alma valdez-garcia: I want to start by saying I really loved your collection. I’ve shared it with a lot of friends as I've been struggling with how to write. It feels like such an individual act, whereas this moment calls for collectivity and communing with others. Your book strives to do that though, you capture people around you. I'm kind of curious—how did it feel to write this book in this collective moment?
You had said in our email correspondence that you wrote it all pre-October 7th, and then wrote the endnotes after. What did that feel like? How does the book sit now versus then?
mónica teresa ortiz: Yes, I do think that when we write, we write individually. Everyone’s going to have their own style, their own choices. But for me, I never write without a book in my hand or a conversation in my mind. So I never write alone in that sense.
There’s always someone or something with me, and I think that’s one of the reasons the book is titled the way that it’s titled, because these were all written out of some sort of provocation.
I left Austin in 2020 and returned to where I grew up, on the South Plains of Texas, which is a very isolated and alienated place, loosely populated outside of the two larger cities—Lubbock and Amarillo. It’s obviously one of the most conservative places in the country. They’re responsible for a lot of legislation that we’ve seen in Texas, because representatives from this area have a lot of money and power.
That was the landscape I came back into in 2020. COVID-19 had just started spreading everywhere. I was out of work and I had a lot of time on my hands. And so at least for a good year and a half, I started writing as a way to deal with everything that was happening. For me, writing has always been an outlet for processing my emotions and the space around me.
I’m never the same person after I write anything.
I had that same feeling after I finished Autobiography of a Semi Romantic Anarchist. I couldn’t write that same book again and feel that with this book as well. We’re constantly being changed and altered by our surroundings. I feel grateful to have had this opportunity to write this book. I also don’t have any sentimental attachment to anything that I produce.
I turned in my book a few days before October 7th, when Israel escalated their violence against Palestinians. And I think it was difficult to edit the book or care about the book after that because, as I said earlier, it doesn’t have material importance. In the context of everything that we’re witnessing, what Palestinians have been documenting for decades, I don’t feel all that invested in poetry.
avg: What do you feel invested in?
mto: I feel invested in what is needed to arrive at a place where we will see liberation, not just Palestinians, but all oppressed people. There’s nothing else to think about for me at this point other than this collapsing empire and how we expedite it.
avg: In the book’s acknowledgements, you mention Wendy Trevino and her take on the poetry world as a bubble—a moneyed space and scene. Being here in New York, I really struggle with not wanting to be in the scene, but feeling like that’s where people are.
What does that look like for you? What is your container for writing and dreaming? How do you set yourself in relation to writers and their politics, outside of the poetry scene?
mto: I don’t remember the exact phrasing, but it was from a tweet of Wendy’s, when I heard the phrase “poetryland.” Poetry, to me, is not a career, nor is it a place that I look for success or validation. Poetry for me is a site of disruption. I think of those who wrote poems, but who also have spoken out against injustices, fascism, violence, and genocide. The government should be afraid of poets. I am not offering poems as propaganda for what the state represents. I am not interested in sending poems to space or being published in Poetry magazine. I hope to be aligned with those who dream and organize towards liberation for all oppressed people, here in the US, Palestine, Guatemala, Mexico, wherever they might be. That’s where I feel like I want to be.
Poetry has never been a place I looked for community, to be honest. I found community with workers, organizers, with people who are poets, who maybe have never been published in a magazine, which doesn’t make them not-poets. I think about the lineages of those who have written poems and spoken out. There’s a long history of poets who have been assassinated by the state in so many places.
avg: When you see these big poetry magazines/spaces picking and choosing who and what they will allow, it’s hard to grapple with that. It’s hard to watch people that you admire stick with these spaces because they think it’ll give them a boost. We’re way past this careerist idea of success.
mto: I mean, you would think so, and yet people are defending PEN America, and the whole debacle with Guernica. There were still people defending them.
avg: There is such audacity to stick with money, it’s not going to save anyone. Why choose that over real, actionable solidarity?
I think your endnotes and afterword really speak to that. You write, “Poets and writers inhabit many spaces, but the most important one is that of provocateur, to prod the audience, to interpret a visible and invisible world, to unveil secrets through the communication of language, sound, and meaning.” Your poem “Manifesto” invokes to the importance of this poetic call to action.
Poems are not going to fix everything. It’s not going to change things, but it can hold a space. Where is that line for you? What do you seek to share in stating what your beliefs are?
mto: I read a quote recently from Orisanmi Burton, the author of the book Tip of the Spear, and he said that the issue “is not that my book may incite riots, but that your hold on power is so fragile, so tenuous, so devoid of legitimacy that mere words on a page may be enough to make your cages of concrete and steel go up in flames.” The book (to inadequately summarize a book of this magnitude) is about the struggle of the Attica revolt and the criminalization of Black radical thought, but more acutely, maps out the development of abolitionist thought throughout this struggle. He uses archives and oral histories to recount these stories—a category of memory work. I have been sitting with that and with the book itself. Alongside their individual experiences, through letters, writings, and books, these men developed radical politics in community, and now many prisons ban certain books. School systems are also banning books. The state does not want us to learn or share knowledge. They don’t want us to remember what they have done. For me, I hope that “manifesto” is a commitment to a process of solidarity, to building our knowledge and growing it, to say, “I am with you, wherever we are going. We’re going together.”
avg: I love that. We’re going together.
The state does not allow us to commune. They don’t want us learning. They realized that people were organizing and coming together in collective learning spaces, and decided to make it as difficult as possible. Make people take on debt to learn.
Student organizing has been this key to huge changes everywhere.
mto: Workers have so much power. And we have to also recognize that this moment needs all of us.
I think about popular universities that have popped up, of people teaching and facilitating workshops with one another. I feel like Workshops for Gaza does a really great job of that. Being open to people who want to support an actual material need for Palestinians. I think it’s revolutionary work to be able to do that.
avg: It’s not just something in the ether.
mto: It’s not just an idea, but an action. It’s a commitment.
avg: I think that that can scare people. It is a scary thing when you’re working to survive in your day to day life to realize you have to organize for a future, or have to organize outside of the place that you live. But by connecting all these places and ideas, that’s the only way anything is gonna change.
mto: Yeah, for sure. I feel like most people are really afraid to lose anything. And so, if you haven’t already lost something, then you don’t want to lose what you have. That fear really keeps people wanting to be comfortable.
My Arabic professor said in class one day that there is this popular saying, and I’m not even going to try to say it in Arabic, cause I would butcher it, but the essence of what it is is, what is coming is more than what is gone.
When she said that in class, it was a mic drop moment to think about that.
avg: Oh, wow, yes. We have to work towards what is coming because it’s bigger than what we can conceptualize.
I think a lot about how to move away from the scarcity mindset. Why are people so stuck on being afraid of not having things? We’ve been told that we’re never going to have enough of everything or anything, which is so inaccurate.
mto: That’s what capitalism does so well. It attempts to destabilize us.
avg: From community and actual physical needs: food and medicine. It alienates us from the knowledge that we have each other to fall back on.
mto: Yeah, I have this friend. Jesús Valles, a poet from El Paso. They always say, we only have each other. I always think about that. You were talking about being outside and growing food as grounding. For me it’s people, it’s what Jesús said that really helps ground me.
avg: Your poetics show this full world of engagement. Like we talked of earlier, writing is a solitary thing, but you’re always in relation to people. One can’t move through a day without being in relation with people.
I believe that part of the essence of one’s poetry resides in the people who have informed one’s life. And I think your book is that. You’re constantly engaging with friends and different lovers and writers you admire. There’s an intimacy, and that’s a really tender thing to do. People work so hard to survive, are constantly just on the grind, and it's hard to remember our relationships with people.
How do you feel like you say that on the page?
mto: I can never remember the exact phrasing, so I am only very loosely paraphrasing, but Saidiya Hartman has said we always have people in our work, we bring people to our work, and I have been fortunate that so many have been a part of my learning, unlearning, who have supported me to continuously divest from colonialism.
I am always in conversation with someone, be it poets, lovers, ex-lovers, friends, or people who impact my thoughts and trajectory. Yesterday, a friend of mine introduced me to a book by Rizvana Bradley called Anteaesthetics, and there is a chapter on “Unworlding, or the Involution of Value,” which talks about anteaesthetics. Bradley writes, “As we have seen, the aesthetic is neither innocent nor incidental, neither epiphenomenal nor emancipatory, but rather a material-discursive field of violent operations which are structurally devoted to suturing the dehiscence immanent to modernity’s genocidal metaphysics.” I have sat with that a lot lately, when I am asked about poetics or aesthetics. That is why I chose to write a manifesto, as a clear political statement of principles, instead of an ars poetica. I think about our commitments to one another.
avg: That’s why we do what we do. We want real honesty to be actionable. As much as we can try for that.
If living honestly is about resistance, liberation, collective dreaming, how does one remember this amidst grief and constant change?
mto: For me, it comes down to faith. I’ve learned that faith—I'm not talking about faith in god in a theological sense, but a spiritual sense can support us and get us through these difficult moments.
That’s a really strong emotion that I’ve had throughout my life. I’ve been lucky enough to have many people in my life who have incredible amounts of faith. That lends itself to being committed to dreaming, to refusal, to liberation for each other.
We have to have faith that we will see the end of this empire, and there needs to be action to push for that collapse.
avg: June Jordan and Etel Adnan are both poets who had faith, who constantly engaged with the dailiness of the world, its relative beauties and horrors they were witnessing and trying to make sense of. They are poets with presence. I see this come through in your work too. What does it mean for you to stay present in the world, and through poetry?
mto: Poets remind me. June Jordan reminds me. Etel Adnan reminds me. Rasha Abdulhadi reminds me. Aurielle Marie reminds me. George Abraham reminds me. Ariana Brown reminds me. Muindi Fanuel Muindi reminds me. Many beloveds constantly remind me.
Also queerness. As I wrote in Autobiography while reflecting on José Esteban Muñoz, it represents a kind of futurity that provides me with the foundation for the faith that we are going somewhere, together.
avg: It’s a building of futurity for everyone living in ways that mean that everyone will be taken care of, no one will be lacking, no one will have to worry about how they’re gonna get their food, who’s gonna take care of their children. There are relations outside of that box and it’s beautiful to remember that.
Since Book of Provocations was several years in the making, and now, out in the world, what shifts in approach are you intuiting/foreseeing/experimenting with in your ongoing poetic engagements?)
mto: After I write something or finish a project, I am no longer the same. The process of writing changes me. The events around me change me. These poetic engagements are not permanent in me. I am always learning, always curious, hopefully always being challenged to grow. Poetry is a kind of memory work to me, and I can be a container to hold those memories. You can write about an archive but that does not mean we can’t move forward. I hope to keep shapeshifting, and being in service to what is needed of me in this world.
I felt when I moved back home that I needed to be here for that to happen. I felt called to be here.
avg: Was it something that you had been thinking of or was it a split moment decision where you knew it was the change that needed to occur?
mto: No. I had been thinking about it for a while. I had grown tired of being in Austin and the performance of the city, the performance of that place, the illusion. And being here in this place where I grew up, there are no illusions about what this place is.
There is racism. There is violence. There’s a very different kind of violence that happens here that I think is not talked about enough, and it is sprung out of Christianity. It is sprung out of religion. I think that violence is obviously from colonialism and these settlements, but it’s also the entanglement with religion.
An illusion of tradition and heteronormativity. You get married and have children and that is the life that a lot of people here have. I don’t want to say that they’ve chosen that, but that is the life that they’ve been socialized to believe in.
I feel like me being here is a kind of disruption to that. And I think I needed that because in Austin it was a different kind of illusion.
avg: When you are in a city, it’s the illusion of making it. The illusion of succeeding in something and that you had to leave somewhere to succeed.
mto: And also a religion of progress. Austin has a reputation as being a liberal place. And to be honest, I experienced more racism and homophobia in Austin than I have ever experienced here. I’ve had bottles thrown at me. People have called me a faggot. Unless you really knew where you were going and who you were with, there was always a potential for something to happen there.
And I don’t always feel that here, even though obviously you know, this is definitely Trump country, but people tell you that up front.
avg: There’s an honesty to it all.
mto: People have their flags out, so you know, okay, I really am not gonna go over there.
avg: Yeah, I grew up similarly in a place where although peoples’ politics are not anywhere close to mine, they’d still greet me openly. There’s something about that. It's a little more honest.
mto: I feel that way since I’ve been home. We cannot perform straightness in public. But no one brings any of that to me. It’s nice.
avg: Whereas a city really requires you to perform for it because it’s constantly changing itself.
mto: Exactly.
avg: You have to scramble to meet it versus a smaller place that you might change faster than, but you can still find your way to come back to it. Which I think a good poetry book does. It should spiral back.
One last question: thinking on the labor of what it means to share one’s thoughts, the labor of writing, and the labor of everyday life.
How do these things work against each other? How do they couple up against each other? And how do you move through that space?
mto: For me, poetry is not labor. I think it’s an opportunity to dream.
There’s a lot of violence and a lot of violent realities in my poems, but we live in a violent world. These poems reflect faith. They reflect refusal, commitment, community, and love. I identify as an anarchist. And I try to practice that in my day-to-day life, but also in poetry. I hope that is a challenge to capitalism and what it tries to destroy in us.
I’ve witnessed a lot of violence and injustices in my lifetime. I was older when I discovered that there was language to talk about these things. Language is a location of processing for me. It’s not just meaning-making or writing beautiful lines.
Aime Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, and Kwame Nkrumah’s Neocolonialism were deeply influential on me. But Césaire, especially as a poet, showed me that there were ways to shape that language through poetry. Liberation doesn’t need a genre, only a vessel.