There is no redemption in labor.

Making visible our labor – domestic, manual, repetitive, intellectual, emotional, creative, unacknowledged – is vital to changing our material conditions. 

Yet within capitalism, our labor determines our worth: what resources and care we have access to.

Your vocation is a calling that you name and choose. This includes occupations such as joy, rest, creative expression.

Poetry as Etel Adnan describes it is

a “counter-profession,” “an expression of personal and mental freedom,” a “perpetual rebellion.” [i] The labor we do to support ourselves does not determine our writing life. Except, of course, for the ways capital seeks to sap us of the vitality our creativity desires. Issues of creative access are inseparable from wage labor, systemic racism, ableism, and entrenched histories of colonialism and imperialism. Our fight for the time and space that people need to flourish creatively requires an active interrogation of these systems of subjugation. The act of creativity is one vector of a larger perpetual rebellion. A part of an "imaginative militancy" [ii] where collective efforts toward political and creative revolution occur simultaneously, from the bottom up, through a "slow insurrection."

However we make money, art will be our “counter-profession.” An occupation that is not work, a friend had tattooed on their body, which was seared in my memory. That which sustains us in our labors: work, play, the magic that we do together. [iii]

“It is not a sin for a man to labor at his vocation,” says Bob Pigeon as Falstaff in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. Bob is a thief, a gambler, father figure and pimp – criminal by way of being queer. As queer theorist Jack Halberstam recognizes, sometimes what seems unsuccessful, inappropriate, or unintelligible is in the process of discovering new processes and forms. [iv]

Through excessive judgment, we curtail the growth of new aesthetics and forms of life. Perceived failure creates a mirror not of our own figure but of the cultures we respond to.

The action of emitting or producing a voice.

Not voice in the sense of “you’ve found the style through which the institution will receive you,” but voice as in voices, as in song or necessary noise. Cf. a loud vocal utterance; a shout, a cry. We are calling out: both answering and creating the call.

In order to alter what is seen and heard, we turn to Stephano Harney and Fred Moten’s definition of study: “talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice.”[vii] Vocational Poetics concerns itself with labor, anti-capitalist activity, including that of nurturing one’s own creativity, and forms of embodiment that expand our understanding of knowledge and its production.