I’ve often contemplated whether there’s aspects about writing that make it—to put it crudely—an inferior art-form: it tends to be a solitary activity, and it has a sort of un-realness, conjuring up worlds in our heads rather than having a physicality in the here and now.
In Writing Utopia: Poetics, Futurity and Friendship at the Wheeler Centre’s Liminal Festival, however, Elena Gomez and Andrew Brooks speak of the “spaces between” words and reality, the individual and community, and a sense of writing as a process to be experienced rather than a fixed and deadening abstraction, all of which challenges this idea I have of writing as unreal.
If that sounds a little vague, I suppose it’s because it is. I’m a little uneasy about reviewing it, not because of any fault in the conversation itself, but because of its inherently slippery and experimental nature. Nevertheless, I’ll have a go at “writing-thinking” this through.
Amidst a haze of interesting, literary-looking people, I walk into the Wheeler Centre tired, oversocialised and anxious at the prospect of writing a review on a conversation. My accomplice and housemate Aiman excitedly stops at the front table which features the books of the writers who have been speaking, and I see Elena’s most recent poetry book Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt, which I had planned to read some of beforehand, but didn’t get a chance to. I leave Aiman amongst the blur of books and people, retreating to a dimly-lit seat in the middle of the space.
Elena is a poet and book editor, currently doing a PhD in Marxist ecopoetics at the University of Melbourne. Andrew is also a poet and editor—his most recent poetry collection Inferno published in 2021—and lectures in Media Cultures at UNSW.
Sitting with a cup of tea, Andrew opens self-deprecatingly with “We weren’t really sure how to go about this”. Elena and him have been close friends for many years, he says, and they approached this call for collaboration through something refreshingly mundane—writing emails to one another.
Their casualness puts me at ease; it all feels a bit incomplete, like we’re just here to experience two friends trying something out.
Andrew says utopia was a prompt for the email exchange. Elena later says she mostly rejected this prompt, having a sort of visceral reaction to the concept as too idealistic. But Andrew continually counterpoints this, saying he thinks of utopia as something which is in-process — it’s in the working towards utopia itself where utopia lies, not at a fixed point which is arrived at.
A lot of their emails centre on their involvements in pro-Palestine protests and encampments, with ideas of community and solidarity, and the place of writing amongst this, threaded through.
In sometimes quite intimate detail, Elena writes to Andrew that she feels unable to write poetry while doing activism, despairing over a sense that it “doesn’t match the public engagement which is needed.”
Andrew seems a bit less despairing in it all. While he “doesn’t want to confuse the page with what’s happening elsewhere”, he feels that “thinking through stuff [through writing] becomes a way to digest things we’re participating in.”
A key theme that emerges from their discussion is a tension between this thinking-through, which they say seems rather individual, while also acting as part of a collective.
Andrew doesn’t seem to see this as a problem, but rather says that this tension is productive. Language occurs in a mediating space between the collective and the individual—it’s in these “spaces of tension” where language emerges, he says.
While she still felt unable to write while doing activism, Elena also somewhat affirms this view by saying a poem can be “useful” —a poem is portable and shoutable, she says, having power insofar as it registers real social dynamics. She emphasises “lower-case p poems” instead of “uppercase P poems”, saying it shouldn’t be overly theorised—when a poem isn’t useful, it should just be discarded.
Often I have resistance to the word “useful”, but Elena’s framing of a poem as “discardable” feels very powerful to me. It seems to put a poem on the same playing field as any other object or experience which is impermanent or subject to decay, giving it a sense of realness — it’s not a lofty, reified thing in a book, but rather something impacted by time, space and situation. This is what I feel as they read out their email exchange itself—it all has a touching sense of mundanity and timeliness, as they mention the dates and times and little things that are happening in their lives, like when Andrew is just about to board a plane. It’s interesting to experience these kinds of quotidian moments read out on a formal stage.
Andrew bounces off Elena’s comment on the “usefulness” of poems by reflecting broadly on how the poem is able to push past categorical limitations—“it’s a site of experimentation”, he says, which also “gives us a chance to think about forms of experimentation in other forms of living.”
The whole talk feels a little dizzying and intangible. At times Andrew refers to a whole stream of authors I’m not familiar with—I’m not saying this as a critique, but just to disclaim that there’s probably a fair bit I didn’t grasp. But it also feels like that doesn’t matter; it’s like experiencing collaboration in action is sort of the point of the event, and not some extracted clear understanding.
It all lends itself to giving me a renewed sense of vigour surrounding writing. Their discussion about utopia as not an end-goal has me thinking about writing itself as a moving, always incomplete process. I’m not writing to achieve some final, solidified state, but it's in the process itself that I can find reprieve and meaning. In a similar way, I suppose, that’s what community and connection is — something that’s moving and somewhat intangible.
Andrew ends by reaffirming utopia as about being in community — it’s in the striving towards something where utopia can be found, which, in contexts of power, can only be done through building solidarity with others.
I leave feeling a little like I’ve just been to church, in a good way—having reflected on community, but also being in this strange liminal space itself of existing in community as they imperfectly process and work through what that means. Aiman and I both agree that we feel strangely rejuvenated.