Buy: book of provocations by mónica teresa ortiz | $20 | July 2024 | 110 pages | ISBN: 978-1-7376050-6-5
Laura Villareal (LV): Your chapbook have you ever dreamed of flamingos? was my first introduction to many of the poems in book of provocations. One of the most admirable qualities of your poetry is your thoughtful engagement with theory, philosophy, politics, and the work of other writers. I’m usually not a fan of notes sections but yours is as rich as the poems themselves. Of your writing process in the notes you wrote, “I find myself in what Harmony Holiday calls ‘the purgatory between recovery and relapse,’ searching for poets whose words move us to act, to ideas that live within poems. For me, poetry is an (in)direct action, an intersection of commitment and practice.” At what point in your writing life did this focus/ethos crystalize for you?
mónica teresa ortiz (mto): I have always been a curious person. Whenever I read anything, if I see a name, a place, another book, that is mentioned, I look it up. Rabbit holes hate to see me coming. But I want to know who the writer was reading, or what theory led them to the place they arrived. I think historical context and culture is important to being a good reader. And I am also interested in place – what was the architecture of space like for them?
For my notes section, I wrote an excerpt about that “crystallization” in Annulet: A Journal of Poetics, in Spring 2021. But I had been thinking about those ideas for a long time. Commitments in both politics and poetics are a choice by many before me. I have been blessed enough to be around people who are committed to practice and action. I was only able to articulate it more clearly, after 2020, after COVID-19 came.
LV: On a similar note to my previous question, your work seems rooted in a line of questioning that considers what a poem can / cannot do, especially how poems live within the greater context of the world. Your poems often mention poems, asking questions like: “what does it mean // that I write // little poems // in wastelands // I call home.” I was very struck by the statement in “un/writing nature,” “Stella says that poems will transport us to freedom / if I don’t seem that excited / it’s because I am working / to decentralize the poet / to use my words as documentation of specters” I was reminded of a craft essay by Ana Portnoy Brimmer, where she writes “I like to think of organizing as a site to draft revolutionary poetics, and poetry as a site to revise revolutionary politics. As interlocking affairs.” Poets are always quibbling about the power of poetry in politics. How do you view the capacity of poetry? What are its limits and what are its powers?
mto: Poetry is not directly material. We aren’t poets to make money. But I do believe poetry can be an intervention in spaces that can disrupt. There is a reason many poets have been assassinated, from Guatemala to Italy to Chile to Lebanon, and even here in the US. Refaat Alareer was assassinated by Israel. Khaliifah ibn Rayford Daniels was murdered by the state. Assata Shakur is still exiled. Why is language so dangerous to the state?
Through the mutual aid effort, Workshops for Gaza, I have seen poets, myself included, use what we know and have access to as a material contribution to immediate needs. Workshops for Gaza offers workshops to the public, and instead of the funds going to the facilitator, the funds go directly to Palestinians facing and surviving genocide. That is one way poets can directly impact material needs. We also have to continuously speak out. Since October 7, 2023, there have been many poets who have stood with Palestine. But there are those who refuse to speak, witness, or risk anything.
There are poets whose language are interventions as well. I look to Aurielle Marie, Rasha Abdulhadi, George Abraham, Solmaz Sharif, Ariana Brown, Zaina Alsous, Jacqui Germaine, Sasha Banks, Fady Joudah, Harmony Holiday, Mosab Abu Toha, Omar Sakr, some of our living poets.
LV: Oh, I really love that response because it illuminates both the power of language and action. I particularly like the description “poets whose language are interventions…”
I think mentioning poems within a poem tricks the brain into snapping back into the reality so we can see what you’re documenting for what it is: intersectional struggles, genocide, climate collapse, and disaster capitalism which is all happening now. Too often new poets are told to “tell all the truth but tell it slant” but I think it’s necessary to also recognize the necessity for clarity in poems that do the work of documentation. When working with poems, how do you decide when to prioritize the explicit and when to embrace the oblique?
mto: I want to be clear with commitments, even if perhaps sometimes that opposes tradition with poetry and with form. I prioritize an idea or intention, rather than an image. I know that’s not a popular approach, but I began writing poetry after 9/11, during the early onset of the invasion of Afghanistan. My first interactions with living poets were those who were exiled, dispossessed. I don’t know that I embrace the oblique so much as I embrace the truth of what is happening around me.
LV: I heard recently that Layli Long Soldier won’t use metaphor anymore in active resistance to likening anything to what it's not. It feels essential for us to witness and document with the kind of clarity you use.
Texas is full of exceptional poets like yourself who illuminate our numerous ecoregions and landscapes. The poems in book of provocations poems transport us to numerous places, but I especially love how vividly you portray the Texas Panhandle’s landscape. How does landscape inform your writing?
mto: Gaston Bachelard wrote that “the poet speaks on the threshold of being” in the Poetics of Space. I grew up in a rural place alienated from cities on the threshold of prairies, which existed long before me and will long after me. I look around me and try to be in relation to the land and water around me. To ask for kinship.
LV: I resonate with that as someone who grew up in a rural area. With many of your poems, it feels like they move based on accumulation that results in revelation. The revelations don’t necessarily come at the end of the poems, but there’s a momentum to the imagery you choose to place next to each other. Your poems are so smart and layered and plentiful, so I often feel like I need to sit and think them through.
mto: Thank you. I appreciate that.
LV: You have a couple poems for the Stridentists and in the notes you say, “I’ve long been interested in the Infrarrealist movement and Stridentists, and this book provoked many ideas, including both of these poems.” I don’t think we hear enough about Mexican or Latin American artistic movements, so could you talk about them for those who might not know about them / the movement? How did you learn about them and how has their work informed yours?
mto: My MFA is from the University of Texas at El Paso, and most of my classmates were Latin Americans. They were from Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Chile, and Mexico. That broadened my literary landscape. They introduced me to books that informed much of my understanding of Latin American politics and history. I also lived in Barranquilla, Colombia in 2008 and in 2009, and I read a lot of Colombian writers and poets then. I began to learn that many movements circulated in Mexico, Central and Latin America. Like the surrealists – Andre Breton and Leonora Carrington – who spent time in Mexico, and the influence of the Avant Garde around the 1920s, gave rise to the Stridentist. Manuel Maples Arce was one poet I became interested in. There’s a book on the Stridentist Movement, by Elissa J. Rashkin, who quotes Maples Arce: “the artist creates his own truths and meanings” but also that “truth is subjective; meaning is unstable and depends on context.” So I found that interesting – provocative if you will… but for me, it really always returns to Bolaño and Infrarrealismo in the 1970s, which is birthed in between the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City in 1968 and the assassination of Allende in Chile in 1973. It is a complex history, but the appeal for me is the idea that poets can have commitments to ideas other than poetry. So that’s where I hope to place my work. But I am also blessed to be learning constantly from contemporary Central American artists, poets, and filmmakers that also inform my work. Liberation is not just an idea, but a word, and a practice. I think that’s what I have carried with me from these other poets.
LV: Your book is split into 3 sections titled “terrestrial,” “celestial,” and “afterlife.” I like the idea of a book being divided into these more mythic landscapes. Could you talk a bit about the process of organizing book of provocations?
mto: I organized the collection while I was in Mérida. During that time, poet Ariana Brown held several workshops on organizing and assembling a poetry manuscript, which was amazing. She’s a great facilitator. We read Sasha Banks’ book, america, Mine. That workshop was instrumental in the process of organizing my collection. And just being there in the Yucatan, learning about Maya history in Mexico. And of course, I have to give a lot of credit to my editors, Claire Bowman and Annar Veröld. I gave them bones and they sculpted it into a body.
mónica teresa ortiz (they / them) is a poet, memory worker, and critic born, raised, and based in Texas.
Laura Villareal is a poet and book critic. Her debut poetry collection, Girl’s Guide to Leaving, (University of Wisconsin Press 2022) was awarded Texas Institute of Letters' John A. Robert Johnson Award for a First Book of Poetry and the Writers' League of Texas Book Award for Poetry. Her writing has appeared in Shenandoah, Sho Poetry Journal, AGNI, among others.