Roșie Stockton’s Fuel, out now from Nightboat, works towards and against calamity, both personal and political. In poems shaped by psychoanalytic thought, the pandemic, and petrocapitalism—and punctured by The End—Stockton asks how we might “find livable forms for our suffering,” and seek out political horizons that meet out moment.
In our conversation below we discuss apocalyptic phantasies, the pleasure communists, and how “fracking is a crazy verb.”
—Dante Silva and Lina Bergamini
Dante and Lina: Let’s start with The End—which is, in your poems, at once a place, a political construct, a departure point. How do you write to The End with love?
Rosie Stockton: It’s actually really hard. A bunch of the letters addressed to the “End” in this book play with the material of desperation. Part desire, part fear. Performing abjection. But it really depends on what types of endings you are thinking about. In this book I wanted to think about the end in multiple registers: love, climate, capitalism. Our relationships are haunted by the spectre of it one day ending: how do we be okay with that? How do we lose each other more gracefully? How do we hurt each other with only the necessary amount of pain, not the gratuitous amount of pain? In my experience the end of relationships is a tremendous opportunity to crack your world open, lay flat on your back and touch the core of the earth and your psyche. Metal on metal. Rumi said it—the cure for pain is in the pain. Love is our capacity to withstand that without trying to make the other solve it, make it go away by hurting the other back. We might find that endings in this regard are a myth. We get to keep on loving each other outside how we cling to one form of relationship or another.
What I mean is this is really hard to do under our current conditions of the devastation of capitalism and the isolation it rewards. This is an ending I live for, an ending communism fights for. In the book I’m also addressing the spectre of the end of the world and the end of capitalism: this age old question—which will come first? Like Fredric Jameson said, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Is there a structure of yearning that will usher the end of the totalizing system of capitalism? Can this longing make us crazed enough to camp out to stop the building of pipelines, for example—to put our body on the line for earth like we do for whoever we are having an attachment freakout about? I also would put it like: Is the apocalypse ghosting us or are we living through it and just want more? There may be no collective fantasy as strong as the promise of apocalypse—so these poems are trying to touch on some perverse libidinal investment—some jouissance—in the concept of “the End.”
D & L: Do you have a fantasy of The End (apocalypse)?
Rosie Stockton: The end of capitalism of course. The end of the systems of domination that keep us apart and keep us hurting each other and extracting from each other and keep us from forgiving each other. Everything in the way of solidarity. Really though. But I’m almost more interested in the fantasy of what that looks like and how we get there than the content of The End itself. We need to get used to losing our sense of safety and security that we have been taught through ownership, possession, etc. James Silt once said to me that brave people don’t lack fear, they just act with bravery despite the fear inside them. There’s a lot we have to lose in order to win. It’s the radical capacity to detach from an imaginable future in favor of total presence, and improvisation to fight against everything on the side of accumulation, genocide, borders. Again, that’s very hard. Don’t get me wrong, I love the pleasure communists, but in this book I’m thinking more about how we find livable forms for our suffering. These poems are trying to drum up some of that bravery. They are trying to practice loss. The art of losing isn’t hard to master! Lose harder, lose vaster.
D & L: You create a language for our moment—words and phrases such as “bioblush,” “geodesic deviation,” “cryptolegible.” How do you craft that language?
Rosie Stockton: I love puns and portmanteaus. I have to rein myself in all the time because my tendency is to be really indulgent with them. Celan is the king of this. You can just smash things together at your leisure? No rules? I try to weave in contemporary language with more lyric-bent diction and let the proximity reverberate. It’s really just wordplay. I listened to a lot of Lil Wayne and Eminem when I was a kid on the bus to middle school. This really informs my poetics. And personal life. Someone could literally gruesomely betray me and I’d soften in the face of wordplay. I go crazy for it.
D & L: “[E]ven the billboards are on rent strike & no one knows what to buy”—the work is at once sparse and incredibly visual, almost as if we’re driving through a desert wasteland. How is place part of your poetics? What places went into the writing of Fuel?
Rosie Stockton: I live in Southern California and visit Bakersfield—just north of LA—often, because my oldest best friend, Elizabeth, is from there. The Central Valley is a total dystopia and I’m totally seduced by it. Kern County is one of the top producers of oil and agriculture in the country. It’s like extraction on extraction on extraction. It’s the truest California. Great country music, fucked up politics. If you drive along Panorama Drive you just look over a sea of pumpjacks. Elizabeth told me that this is where the highschool kids go to drink beers. The pumpjack became this metonym of extraction that guides the poetics in the book—up and down, up and down. Fracking is a crazy verb. Tell me that is not sexual. It’s a horror show. These are the primal scenes that this book grapples with.
D & L: I understand the project came out of the pandemic, a period marked by “new heights of isolation and interconnectedness.” How did the pandemic—and the fundamental changes in our social and material relations that followed—allow you to imagine the political horizons in Fuel?
Rosie Stockton: It may be hard to tell but many of the poems in the early sections of this book are “protest poems.” I mean I am actually describing the feeling of being at an action. I can’t really remember the isolation of the pandemic without the reality that it coincided with the George Floyd uprising. I look back on that time and remember the feeling of total bewilderment—like we have no idea what is about to happen, what is happening, we are making something happen, aren’t we? Were we? But there is a contact potential that there previously wasn’t. I touched on that feeling again during the LA fires this January. Reality was suspended and we had to find each other really rapidly and make decisions with very little information about what was happening. I want political horizons that are durable in the face of not enough information. In the face of our forms of collectivity and love that surge and collapse but that doesn’t mean they were a failure, it just means try something new. We have to learn to be okay with projects ending without losing the momentum of building power, collectivity. Sometimes I really think the best organizers and the best lovers are those that can withstand really annoying imperfect situations (and people) without letting it get to them. (Then again, I am speaking as an avoidant.)
As for Fuel, the poems in here are places I can grapple with the ephemeral nature of social life and grieve the changing nature of all relationships while also being able to ride for my people and trust that they will ride for me even as relationships ebb and flow. It helps me feel brave enough to dedicate myself more truly to love, which I think helps make my politics more precise. Both on a scale of how I treat my loved ones, how I treat strangers, and how I engage with practices of finding each other. In the end this book really is a book about believing in something amidst total devastation. That’s maybe a political horizon I’d advocate for. Unwavering ass faith. There is an erotics to that.