Marx in the section on the labour process in Capital vol. 1 effectively claims that labour is categorically metabolic: “Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.” So Marx’s Stoffwechsel effectively shares in the social fate of labour as such. This matters for, effectively, the communist horizon of I think all of my poetry whose explicit object is gender: a disalienation of mental and manual labour that takes the specific form of superceding a gendered division of labour. To say this with a bit more punch, I’m interested in using poetry to pose the question of what it would mean for gender to be continually joyous rather than an accumulation strategy.
Kay Gabriel, “Pleasure and Provocation: Kay Gabriel Interview with Jordy Rosenberg,” Salvage (x)