutive moments in a totality of

34 De’Ath, ‘Unscociable Poetry’, 2. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 3.

21 social relations and its reproduction’.37 One of the ways De’Ath’s thesis does this, as seen in Chapter One, ‘Feminized Poetry and Dialectical Reading’, is through a close reading of

Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets, in which she observes that ‘the remarkable under-theorization of this dimension [social reproduction] of her work could be read as a symptom of the disconnect between Marxist or materialist analyses of reproductive work, and feminist poetry concerned with this difficult matter’.38 As De’Ath notes, ‘Taking up childcare, domestic work, and biological reproduction as explicit aspects of its subject matter, most of

Mayer’s poetic work through the 1970s and 1980s would make ideal subject matter for a

Marxist-feminist literary analysis.’39 De’Ath’s project, of ‘theorizing the relationship between real abstractions and aesthetic abstractions’40, is a distinctive one that highlights both the possibilities of poetry to do such a thing as well as the importance of recognising this theorising as a way to understand the social relations that govern our world.

De’Ath and Solomon each provide a theoretical framework that connects socialist or

Marxist feminism to poetry, and their work has been useful in supporting and developing my own poetic practice as well as helping me map and contextualise my research.

Solomon’s attention to the generational/periodised aspect of socialist feminism as well as to the paratexts surrounding the work of the socialist feminist poets such as Mulford and

Riley speak to similar concerns of my own – which I elaborate on in Chapter Two – regarding the intergenerationality of Marxist-feminist poetics and the wider political subjectivities that allow it to develop (vis-à-vis my own subjectivity as a gendered and raced labour subject). Drawing on the insights of De’Ath and Solomon, I have sought to address the following questions in both this research project and my creative practice: how does a

Marxist-feminism poetics appear? What are its aesthetic features and conditions of

37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 54. 39 Ibid., 57. 40 Ibid., 43.

22 production? My research, in the form of my book-length poem, shows how it is through poetry that these questions can be answered.

Marxist-feminist poetry has also, insofar as it is about gender and race and class, understood the body as a site in which many of the concerns of Marxist feminism are reproduced. One essay that brings this into sharp light is Anne Boyer’s essay on Karin

Brodine’s series of poems Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking. Boyer identifies within

Brodine’s poems an antiwork, revolutionary and feminised subjectivity via the poem’s theme of breast cancer (which Brodine suffered from). Boyer’s reading of Brodine’s poems centres the relationship of the feminised worker to her body. Her essay positions sickness, and cancer, alongside the circuits of capitalism and profit and sick bodies, where capitalism and labour is also an ‘illness’ upon a worker’s body: ‘Could a poet on an alien earth explain how on this one, the sick body of a worker is the source of more profit than her healthy body at work?’41 Boyer’s criticism, alongside the research by De’Ath and Solomon, evince a contemporary poetic interest in Marxist feminism. They each raise questions about subjective and poetic experience of Marxist-feminism, on a broader societal level as well as the individual corporeal experience.

***

Each of these broad moments – late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Kollontai),

Western Marxist feminism (1970s) and contemporary Marxist-feminism within poetry (post

2008) – set out the concerns and curiosities that form the basis of my own poetic practice.

More importantly, they lay the groundwork for understanding the qualities of a Marxist- feminist poetics that produce a generative model for reading and thinking through poetry.

41 Anne Boyer, ‘Woman Sitting at the Machine’, Poetry Is Dead 12 (November 2015): 6.

23 In this chapter I have explored the temporal and theoretical touchstones – critiques of personal relationships, domestic labour and gendered exploitation in Kollontai’s era, the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, and our contemporary moment of capitalism post-2008 – that form the basis for understanding how we can identify and read a Marxist- feminist poetics. In the following chapter, I will detail the specific ways my poetry practice has emerged from engaging with intergenerationality, and how this intergenerationality defines the generative potential of Marxist-feminist poetics.

24 CHAPTER TWO: THE INTERGENERATIONALITY OF MARXIST FEMINISM & MY TURN TO ‘COMMUNIST POET– EDITOR’

My Marxism and poetry were connected from the start. Some friends and I formed a reading group in the mid 2010s where we read volume one of Das Kapital together, chapter by chapter, over a number of months. These friends all happened to be poets, and so as I started to grapple with questions about labour, value, work, love, commodities, time and workers’ bodies, poetry became the mode through which I processed these ideas.

Becoming a Marxist may have helped me become a poet. Or becoming a poet made me a

Marxist.

These areas opened up threads for me to begin grappling with my own subjectivity and class positions: a woman, a first-generation immigrant to middle-class parents, and a worker in a feminised, underpaid industry. The task at hand was to not only think through these positions and extend beyond the personal subjective position into an understanding of a broader class and gender-based politics, but also to trace within these positions the genealogical threads, that is, to situate my contemporary experiences in the context of generations of gendered and racialised class divisions.

I began to read Marxist-feminist writings, and pieced together theoretical components which I explored through my poetic practice. Around this time I was also introduced to poets like Anne Boyer, and through her, to Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, June Jordan and Diane di Prima. These poets wrote about revolution and motherhood and work, themes that spoke directly to the intersection of class and gender that had begun to inform my politics and view of the world. It was irrelevant whether I was a mother or not, or even interested in becoming a mother, because through reading these poets’ works, it became clear that for anyone interested in challenging the social hierarchies our economic system is built on must understand the struggles of motherhood, desire, and women’s work.

25 The revolutionary poetics that can be located in the work of Diane di Prima, for example, can be read critically as a map of past struggles that can help us consider the future. When we consider the centrality of intergenerationality to Marxist-feminist poetics,

Braidotti’s observation that ‘[p]ost-feminist neo-liberalism is a variation on the theme of historical amnesia’42, and, regarding race, that ‘neo-liberal ethnocentrism entails some formidable lapses of memory, which take the form of ignorance of the history of women’s struggles and of feminist genealogies’43, takes on an added urgency. Marxist-feminist poetics intervenes in this historical amnesia by emphasising the continuity of struggle under racial capitalism. For Marx, conflict (both class struggle and the tension between forces and relations of production) is tied to a conception of history in which the ‘free’ will of the working subject is subsumed by the process of producing commodities. Marx’s formulation enacts a break with philosophical conceptions of temporality that posit history as movement toward ‘free will’. Here history becomes open-ended and incomplete. Marxist feminists, who understand the reproduction of the workers body is the central to the capacity to (re)produce the commodity form, draw upon this conception of temporality in their practice by consciously acknowledging a debt to past struggles. In 1969, Mary Ann

Weathers, writing about revolutionary liberation of black women, observed that ‘[o]lder women have a wealth of information and experience to offer and would be instrumental in closing the communications gap between the generations. To be Black and to tolerate this jive about discounting people over 30 is madness.’44

Audre Lorde, too, recognised that intergenerationality is crucial to the liberation of women (specifically, Black women):

42 Braidotti, ‘A Critical Cartography,’, 171. 43 Ibid., 172. 44 Mary Ann Weathers, ‘An Argument for Black Women’s Liberation as a Revolutionary’, No More Fun and Games: A Journal of Female Liberation 2 (February 1969): 68.

26 By ignoring the past, we are encouraged to repeat its mistakes. The “generation

gap” is an important social tool for any repressive society. If the younger members

of a community view the older members as contemptible or suspect or excess, they

will never be able to join hands and examine the living memories of the community,

nor ask the all important question, “Why?” This gives rise to a historical amnesia

that keeps us working to invent the wheel every time we have to go to the store for

bread.45

Having been sufficiently radicalised via canonical Marx texts, it followed that I would turn my political interest (intertwined by now with my poetic interest) towards the Russian

Revolution. In doing so, I found that women’s rights in early Soviet Russia were remarkably modern (they passed laws for no-fault divorce and legalised abortion). One of the central figures in organising the women’s movement was a Bolshevik named Alexandra

Kollontai, who helped establish the Zhenotdel – women’s bureau – under Lenin’s socialist government. I soon also came across Kollontai’s fiction – a 1923 collection called Love of

Worker Bees, which included the novella ‘Vasilisa Malygina’ and the short stories ‘Three

Generations’ and ‘Sisters’ that was published in English in 1977, and included an afterword by socialist feminist scholar Sheila Rowbotham.46 This discovery came at a formative time for my poetic and political practice – Kollontai embodied many of the questions and problems my own poetry encountered, and though I wrote poetry, not prose, I too felt compelled to pick at a thread of creative literary output braided with politics of gender and labour.

45 Audre Lorde, ‘Age, Race, Class and Sex’ in Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1984), 117. 46 Alexandra Kollontai, Love and Worker Bees, trans. Cathy Porter (London: Virago, 1977). The novella ‘Vasilisa Malygina’ was first written in 1927 and first translated into English by Seven Arts Publishing Co, New York, 1927. This translation can be found online at marxists.org/archive/kollonta/red-love/index.htm

27 As a mother and agitator, what was her writing practice? How did she deal with the conditions of reproductive labour as a woman while writing about those very conditions?

And how did she manage her own romantic relationships while writing about the need for socialists to address romantic relationships? These are the questions I raise in this chapter.

Kollontai seemed, to me, an early ‘prototype’ of how to enact Marxist-feminist politics in a revolutionary context, and raised questions that would continue to be addressed by feminists and Marxists in later generations.

Turning to my own poetry, the question became clear: what did my own poetic development mean, as a ‘descendent’ of Kollontai’s writing and political practice and, more broadly, the genealogy of Marxist-feminist thought over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? In this chapter, I reflect on this question, beginning with Kollontai, in order to trace the development of Marxist-feminist theory alongside the development of my poetic practice and Marxist-feminist poetics. I consider the ways my paid employment as a book editor conditions my poetic practice and reflect on the recent processes of unionisation in my workplace and how this threw into sharp relief my politics regarding capitalism and gender.

KOLLONTAI AND ‘WOMEN’S WORK’

In my writing practice, I’ve found a recurring notion of temporality – a need to understand past movements of revolution and feminism, and to consider the future.

Not long after the Marx group concluded, I was in another reading group, this time centred on feminist texts over the twentieth century. One of the readings was an essay by

Kollontai called ‘Communism and the Family’, with a subtitle that read ‘Women’s role in production: the effect on the family’. Kollontai’s ideas seemed to be extremely current and relevant, but it had been written in 1920:

28 Nowadays the working woman hastens out of the house early in the morning when

the factory whistle blows. When evening comes and the whistle sounds again, she

hurries home to scramble through the most pressing of her domestic tasks. Then

it’s off to work again the next morning, and she is tired from lack of sleep. For the

married working woman, life is as hard as the workhouse.47

For Kollontai, the abolition of the old family structure was necessary to overthrowing capitalist production. She argues that the bourgeois family served to uphold the capitalist order and that revolution would pave the way for it to lose its power and cease to matter.

Post-revolution, she tells the reader how these structures fall away:

All that is old and outdated and derives from the cursed epoch of servitude and

domination, of landed proprietors and capitalists, should be swept aside together

with the exploiting class itself and the other enemies of the proletariat and the

poor.48

If we consider Kollontai and temporality, it becomes clear that one of the complications of her political thinking was time itself: she had been attempting to consider women and the family as explicit and necessary aspects of the socialist project prior to the revolution as well as during and immediately post-revolution. She was also complicated by her position: as the only woman in a leadership position within the Bolshevik movement, her struggle was two-fold: within the party itself against male comrades and with bourgeois feminism, which concerned itself with feminism for the upper-class women of Russia. When I return

47 Alexandra Kollontai, ‘Communism and the Family’, in Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, trans. Alix Holt (London: Allison & Busby, 1977), 252. 48 Ibid., 251.

29 to her writing, it appears as a strange mix of persuasion to change and the appearance of describing a society that is already changing. None of what she is suggesting is firmly in practice just yet; the temporal slippage for Kollontai is the tension between her belief that the family unit crumbles as socialism fulfils its destiny, on the one hand, and the acknowledgement that there was work to do (in excess of the socialist party’s official program) in order to dissolve the bourgeois family unit. She writes:

Women’s work is becoming less useful to the community as a whole. It is becoming

unproductive. The individual household is dying. It is giving way in our society to

collective housekeeping. Instead of the working woman cleaning her flat, the

communist society can arrange for men and women whose job it is to go round in

the morning cleaning rooms.49

In Communism and the Family Kollontai imagines a blueprint for how the care of children and domestic duties like housework will look under collective socialist care, rather than strictly within the private sphere of the bourgeois household. It is this shift of domain that ultimately frees women from the peculiar oppression they experience as workers and mothers and wives. Roughly half a century before Marxist feminists such as Leopoldina

Fortunati (discussed in Chapter One) and Angela Davis50 offered their analyses of reproductive labour that called for the obsolescence of private and domesticated housework, Kollontai was doing the same. She examined the trappings of marriage and work for women and considered the relationship between personal, gendered experiences

49 Ibid., 255. 50 Angela Davis’s communist case for the obsolescence of private and domesticated housework as a strategy of women’s liberation was also a black feminist case, and made a vital racial intervention into Marxist-feminist theory. See Angela Davis, Women, Race & Class (London: The Women’s Press Ltd, 1982).

30 under capitalism and how these might transform under a communist society. The thread

Kollontai had begun, revived in later generations, shows us that Marxist feminism is an ongoing and open-ended project. And if we recognise a continuation of this thread in our contemporary moment, what are the implications of this intergenerationality for the future?

My interest as a poet engaging with Kollontai’s writing is complicated by her historical recuperation and criticism. Her translator Alix Holt, for example, repeatedly refuses to paint a saccharine portrait of the woman:

Kollontai’s failure to form her observations on particular social processes into a

general analysis of events, and her emphasis on reform of the trade unions as the

only course that could save the revolution, had a bearing on the nature and

effectiveness of her activities in the cause of women’s liberation. In the first half of

the 1920s she wrote several of her most interesting articles and essays on questions

of women, the family and sexual relations, but she was extending and filling in the

insights of earlier years rather than developing her ideas in the light of the rapid

changes in Soviet reality, and she proved unable to defend the ideals she stood for

against the attacks to which they were increasingly subjected.51

Kollontai was not the infallible Marxist and feminist hero I had been so compelled by. I now read her earlier self-confidence, once so inspiring, as the product of an aristocratic upbringing. I was – am – too harsh and too quick to denounce. But also, always, suspicious of my idols.

And yet she appears in the second page of my poem:

51 Alix Holt, ‘Morality and the New Society’, in Alexandra Kollontai, Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, trans. Alix Holt (London: Allison & Busby, 1977), 201.

31 demanding of pleasure

we thought a new and brighter future

was just a combo for workers of the world

when worker–mother differentiated

when I read enough novels

‘to know how much time and energy it takes to fall in love and i

just don’t have the time’

This entire page of the poem responds to my engagement with Kollontai’s body of work, but the quoted line here specifically refers to a scribbled-out quote I copied while in the depths of reading Kollontai. The original line went: ‘But don’t you see, you have to have leisure in order to fall in love – I’ve read enough novels to know how much time and energy it takes to fall in love and I just don’t have the time.’52 It comes from Kollontai’s epistolary short story ‘Three Sisters’, in which a mother reflects on her sexual relationships as well as her relationship with her own mother and with her now grown daughter, and the intergenerational shifts and conflicts for each woman dealing with problems of romantic and familial love. The quote appears in the story at the moment the daughter explains to her mother her casual sexual relationship with a man she likes but does not love. She is a

‘new woman’, but her mother doesn’t quite understand – it’s the post-revolutionary

Russian equivalent of ‘friends with benefits’.

52 Alexandra Kollontai, ‘Three Generations’, in Love of Worker Bees, 207.

32 Despite encountering criticisms of Kollontai’s political project, I’ve found my discomfort with her unevenness generative for my Marxist-feminist poetic and political development. Kollontai unpacked the messy webs of love, desire, family and women’s work she had identified as part of a communist movement. Her politics contained an optimistic commitment to a revolution that would equalise personal and sexual relations regardless of her having all the answers; a commitment to discovery and rigour as opposed to declaration (though her essays often had a declarative tone); an adamant war against the bourgeoisie; and a devotion to use her life and her subjectivity as the site upon which to build her politics including discarding a husband and leaving her child in his care while she travelled for revolutionary work. Is this not Marxist feminism in practice? Her various failures or inabilities were part of these commitments, a natural side effect for someone whose purpose was relentless and tireless. The question for me then became, what to do with Kollontai and my poetry?

To consider these two elements alongside each other, I cannot ignore the question of form. I have wondered, during the course of this MFA, whether and how to write about

Russian formalism, whether the Soviets’ story was important or whether my interest in it was simply me clinging to the safety of the past in order to avoid looking into the future. But then, to look to the past, as my poetry and this paper seek to do, must, by necessity, contemplate the future. Thinking about Kollontai in an intergenerational sense allows me to develop a framework that can extend to our contemporary conditions under capitalism – the normalisation and idealisation of precariat labour, particularly in writing and artistic communities, and the gendered division of artistic labour with regards to care and administration. Though the conditions and stages of capitalism have advanced since

Kollontai’s time, the framework she began to uncover, knitting lived experience, artistic expression and political struggle, still reverberates today.

33 Kollontai’s writing practice was informed by, and was an extension of, her politics.

Her polemical pamphlets and speeches were one form of this practice, but her novel and short stories (Red Love, ‘Sisters’ and ‘Three Generations’) show a creative approach to unpacking the problems facing revolutionary women in the years directly following the

1917 revolution in Russia – problems of work, sexuality, morality. Her position as a writer took on a new quality to me: one of someone who had the ‘real problems’ of how to deal with gender and reproductive labour within socialism – why was socialism or Marxism alone insufficient? Though she was aesthetically far from poetry, I could not help but feel compelled by her writing practice, through which she explored gender and revolution from her subjective positions during and after the 1917 revolution and as a mother, wife, agitator and revolutionary. That she was a writer and political agitator for socialism at the moment of a successful socialist revolution kept drawing me continually to her work.

Kollontai’s novel, Red Love, tells the story of Vasilya, a young Soviet woman who marries for love. Her husband is an important party man, whose tastes and lifestyle are, in

Vasilya’s view, still quite capitalist. She discovers, when she surprises him with a visit while he is out of town on business, that he has been having an affair. The novel depicts Vasilya dealing with this discovery, and trying to find happiness in her love life without compromising her politics. The novel deals with free love, socialism, gender, and work and bureaucracy.

My poetic inquiry of Marxist feminism responds to Kollontai as a figure encompassing her biography and her written work. In the second part of my book-length poem I attempt to directly ‘speak’ to her, drawing on an epistolary construct of intimate address, which, as I argue in Chapter Three, can be read as an aesthetic construct within Marxist-feminist poetics.

34 dear Alexandra no. I mean, dearest. Or instead to my comrade or to my speaker no

even to the mother the not-mother are you tired yet, is there a way for us to

communicate that won’t rely on false memories or feigned scholarship even any

mere connection or my own mother memory asking: where is Inessa?

dear Alexandra o wait my pen has run out of ink

dear Alexandra where did your unpublished stories go

Reading Kollontai and allowing her to take up space in my poetry shows how intergenerationality is centred in the Marxist-feminist poetics this project reveals and analyses. Kollontai does more than provide the historical ‘ground zero’ for this project.

There is the question of love and romantic relations under our overarching socio-economic order – an inseparable question for Kollontai as she envisaged and tried to put into practice the ways a Soviet state might achieve true equality among the sexes. A year after the 1917

Russian Revolution, she asked:

How can we explain the hypocritical relegation of sexual problems to the pigeon-hole

of ‘family affairs’ not requiring a collective effort? As if relations between the sexes

and the elaboration of a suitable moral code had not appeared throughout history as a

constant factor of social struggle! As if relations between the sexes, within the limits of

a determinate social group, had not fundamentally influenced the outcome of the

struggle between opposed social classes!53

53 Alexandra Kollontai, The New Morality and the Working Class (Moscow, 1918), as quoted in Jacqueline Heinen, ‘Kollontai and the History of Women’s Oppression’, New Left Review, (July 1978): 44.

35

Work and love, two of the central problems of Marxist feminism, turn out to be generative not only for my poetic development, but also for understanding it as an intergenerational concept.

GENEALOGIES OF MARXIST FEMINISM – TOWARDS A CONCLUSION

When we consider capitalist society today, we might note how its composition looks compared to, say, the capitalism that formed out of the 1970s economic crises. Looking back further, to the early twentieth century and the beginning of the Russian Revolution, we can trace a genealogy: an appearance of Marxist-feminist struggle alongside these moments of crisis throughout the past century. This genealogy can help us understand

Marxist feminism’s appeal as a method of addressing gendered inequality and capitalist oppression. And in framing Marxist feminism genealogically, we can consider its possibilities for the future. As I showed in Chapter One, Rosi Braidotti’s Nomadic Subjects highlights the importance of thinking through feminist genealogy (what I have referred to throughout as intergenerationality). Braidotti’s poststructuralist approach to feminism engages with notions of genealogy and temporalities, pointing to the May 1968 protests as one of the catalysts. The feminisms she identifies as radical insofar as they are a rebellion against the traditional forms and images of power, such as paternal authority in the family, the state and society. By extension, the feminisms Braidotti describes are also an attack against the mystique of the revolutionary chief or leader whose machismo left no doubts in the women activists.54

54 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 78.

36 The surge of left-wing Marxist movements in the West during this period, seen in the rise of workerism and trade unionism, meant feminists were left with a dilemma: ‘the failure of the allegedly radical left to interrogate and unseat its entrenched masculinism’.55 So Marxist feminism ‘re-emerges’ – as in, it emerges in a new post-Kollontai moment – as a response both to capitalist society and as a critique of anticapitalist activism that, in the Marxist feminists’ view, was centering the (usually white) male worker’s experience in class struggle to the exclusion of all other experiences. This genealogical thread across the century is, I argue, crucial to our understanding of Marxist-feminist poetics.

***

I return to thinking about my own subjectivity, how it has informed my practice, how it interweaves with Kollontai’s revolutionary feminism, and later Marxist-feminist struggles in the 1970s. How my political education began with Marx and Marxist feminism and poetry all at once and how this affected not only my relationship to language as a poet, but also my own work life. Kollontai’s political struggle was rooted in her experiences as a woman, but she also fought for the rights of the working classes. While the aesthetic challenge in her time took the form of her agitprop-inflected fiction, when I consider my own practice and the historical context of the moment I write from, I consider Jasper Bernes, harking to

Kathi Weeks, that ‘[p]erhaps the task of the aesthetic challenge in our time is not to demand freedom in work but freedom from work, as Weeks has suggested.’56

55 Ibid., 79. 56 Jasper Bernes, ‘Art, Work, Endlessness: Flarf and Conceptual Poetry among the Trolls’, Criticial Inquiry 42, no. 4 (Summer 2016): 780.

37 MARXIST FEMINISM IN THE WORKPLACE

There is, in many workplaces in the culture industry, a tendency of workers to make themselves available on email outside of the office or office hours, to respond to ‘urgent business’ while home sick. This is a resources problem: the combination of high workloads as a result of insufficient staff, and a need to show employers somehow that one ‘has what it takes’, and is able to work harder than everyone else, in order to be visible in a field where there are more people wanting to work than there are jobs available. Companies – mobilising a contemporary rhetoric of flexibility, agility, and creativity – actively encourage these labour conditions by demanding passion and commitment from their employees. Of course, they are quick to deny that this is what they are doing if workers try to collectively protect themselves (through, for example, demanding time in lieu provisions in a collective agreement). The more we are available ‘round the clock’, the more productivity can be squeezed from the labour force. As is true for all commodity-producing capitalist businesses, the source of profits and value gained by the employer is surplus value extracted from labour.

The editors and publicists at my workplace (a book publishing company) have recently unionised, and so we have proverbial targets on our backs. Surveillance and micromanagement has increased. Now more than ever we must be watchful of our time, our emotions, our labour, our contracts. This has implications for how we undertake what

Marxist feminists term the ‘care’ components of our work, as highlighted earlier in the introduction and literature review chapters. The nature of this work involves both deep thinking and deep feeling: an intellectual labour is required to read words over and over, and an emotional labour is also required to interface with writers as they complete creative and critical projects. We are paid for a set amount of hours per week but are also expected to perform overtime (unpaid) whenever necessary. When editors make the tired and somewhat out-of-date comparison of editing to midwifery, what they mean is editing

38 largely comprises care labour. Helping an author produce a book is by no means as crucial as delivering a baby, but editors are encouraged by authors and employers alike to treat it as such. But editing and book publishing is also the production of a commodity, even if it’s not all done on a factory floor. A book is not like a baby. A book adds value to an author.

A baby subtracts it from a woman. As editors, we perform the type of emotional labour that Arlie Russell Hoschchild describes57, in that we must adjust our own emotions when dealing with the writers to keep them on track. Others have linked the nature of unpaid domestic care labour, which predicates itself on (and absolves itself through) justification of ‘love’, to the care of others in the course of certain types paid work, which tends to be feminised and lower paid. Writing on arts industry workers, for example, Macushla

Robinson points out how

Invisible labour is no longer limited to the home. Liberation from the restricted

role of the housewife has not simply done away with the gendered division of

labour: capitalism, always good at appropriating and metabolizing critique, has

taken this division into the workplace so that women, no longer bound to the

home, bring the skills of the home with them to work. They end up performing

57 Arlie Russell Hoschchild’s The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012) argues that emotional labour is when the worker (usually in service-oriented role) is required to manage their own emotions in order to fulfil the employer’s requirements of the job, for example, a flight attendant must act in a certain pleasing way to serve the customers. While the term emotional labour has expanded somewhat in popular discourse, for the purposes of my paper, and my thinking more generally on feminised labour and Marxist-feminism, I prefer to follow the definition and parameters set out in Hoschchild’s work.

39 double the labour: that for which they are compensated, and the affective,

invisible labour for which they are not.58

As editors, we often suggest ways for the author to improve their work for publication, but must present this in a manner the author will be receptive to. We spend extra hours of our time finessing the approach, and are often encouraged by our employers to make the author feel special and cared for. Part of the ‘service’ of ‘author care’ that a publisher promises authors comes from the editorial relationship – editing as an act of care. Editing because we care. We therefore don’t tell the author, for example, that our edit will take a month to complete because we are sending two to three other books to print before that, which take priority. We don’t tell them that the size of their print run will affect our decisions about time management. We apologise, blame ourselves and our clichéd ‘need’ for perfection, unable to let go of the edit until we are extremely happy with it, and it’s only a partial lie. We tell the author this so they know they are the most important person in our work life.

Our organisational efforts involve wielding the care aspect of our job to strengthen our collective bargaining power, to show them that there are more of us and that we are needed. This could be, for example, a ‘work to rule’ method where we deliberately do not go ‘above and beyond’ to service our authors and books. But such wielding sits opposite to our intrinsic desire to achieve success in our own right, to not let the author down, not let our quality of work suffer. I told an author that working on her book was a source of pride for me as well: I too was invested in making sure it was of the highest quality so it could reach people (this is the code; we say to authors we want ‘to reach people’ but the

58 Macushla Robinson, ‘Labours Of Love: Women’s Labour As the Culture Sector’s Invisible Dark Matter’, Runway 32 (2016), accessed 23 May 2019, runway.org.au/labours-of- love-womens-labour-as-the-culture-sectors-invisible-dark-matter.

40 publisher’s need is to make money from it). The catalyst for our unionising was to gain back time: overtime, specifically. We don’t know yet whether this will come out in our favour. The contracted hours of our work week are ‘guidelines’. Really, work is meant to be on our minds at all hours. For Kollontai, a majority-women workforce shows itself as a critical component of revolution. In the early twentieth century these women were working class and mostly in factories, unlike the women-dominated industries of book publishing and the arts more broadly, whose work takes place predominantly in the office. But

Kollontai recognised the uniquely gendered exploitation of these women as a rallying point to organise and revolutionise them. The chasm of subjective experiences between my book editor colleagues and the women factory workers of Kollontai’s era is large, but the common thread is that there is revolutionary potential in organising around a shared experience of exploitation.

***

In this chapter, I have traced my political and poetic consciousness alongside my understanding of the struggles of Kollontai and women during the Bolshevik revolution, and later the Marxist feminists of the 1970s. I have expanded on these periods to emphasise how central intergenerationality is to a Marxist-feminist poetics, and traced this against my own poetry. In this chapter I have drawn threads between the working conditions of women in Kollontai’s era and my own contemporary working conditions, and I have shown how these inform my poetic inquiry. I have reflected on how my work as a book editor, in which I am required to perform and demonstrate care and love towards the authors and books I work on in addition to editing the text for the end goal of producing a commodity, and how this role is gendered, as well as the relationship between its gendered aspect and its exploitative aspect. This lived working experience, I showed in

41 this chapter, revealed the qualities of my subjectivities that shape my poetic practice and inform the formulation I argue constitutes a Marxist-feminist poetics. I have laid bare the temporal and cartographical spaces that constitute the poetics of Marxist feminism.

In the following chapter I extend the concept of intergenerationality beyond the political sphere and towards the poetic. I explore more deeply the poems themselves, and unmask the ways Marxist-feminist poetry – specifically from my ‘poet mothers’ – appears in practice, and how we can identify its dual qualities: the aesthetic qualities of a poem and the conditions of the poem’s production.

42 CHAPTER THREE: ‘POET MOTHERS’ AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION – A MARXIST-FEMINIST READING OF BERNADETTE MAYER AND DIANE DI PRIMA

When I consider my ‘poet mothers’, I can see that the common threads that link these poets across different lyric and experimental modes and time periods, are their explorations of gender roles, work, motherhood, revolution. Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette (1996) showed me what a feminine epic could look like, and her vast body of poetry about motherhood, including her 1974 book-length poem Songs for the Unborn Second Baby showed me the poetic potential of a subjective, politicised experience. Songs in particular, written while Notley was pregnant with her second baby, is a reflection of pregnancy and motherhood, a deep and sustained poetic exploration of gendered experience and of an unborn subject that plays with address, voice and quotidian life. Lindsay Turner recognises and connects poetry to work in Notley’s writing, showing how ‘Notley’s work comes to provide a nuanced and flexible model for conceptualizing gendered reproductive labor’ and arguing that her poetry is ‘conceptually useful for thinking about the current conditions of the feminization and globalization of work and the unevenness of this work’s distribution – a task as urgent as it is daunting’.59

But while Notley’s poetry revived and educated and politicised me, there are other poet mothers whose writing also influenced my voice. Reading Anne Boyer, Ariana Reines,

Bernadette Mayer and Diane di Prima (to name a few) contributed to my poetic education as well as my interest in Marxism and Marxist feminism, buffeting the development of my political consciousness and my poetic voice. These poets allowed me permission to consider my subjectivity and my body as a site through which my poetry can be produced, as well as a site where the exchange of my labour power begins. While more space could be

59 Lindsay Turner, ‘Lullaby & Labor: Alice Notley and the Work of Poetry’, Contemporary Women’s Writing 12, no. 3 (November 2018): 291.

43 devoted to exploring the works of each of my poet mothers, such an undertaking would fall beyond the scope of this paper. My poet mothers’ voices are identifiable in my poem, admit the joyous passion of revolt, but in this chapter I will perform close readings of two poets,

Bernadette Mayer and Diane di Prima, who each demonstrate complementary but distinctive entries into an understanding and analysis of Marxist-feminist poetics. They orbit each other’s work, temporally and thematically. In Mayer’s Midwinter Day, for example, a passage reads:

Raphael once told me he thought Diane di Prima’s work was difficult and

somewhat crazy until he read mine, though he’s sympathetic and sees our writing as

a symptom of what he thinks of as crazy times.60

Ewa Ziarak writes that ‘women’s experimental literature offers an alternative both to modern citizenship […] and to the commodity form, abstracted from the concreteness of time, labor, and the particularity of the object’. 61 Put another way, Marxist feminism returns us to the working body, a body that must be reproduced, a body that cannot be abstracted from the time and labour that conditions it, a body whose very existence troubles the modern bourgeois subject. Each poet I read closely in this chapter contains aesthetic and thematic qualities that I will argue helps us identify what a Marxist-feminist poetics looks like, or, how to read a poem through a Marxist-feminist lens. I will do this by examining the temporal conditions of production that Mayer and di Prima wrote under, as well as their thematic content, which deals with motherhood and domesticity and work and anticapitalism. I then turn to objects in poetry, specifically, the objects described in each of

60 Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day (New York: New Directions, 1999), 64. 61 Ewa Ziarek, Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 14. [ebook edition]

44 their poems, to consider the role objects might play in the Marxist-feminist aesthetics of a poem. I link this to domestic objects in Kollontai’s fiction and in my own poetic work.

This chapter will argue how attention to poetry offers us a way of tracing and reading the

Marxist-feminist aesthetic qualities within a poetic work.

THE WORKING CONDITIONS OF MARXIST-FEMINIST POETRY

In Midwinter Day, Mayer’s dream-state is concerned with work, but it is a work different from wage labour: the work of a mother and the work of an artist. Mayer’s dreams and concerns of work in Midwinter Day elide her subjectivity as a writer and mother, and the work that both of these roles involve. My dream-state sometimes offers me the answer to a grammatical puzzle I had not been able to solve at my desk earlier that day. Though I’ve gone home for the evening, I haven’t ever truly ‘clocked off’. I send a difficult email to an author late in the evening and then must actively stop myself checking my work email at home because I am worried their response will be unhappy. The stress of it infects my dreams. Here is Mayer’s dream-state:

People all around me

Wondering what it is I write62

…

In the dream my daughters Sophia and Marie

Are always with me63

….

And all the children are put,

Thrust, driven, goaded, impelled and flung,

62 Mayer, Midwinter Day, 2. 63 Ibid., 3.

45 Urged and pushed into bed

Then I can dream64

Mayer’s dreams are filled with living, writing and the work of motherhood. She dreams of her children. I dream of my authors. We are both consumed by writing.

Poetry has become a way for me to claw back the brain space (my intellectual and creative labour) that is given over to work, to books and authors and writing that I am paid to care about. Nobody is paid to care about poetry, and so even though it operates with its own micro economies (prizes with cash money, grants and residencies, workshops, readings), I am usually able to engage with it without being forced to consider the cash flow of my poetry circuits.65 Poetry is the way I steal back time – not only during the hours ostensibly assigned to reproductive labour (evenings when I should be cooking dinner, and so on), but also during waged labour (in quiet moments between projects at work, or first thing in the morning at the open-plan office before other colleagues arrive if I’ve had a tendril of a line appear in my mind during my commute). I mine work for poetry. Or, more accurately, poetry is how I survive work.

I often keep a score of phrases and words that I come across during work. Lunate bone, for example, appeared in an index I had spot-checked one Tuesday afternoon.

64 Ibid., 5. 65 For an overview of the shrinking poetry economy in Australia and analysis of poetry publishing trends spanning the decade of mid-nineties to early 00s, see Bronwyn Lea, ‘Trends in poetry publishing: 1995–2008,’ Five Bells 15, no. 4 and 16, no.1 (Summer 2008– 2009): 61–64.

46 Hemlock

Lunate bone

Home insulator kit, a window

The dark

An hour stole back

[nonwork/antiwork/postwork futures]

‘Lunate bone’ and ‘Hemlock’ began as scrap phrases, scrawled at my work desk; ‘Home insulator kit’, a Google tab open while at work (in my spare time I was searching cheap ways to heat a home); ‘An hour stole back’, both an hour I have stolen back at work / the end of daylight savings in Victoria / the hour work stole back from me when I woke at 5 am to fret about an email response an author had sent where they were unhappy with me for an arbitrary reason. Reading Andrea Francke and Ross Jardine on administrative labour,

I see how my own job, ‘sold’ to me as work about creative collaborative and fulfilment, now has similar parameters to that of an administrator, ‘constructed to be a reduction of the alienated parts of a sum’.66 There is a connection, too, to the way domestic labour has been treated, a connection between the nature of my work, an editor’s work, and that of the person maintaining the household. So, for the editor (or ‘administrator’), ‘lack of authorship and ownership of their intellectual property re-enacts the same strategy that has historically been used to undervalue domestic labour – which has always been perceived as un-authored, unskilled and performed for the head of the household.’67 This is true also for

66 Andrea Francke and Ross Jardie, ‘Bureaucracy’s Labour’, Parse 5 (Spring 2017), accessed 1 July 2019, parsejournal.com/article/bureaucracys-labour-the-administrator-as-subject. 67 Ibid.

47 the way the editor’s work becomes devalued. I recognise here the ways my skills and experience as an editor are, over many years, flattened and redistributed into seemingly more administrative tasks (sign-offs, checklists, entering Cataloguing-In-Publication data, and so on). The ‘nonwork futures’, of course, my dream for the next stage of humanity. My subjectivity and poetry and politics are three braided strands.

The layout of text on this page of the poem is scrappy, small. The nature of a durational book-length work is the shifting pace that reflects the different modes in which

I write. The durational aspect comes from the work being produced over four years, wedged haphazardly but persistently between life and work. During the four years I was writing this MFA,68 I moved houses four times, worked in three different jobs, adopted a kitten, published a separate collection of poetry, deleted much of the original sections of this poem, gained another niece and nephew, became vegan and took up an intense martial arts sport. My relationship to my poetry, to my body and to my work morphed over these years and because of these experiences. I continued to write and think about the questions that compelled me to begin this project initially. Audre Lorde captures something of why I kept going:

Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most

secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which

can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of

surplus paper. Over the last few years, writing a novel on tight finances, I came to

appreciate the enormous differences in the material demands between poetry and

prose. As we reclaim our literature, poetry has been the major voice of poor,

68 I undertook this Masters part-time so that I could continue to work full-time.

48 working class, and Colored women. A room of one’s own may be a necessity for

writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time.69

My poetry engages with the temporal conditions of Marxist feminism, that is, the genealogy of the past connected with a consideration of what the future might look like. The poem is constrained in form not only by the limits of the MFA program itself but also by the working day. I work in salaried wage labour for 40ish hours a week, and have written poetry inside and outside of those hours. This method of my practice, a mix of dedicated writing time outside work and stolen moments within, constitutes a poetic practice that is formed by the material conditions of my life. It is a practice that sits in the tradition of my poet mothers such as Mayer and di Prima, whose poetry, as I have shown, also emerges from the material conditions of daily life – that is, the classed and gendered and racialised subjectivities they inhabit, as well as their roles as mothers.

The conditions of my life include the necessities of social reproduction too: I must clothe and feed myself, regenerate each night in order to sell my labour power the following day. I must write poetry around showers, cooking dinner, cleaning the stovetop and doing laundry. In my poems I play with the language of minutiae that takes its formal cues in some part from Mayer’s style but also the documented minutiae of the care workers

– such as the nurse assistant I referred to in Chapter Two, who describes the various constraints of their job placed on them by both management, as well patients and colleagues. I have found the minutiae of ‘office speak’ particularly generative for my poetry as it captures the banal language of capitalism in the 21st century, the feminised labour of some kinds of office work (including my own) and the everydayness of low-paid work

69 Audre Lorde, ‘Age, Race, Class and Sex’ in Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1984), 116.

49 under a social and economic system defined by each person’s relationship to the means of production.

The poetry of this MFA takes the form of a book-length work, but is presented as a series of poems across the pages, playing with and exploiting the constraints of the page to enact slippages. This is a deliberate choice: I want to show that both the discrete moments and the entirety of a time period are present at once. The durational component is a deliberate choice to unmask the temporality of poetic production in a sustained project while also flattening the differences between one long moment (hence, book-length) and the smaller moments within (expressed in the form of page breaks and section breaks within the poem).

MOTHERHOOD & REVOLUTION

While I was reading Capital, I also read Diane di Prima’s memoir, Recollections of my Life as a

Woman, an account of the poet’s life in New York among other beat poets, her relationships and the children she raised while producing poetry and magazines, as well as the struggles she faced as a feminist within radical left-wing circles. She made visible the invisible work of childrearing, and laid bare the material realities of writing poetry and participating in the radical poet circles while also needing to raise and care for her children as a single moher. When I read this, I thought: I barely have time to write poetry around work and meals and sleep and I have no dependents. How did she do it? And how did she stay so committed to her politics despite the sexism within these leftist groups? I was unable to separate my interest in writing and reading poetry from my interest in politics. In reading the works of Bernadette Mayer, Anne Boyer, Diane di Prima, Alice Notley, June

Jordan and others, I tried to figure out how they did it: how they wrote aesthetically exciting poetry while also engaging with political issues without the politics eclipsing the form. How they wrote about motherhood and quotidian life and their work shows the 50 possibilities of the poetic form to enact a Marxist-feminism worldview. From di Prima and

Jordan, especially, I learned about the aesthetic modes for poetry about revolution, such as the manipulation of addressees in di Prima’s poems (the constantly changing ‘you’), and her use of the collective personal ‘we’ throughout. Or how June Jordan played with form to emphasise a politics that was direct and upfront. For example, her poem ‘1980: Note to the

League of Women Voters’ begins with the polite address ‘Dear Ladies’, before eviscerating the organisation:

For these reasons I am forced to decline

your invitation to the vote: I am moreover forced

to decline your remarkable attributions of responsibility as when you say

it’s up to me:

What’s up to me?70

These were all poets who taught me many things about how poetic language is inseparable, and often cannot be untangled, from politics.

In Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day and Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters, each work evinces a Marxist-feminist poetics, albeit with different formal and thematic inflections. Midwinter Day, a book-length durational poem, composed entirely over one day

(22 December 1978), concerns itself with the interior, domestic life of a feminised subject, from dream-sleep state to waking and back to sleeping, while Revolutionary Letters evokes an intimate form of address via an epistolary framework that continues throughout the series

70 June Jordan, ‘1980: Note to the League of Women Voters’, in Directed By Desire, 387–8.

51 of poems. Both works are thematically and formally concerned with class, gender and domestic labour.

In Midwinter Day the narrator, a poetic representation of Mayer, states in the very beginning: ‘Have there been such dreams as I had today,/The 22nd day of

December,/Which, as I can now remember,/I’ll tell you all about, if I can/Can I say what I saw.’71 Even before the narrator of Midwinter Day has woken, we see, from the start, her dreams are infused with the minutiae of domestic and family life. She references her daughters twice within four stanzas: ‘I saw that my daughters were older than me’,72 then

‘In the dream my daughters Sophia and Marie / Are always with me’.73 One daughter

‘smelled the fragrance of her cultivated rose’.74 In the dream, we see women cooking

(‘Nancy’s fixing us / The eighteen intricate courses of a Japanese dinner’75) and gathering together in a kitchen. The poem opens by situating us, through the narrator’s dream state, directly within a feminist consciousness, and displaying the themes and concerns most often associated with the feminine.

A large flat dull dry cake like awful life

I broke it into pieces in my adolescent plate

Mothers and fathers

Beware of these bereft dream cakes

Not like Nancy’s mother’s milk potato cakes76

71 Mayer, Midwinter Day, 1. 72 Ibid., 2. 73 Ibid., 3. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., 9.

52 A series of single-syllable words, soft consonants, in the first line – the sonic effect reflects and affects the tone here: one of abjection, dullness, where the culprit is a failed cake. Or a woman’s domestic requirement, to be able to bake a cake, is where the failing resides. That this is positioned, in contrast, to the sublimely feminine counter (within whose line we see

‘mother’s milk’, referencing another focal point of women’s work, breastfeeding) suggests a politically charged juxtaposition of the complex nature of what we as a society consider to be the domain of women. The phrase ‘mother’s milk’ appears once more on page 19, a tiny refrain. Mothers and fathers appear throughout but the narrator is a mother. Or, more specifically, ‘I’m the mother and the poet’.77 Note, too, the order given to the two roles.

The words mother and poet are both trochees, so swapping the order would not significantly alter the metre. The too, instead of a is worth pointing out here too. One could read the definite article as referential, and the loose, dreamy narrative the poem follows through this section allows room for that. But the definite article serves another purpose here, one that renders it politically charged. By using ‘the’, Mayer situates the two roles, mother and poet, in equal stead, offsetting the importance set by the order. But it also gives the line a declarative quality. It is specific rather than general. She is the mother.

The early pages of the poem represent a dream state in order to begin where the subject, or narrator, can be most deeply embedded in her consciousness. Later in the poem we see another concern regarding motherhood:

I better hurry to accommodate family to see what’s going to happen with them

today, every morning’s the same dawning before it’s talked about or told like the dull

man who wanted to tell the dream he had of you a week ago …78

77 Ibid., 14. 78 Ibid., 24.

53 Here the tone shifts; it’s more directly stream of consciousness, rolling over, a block para, no line breaks, minimal punctuation. There is concern apparent, a stressful experience of motherhood. Identifying the hidden labour within raising a family of worry, boredom. In the second part of the poem, where narrator and family are awake and readying for the day, we see the reality of this motherly stress: ‘If everything could happen at once even as merely as only two babies crying and requiring everything but nothing at one time.’79

Within this consciousness we have seen a domestic theme appear through imagery of mothers, daughters, meals cooked, home life. But Mayer’s poem does more than merely reference domestic signifiers. Through her poetic practice, she embodies and reproduces a

Marxist-feminist poetics.

At the core of Mayer’s poetics is an interest in illuminating the small, homely moments in the life of a woman raising children. The nature of the poem – its durational and conceptual framework – is informed by this very interest that coincides with that of

Marxist feminism: the unpaid reproductive labour of women under capitalism.

Reproductive labour, as outlined in my introduction, might include the bearing and raising of children, housework and managing the division of labour within a household, thus reproducing the labourer (feeding, clothing ‘him’) and literally reproducing the next generation of workers. Because this is a poem and not a political pamphlet, the Marxist- feminist consciousness is evident in the details she chooses to include and exclude, situating the work of motherhood prominently within her poetic recounting of the day.

Mayer returns often to motherhood and class-conscious domesticity and poetry:

Sickening holidays, cold rooms and running out of money again,

79 Ibid., 30.

54 Nothing to do but poetry, love letters and babies80

That the poet and narrator of the poem share enough crossover qualities to suggest a strong autobiographical component shows that Mayer’s subjectivity is intertwined with the aesthetic of the poem. For Mayer, the act of labour exists within the form of the poem itself: the concept of writing the poem over the course of one day; the implicit suggestion is that this 24-hour period is the workday of a mother – a never-ending job. Midwinter Day shows us that work of female reproductive labour is inseparable from the work of poetic creation. This, ultimately, allows us to identify it as a Marxist-feminist poem.

Diane di Prima’s book of poems, Revolutionary Letters, offers us a slightly different formal approach to the poetics of Marxist-feminism, one that is more explicitly interested in class.

This is suggested in the opening lines of ‘Revolutionary Letter #1’, in which the narrator has come to realise the limits of their subject position as the seller of labour power in exchange for money to purchase the means of subsistence:

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 over81

While Mayer’s poem closely gazes at the quotidian aspects of an individual, feminine, life in order to illuminate the gendered politics of hers and the narrator’s subject position, di

Prima’s poems in Revolutionary Letters, by their nature more disparate (a series of numbered

80 Ibid., 54. 81 Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letters (San Francisco: Last Gasp of San Francisco, 2007): 7.

55 letters as discrete poems rather than a book-length poem), cast a wider net, incorporating a range of subject positions. Like Mayer, her interest in the domestic manifests in its formal approach. She uses an epistolary framing for each poem, suggesting an intimate addressee, albeit one that shifts across the poems. The subject or narrator that di Prima constructs is a layered facsimile of the poet herself. Di Prima’s poems are also durational. If Midwinter Day takes up the question, what does a woman’s life look like over the course of one day,

Revolutionary Letters asks, what does it look like over a number of years? We can see this in the dates of some poems. Though the book was first published in 1971, subsequent editions up until 2007 have seen the introduction of newly written poems, highlighting the ongoing nature of Marxist-feminist struggle in response to the ever shifting formations of contemporary capitalism..

In ‘Revolutionary Letter #72’, there is an intersection of many elements that help us situate di Prima’s work within a Marxist-feminist context. Its secondary title (one of the few poems in the collection to have one) is revealing: ‘A spell for the children of the poor.’82 That this spell is dedicated to children demonstrates their importance; for di Prima, the child contains a revolutionary potential and promise. More than this, di Prima’s poem is explicitly for ‘the children of the poor’, which indicates her explicit interest in the relationship between children, class, gender, and revolutionary subjectivity.

Di Prima’s subject position, growing up a working class girl in New York in the sixties, is taken up in this poem through other characters and subjects, often young working class girls. One of them is

… Melissa, black girl who lives

next door to me in the Fillmore where the grocer

82 Ibid., 94.

56 refuses to give her eggs if she’s 2c short & she’s

always

2c short, her mom

spent the last five dollars on codeine

’cause she hurts.83

The poem goes on to mention the cost of eggs and the bleak reality of living while poor, where one can have temporary pain relief or food but not both. It talks about ‘paint, and a violin / for your brother / & all the leotards anybody wants’, objects required for hobbies for a child. The text of the poem does not exactly mimic what we might imagine a spell to sound like, but is instead framed as an account of a number of gifts the narrator has brought the children. The spell is not an incantation for financial safety but the bringing of material comfort itself. The spattering of short lines and extra spaces around some words, even the use of ampersands instead of spelling out ‘and’ gives the poem the feel of a scrawled, handwritten note, something one might scribble, perhaps in preparation for a spell. This poem effectively draws together a number of key concerns of Marxist-feminist poetics: class, commodities and the domestic labour of caring for children.

Taken together, Midwinter Day and Revolutionary Letters pick up the everyday, somewhat banal observations of living as a woman under capitalism while also engaging with the temporal aspect of their respective situations. Mayer employs durational constraint as well as a deeply personal exploration of consciousness in a poem that is concerned with gender and domestic labour, while di Prima expands a durational mode to show a feminised subjectivity that is political and class-conscious. Di Prima’s project of expanding and

83 Ibid., 94.

57 revising her poems with nearly each new edition shows that a poetic exploration of

Marxist-feminist consciousness is one that must be responsive to the advances of capitalism. Her work shows us the usefulness of intergenerationality as a framework for understanding both subjectivity and struggle, and this concept of a temporal unfolding foregrounds the growth and extension of ideas, rather than mere repetition and reiteration.

My reading of and thinking through these poems reinforce my own poetry; my poetic practice developed out of reading poets such as di Prima and Mayer and responding to them in some way by writing against or for them. This intergenerational approach is crucial to the project of a Marxist-feminist poetics.

CAPITALISM AND ITS OBJECTS

Jack Spicer writes, ‘Dear Lorca, I would like to make poetry out of real objects.’84 Setting aside the wonderful parallel of the intimate direct address – Spicer to Lorca and di Prima to an unnamed recipient – we could take Spicer’s declaration as a cue to ask: what are the real objects of a Marxist-feminist poetics? There are objects all throughout my poetry – quotidian objects that index a gendered life under capitalism (‘hoarded bobby pins and lip cream’) or objects found in nature:

if you have a question or problem relating to your workplace

gather seashells into the shapes of great faces

amenities, physical environment

spread sand into orifices

eye strain, exhaustion, debilitating overuse injuries

jellyfish pillow

84 Jack Spicer, ‘After Lorca’, in My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, eds. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 133.

58 When my poetry travels to the natural world, it is often to seek something tangible, to try to grasp objects and places that don’t exist under the oppressive network of social and economic relations that constitute capitalism. The emergence and continuation of capitalist modes of production – the expropriation of the commons, the extraction of resources, the racial hierarchies that emerge from colonial and capitalist projects – reveal the impossibility of a conception of nature that is untouched by political and economic forces. Yet the natural world can still provide momentary spaces of escape and cannot be completely controlled by the forces of capital. And so I juxtapose a ‘gentle’ and seemingly apolitical concept of nature (seashells, jellyfish) with contemporary work banalities. In the above passage, for example, the first line deliberately mimics corporate/HR speak, and ‘orifices’ is a play on ‘offices’. The ‘nature’ of this space is spoiled by the injuries associated with work that requires long periods of close reading.

In Revolutionary Letters, objects also make up an index of sorts to the subjectivities her poems are interested in – those for whom revolution is the main way out for their oppression. ‘Revolutionary Letter #34’ declares:

hey man let’s make a revolution let’s give

every man a thunderbird

color TV, a refrigerator, free

antibiotics …85

It lists further: ‘inflatable plastic sofas, vitamin pills … guitars and flutes’86, and mentions herbs, domes, flower pots, sculptures. The objects of the revolution are objects for living

(health and abode), for playing and for eating.

85 di Prima, Revolutionary Letters, 47.

59 The objects combined: subsistence after freedom from wage labour, which of course is half of the source of exploitation for working women. There is a sense of sarcasm in the poem, a sly suggestion in the tone of the direct address (‘hey man’) that perhaps these objects are not necessary to revolution, that they are objects for capitalist society and represent our lacks in other ways. That the ‘need’ for these objects might cease after capitalism. Either way, the objects here are representative of a subject in relation to social conditions. The objects in Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day are also quotidian and gendered – kitchen table, cooked eggs, cake, strollers – household, foodish things.

Objects in poetry hold transformative power – they can be many things at once; they offer syllables for a meter, they are aurally and visually potent, they are, as words, objects in themselves, as well as signifiers of objects. And that is before we address the multiple emotional and aesthetic qualities an object can lend to a poem. In Kollontai’s writing, objects can be read as even more directly functional. Birgitta Ingemanson argued:

In Kollontai’s fiction, the joys and tribulations of the domestic sphere are a

microcosm of society's achievements and failures; personal development in the

home not only reflects but also affects the general level of morality. Of central

concern in this two-way operation is the private property of the characters, the

things they own. Their property defines them socioeconomically and acts as a

catalyst in their relations with each other and with society. Connoting wealth,

luxury, and bourgeois culture on the one hand, and poverty, utility, and proletarian

ideals on the other, such items from the domestic sphere as food, clothing, and

86 Ibid.

60 furniture can represent ‘bad’ or ‘good’ political ideas that in turn support or reject a

societal set-up and social arrangements where women become possessions, too.87

Such a reading is directive and possibly too narrow – it suggests a binary in Kollontai’s writing that does little credit to her non-fiction writing where she complicates and persists in thinking through difficult questions about love and sex and work and womanhood in a revolutionary society. But this reading does point to a common thread in Marxist-feminist poetics: that its objects are material traces of gendered politics and subjectivities – and that we can read into their representation along political lines.

Objects are just one component of the Marxist feminism in my MFA and the poems I have closely read above. But the elements comprising my practice-based research thesis are not neat segments that can be unpacked. Rather, they have combined and gestated to help form my poetic and political consciousness (a consciousness that is always evolving).

CAPITALISM, MARXIST FEMINISM AND POETRY

Poetry is a form that does not adhere to the same strictures as narrative forms of writing. It is a form of distillation, sound, multiplicities and shifts, and even when narrative is part of a poem, the role it plays within the form (nestling alongside metric and linear and page considerations), is fundamentally different from the role of narrative in prose texts. The formal possibilities of poetry, alongside its position in the margins of literary works considered by society as significant, provide a set of conditions that make it possible to explore our contemporary moment. While Marxist literary analysis has extensively examined the relationships between labour, literature and production, Marxist-feminist analysis has been somewhat thinner. Amy De’Ath shows us that ‘social reproduction’s

87 Birgitta Ingemanson, ‘The Political Function of Domestic Objects in the Fiction of Aleksandra Kollontai’, Slavic Review 48, no. 1 (Spring, 1989): 72.

61 relationship to the aesthetic, and poetic language in particular, re-centres the tricky, opaque divide between aesthetic critiques and systematic critiques because it flings several key questions about this latter relation into orbit’.88

Though I have identified components such as intergenerationality, material writing conditions, themes of gendered subjectivity under capitalism and formal qualities as the elements comprising Marxist-feminist poetics, the crucial question remains: why poetry?

Here I turn to Veronica Forrest-Thompson’s case for poetry as a form distinct on account of its ‘rhythmic, phonetic, verbal, and logical devices’89; it is a form that is ‘resolutely artificial’, depending on ‘a host of conventions which we apply only in reading and writing poems’.90 Poetry provides an open space for generic experiment that is not possible in the same way for other forms of writing. The dictates of how we read a poem are formulated by the poem itself. This is distinct from prose and we could turn to Kollontai for comparison: for Kollontai, fiction’s narrative priority allowed her to dramatically play out the scenarios of her political ideas (which could be seen in characters such as Vasilya and

Vladimir in Red Love). In my own practice, poetry is stylistically malleable and its formal possibilities allow the poet to consider not only the thematic ideas they are trying to produce, but also the shape of the words, the visual elements of the line, the aural component (even if a poem is ‘free verse’, the rhythmic elements – the meter, feet, syllables

– are a conscious part of its composition). The phrases scattered throughout my poetry borrow from ‘office culture’ to not only thematically link contemporary working life but also to use its language to convey the banality of the space and occupants with uninteresting rhythm and metre that mimics speech from this environment. In the previous

88 Amy De’Ath, ‘L(a)ying Down In the Banlieue’, Mute magazine (21 September 2016), accessed 18 April 2019, metamute.org/editorial/articles/laying-down-banlieue. 89 Veronica Forrest-Thompson, Poetic Artifice, ed. Gareth Farmer (Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2016), 33. 90 Ibid.

62 chapter I highlighted how the office space of my workplace conditions my subjective experience as well as the form and themes of my poetry. Within my poetry, I also juxtapose the different ways gendered labour takes place in waged and unwaged forms.

Now that we have identified the formal qualities of Marxist-feminist poetics, we must turn to how poetry appears under and alongside and against capitalism. Joshua Clover argues,

poetry, via its own internal characteristics qua poetry, might bring into clearer

apprehension the elusive character of finance and, more critically, of value itself. Marx

calls surplus value the ‘‘invisible essence’’ of capital […] poetry might provide a

privileged optic, among literary modes, for rendering value visible in its movements—

and if, in turn, this might elucidate the question of what poetry might be for within our

particular historical conjuncture, defined by global political-economic crisis.91

Because poetry exists on the fringe of literary culture in terms of its ‘market value’, it is in many ways freer to explore aesthetically and thematically radical forms without the same pressures of the market that have shaped the more popular narrative forms of literature.

The homogenous working class, the proletarian subjects of the early twentieth century who were able to overthrow governments and fight capitalist bosses or fascists have been atomised; stratified. Further, those who are perhaps in the most alienating jobs in the west

(factory workers still exist, but so do cleaners, nannies, call centre workers) are largely feminised and often non-white migrants, who have varying levels of connection to communities they might be able to seek support from. Union membership has plummeted

91 Joshua Clover, ‘Retcon: Value in Temporality and Poetics’, Representations 126, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 13.

63 and industrial laws have weakened.92 Clover points to the rise of the credit economy, mapping ‘the shared character of temporalities in poetry and finance’.93 This notion of temporality is one I keep returning to, and one that I have marked as crucial to understanding the relationship between Marxist-feminism and poetry. We can see that temporality is also crucial to understanding the moment of capitalism we live under, and the conditions that produce Marxist-feminist thought. For Clover, ‘[c]redit too is a kind of time travel; it is a way of spending in the present the value of labor still in the future. Debt, equally, is the thing that knows what you will be doing next summer.’94

When poetry explores gendered raced and classed subjectivities against capitalism, it becomes clear, as I have shown in the preceding chapter, that poetry’s fecundity for such exploration is due to its linguistic and formal qualities. That is, poetry is in a unique position to be able to explore social reproduction and feminised subjectivity. These aesthetic qualities, as I have shown in this chapter, are inseparable from considerations of the conditions of the poem’s production – that the gendered and classed subjectivity captured in a poem is present in its construction as well as its aesthetic qualities. In following these considerations, what becomes clear is that Marxist-feminist poetics, when identified within the parameters defined above, provides a generative grounding from which we can consider future potential of poetry, feminism and anticapitalism.

92 In Australia, union member numbers fell from ‘2.5 million in 1976 to ‘1.5 million in 2016’ and density in this period fell from 51 per cent to 14 per cent. See Parliament of Australia, Statistics and Mapping Section, Trends in Union Membership In Australia, Geoff Gilfillan and Chris McGann, Australian Government, Canberra, aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/ rp/rp1819/UnionMembership, accessed 8 September 2019. Regarding weakening industrial laws, also in Australia, see Josh Bornstein, ‘Employees are losing: Have workplace laws gone too far?’, Journal of Industrial Relations vol. 6, no. 3 (March 2019): 438– 456. 93 Clover, ‘Recton’, 16. 94 Ibid.

64 CONCLUSION: FUTURE DIRECTIONS FOR MARXIST- FEMINIST POETICS

My purpose in this thesis has been to lay bare the qualities of a Marxist-feminist poetics, and to illustrate how such poetics can be identified and read in a generative and productive way via an attention to how such poetry engages with gender and labour in a capitalist society. I have argued that in order to do this, we must begin with intergenerationality. I began by tracing Marxist feminism’s temporal touchstones in three broad ‘moments’: the early twentieth century (Bolshevik feminist Alexandra Kollontai and the 1917 Russian

Revolution); the 1970s (the emergence of Marxist-feminist theory in the West as well as early Marxist-feminist poets); and our contemporary period of late capitalism (broadly traced from the 2008 global financial crisis and the current period of Marxist-feminist

‘revival’). I argued that in these periods, materialist concerns of gender and labour

(especially regarding domestic and care work that is waged or unwaged) combined with corporeal subjectivity were central to Marxist-feminist poetics and that the political implications of these material conditions are connected to the production of such poetry.

Put another way, I have argued that these gendered and classed experiences are commonly explored in Marxist-feminist thought within the body, and this emphasis on how social and economic relations come together in the feminised body manifests in this poetry.

In addition to mapping the temporal spaces of Marxist-feminist poetics, I have also shown through a close reading of two exemplary Marxist-feminist poets, Bernadette Mayer and Diane di Prima, how a poem’s aesthetic qualities can explore and question and unpack the subjective and political experiences that Marxist-feminism is interested in, and how the conditions of a poem’s production must be considered in conjunction with the poem’s aesthetic qualities. Turning to my own poetry as comparison, I unpacked the conditions of

Mayer’s and di Prima’s writing practice – specifically the conditions imposed on them as mothers, poets and carers – and how this manifests in their poetic form. In a similar

65 manner I examined the role of objects in poetry alongside Veronica Forrest-Thompson’s notion of poetic artifice to further unmask the poetic qualities of Marxist-feminist poetics.

I applied this analysis to the conditions of my own practice, including its temporal and spatial constraints. I argued that my practice is conditioned by my professional work as an editor (as a worker who must exchange labour power in the market, but whose labour is complicated by gendered expectations of care and unpaid labour), and as a non-white cis woman with migrant parents. But, equally importantly, I showed how the conditions of my practice were apparent in the form of my poem, linking my work to a broader tradition and as a descendent of my poet mothers such as Mayer and di Prima.

The qualities of Marxist-feminist poetics I identified, which are generative in nature, allowed me to create a framework and set of questions to allow for a Marxist-feminist poetics capable of tracing incarnations of capitalism into the future. Capitalism cycles with moments of crisis and growth, and its moments of crisis have provided poetry and art with a purpose to write against. Each crisis has brought about new compositions of labour and capital, as we have seen in the rise of precarity and finance capital in recent years. In the absence of total global revolution, capitalism will continue these cycles, and we do not know what its future forms may take. As Jack Halberstram writes in his introduction to

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The Undercommons, ‘Revolution will come in a form we cannot yet imagine.’95 My hope for this research project is to provide a framework for understanding how language, and poetry specifically, contains temporal and intergenerational bases that inform its production and aesthetics, and to consider poetics alongside the revolutionary struggles into the future whose nature we do not yet know.

95 Jack Halbertsam, ‘The Wild Beyond’, in Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 11

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