Poet Rosie Stockton is Re-writing the Love Poem in a Capitalist Society – Vogue

Stockton and I spoke this spring, under a pomegranate tree in the backyard of their home in Los Angeles, about love and work. Stocktons platinum blonde hair was pulled back, and they were wearing a white tank top, denim jacket, black pants and a tiny string of pearls.

You write about the conflict of love and the way capitalism wants us to experience love.

Love can be playful and experimental, healing and activating. It can offer possibilities for growth, reflection, and breaking out of lonely modes of being. Capitalism regulates our experience of romantic love into the couple form envisioned by heteropatriarchy, because this is the form of social life most hospitable to capitalist accumulation. The state tries to control our experience of love through laws against deviant modes of sexuality and gender, in order to make us fit into capitalisms needs. But I believe a politics of care and queer love is in excess of this.

How did you get from writing about work to love?

I was thinking about conversations around the politics of reproductive labor. There is a slogan that came from the Italian Marxist feminisms Wages for Housework movement: They sayit islove.We sayit isunwaged work. There are also traditions of thought articulated by Black Marxist feminists that argue against the wage. Like, we dont want to turn care and love into labor: what else is possible? In one poem I write: Can we love with inadequate politics? I wrote poems to people I care for: friends, lovers, and those who are both. I wanted to fuck with the poetic forms associated with romantic love (like the sonnet!) to actually experience the love that animates my life.

So whats your take? Should all care be paid for?

Domestic labor and care work are exploited by racial capitalism, and have been a historically difficult sector to organize. For those doing this kind of labor, of course it has to be paid, and all workers need labor protections. That said, the wage isnt the ultimate demand that I have around compensating reproductive labor, or practices of care and love. In this book I imagined refusing the wage as the path toward love and liberation. Leftist thinkers like Claudia Jones, Angela Davis, and Rosa Luxemburg are influential to me.

The book is simmering with radicalness. What are some of the politics that inform your work?

These poems are personal, but informed by politics that demand the abolition of police and prisons and the decriminalization of sex work. Im interested in the intersection of labor organizing and abolitionist mutual aid projects that call for better working conditions while dreaming of autonomous systems that get everyones basic needs met.

Here is the original post:

Poet Rosie Stockton is Re-writing the Love Poem in a Capitalist Society - Vogue