'I once wrote to a poetry advice column because I was afraid of my emotions and the havoc they wreaked on me. I called them ‘a huge problem’ but Diana Hamilton responded: ‘Feeling pleasure is a legitimate way of developing as a person-writer!’
'We got a kitten and I tried to write poems for her. Or some other (many) times I had a thought and realised I shouldn’t say it out loud only to find myself speaking it. When these turned to poems. Could there be a poet in the sense of a hare or another graceful creature or perhaps bitter and less warm-blooded. Like endives.
'Or when you want to write poems for the world but … and maybe a museum exhibition about a colonial botanist who collected timber specimens.
'Joined a reading group with some people who turned out to almost all be poets we read Das Kapital volume 1 which stuck with me I think my communist spirit which was born that year was also part poet.
'It’s sometimes like a heat pack muscle relaxant & then you finally can read in bed in the evenings without checking on your cat.
'I’m afraid to share more because of what emotions have done to my poetry but you can read and devein them in your own time. There is a YouTube tutorial for it probably.
'Or full communism or how Amy De’Ath says ‘i wish for us another world where we might live freely … a world of dank memes and slick gifs’.
'–Elena Gomez' (Publication summary)
Dedication: for Rory
'I first heard of Elena Gomez when a friend of mine who was living in London DM’d me a link via Instagram with the message ‘another commie poet in Melbourne!!’. I had just started writing poems, so this was kind of like when a parent notices you are in an awkward phase of identity, and naively suggests you hang out with the cool girl at school who is two years above you. I love hearted their message and ordered Elena’s recently published debut book, Body of Work. When I met Elena a year or so later, we were both in a Marxist reading group, which I soon realised was made up of mostly poets. Elena and I were sitting across from each other on low sagging couches while two people between us engaged in one of those conversations poets are often guilty of: the topic is something tangible and relatable, like work and gender, and yet it turns into something that is abstracted to the point that no one knows what’s going on, or if they ever did. At some point in the reading session, Elena intervened and summed up the conversation with a famous line from the Wages Against Housework movement: ‘They say it’s love, we say it’s unwaged work’. I thought, I love this bitch.' (Introduction)
'I first heard of Elena Gomez when a friend of mine who was living in London DM’d me a link via Instagram with the message ‘another commie poet in Melbourne!!’. I had just started writing poems, so this was kind of like when a parent notices you are in an awkward phase of identity, and naively suggests you hang out with the cool girl at school who is two years above you. I love hearted their message and ordered Elena’s recently published debut book, Body of Work. When I met Elena a year or so later, we were both in a Marxist reading group, which I soon realised was made up of mostly poets. Elena and I were sitting across from each other on low sagging couches while two people between us engaged in one of those conversations poets are often guilty of: the topic is something tangible and relatable, like work and gender, and yet it turns into something that is abstracted to the point that no one knows what’s going on, or if they ever did. At some point in the reading session, Elena intervened and summed up the conversation with a famous line from the Wages Against Housework movement: ‘They say it’s love, we say it’s unwaged work’. I thought, I love this bitch.' (Introduction)
