Interview: Amy Marguerite talks about over under fed

Amy Marguerite is a poet, essayist and librarian living in Tāmaki Makaurau. In 2022, she completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her debut poetry collection, over under fed, is out now with Auckland University Press. Amy talks to NZ Booklovers.

Tell us a little about over under fed.

over under fed is drunk in the shower......exploding sometimes......a beautiful sleepless nightmare......sitting at the hem of everything......leg hairs tremoring......a phoney ventricle......the hail mary after skipping a meal......no place for a moment really.

What inspired you to write this collection?

Oh goodness, so many things and people and feelings and experiences! I’ve felt compelled to write about my eating disorder ever since I was diagnosed as a teenager. I desperately wanted to see more accounts of the illness out there and my own experience seemed like an obvious place to start. I read a lot of poetry when I was unwell but struggled to connect with the FEW poems I read on the eating disorder experience; they all seemed to trivialise the condition in some way or another and not only did this make them very boring, but it also made them harmful and downright offensive.

Apart from wanting to see eating disorders more conscientiously and abundantly represented, I was intrigued by the possibility of putting such a baffling condition on the page. I am always returning to this line from Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts: “The inexpressible is contained—inexpressibly!—in the expressed.”

In spite of my eagerness, I didn’t end up writing about my eating disorder for a long, long time. I wanted to be absolutely sure that I wasn’t glamorising the illness and adding to the ever-growing pool of triggering content out there, and I was also just really overwhelmed by how impenetrable the whole thing felt. There’s a real secrecy about anorexia that I think I was still holding on to, and at the same time I was obsessed with getting it OUT, so that tension was exhausting.

The poetry in the ‘ward 25a’ section of over under fed only arrived once I had fully recovered from the illness (plus another year or two of existing in my recovered body). I was also only able to write these poems once I’d started to think and write about other things. Most of the poems in over under fed actually ended up being about other things like desire, unrequited love and limerence. I’m laughing as I’m typing this because when I was younger, the mere thought of writing a love poem made me gag!

Megan Fernandes wrote a brilliant poem titled ‘Tired of Love Poems’ which pretty much sums up my past, present and probably future thinking about love poetry. Obviously I will not be telling you who inspired the love poems in my collection!

What was your routine or process when writing these poems?

I really just wrote when I felt like writing, which often meant cutting showers short or getting off the motorway prematurely. The closest thing I had to a routine was a morning writing ritual in my lovely Aro Valley garden. Given that I am NOT a morning person, I was shocked by how quickly I fell in love with the practice. It would’ve been nice if this ritual had survived beyond 2022, but once I’d completed my MA and left my lovely flat, I knew it was time to let it go. Actually, I had no say in the matter—it was the ritual letting go of me.

When I returned to Auckland in early 2023, I experienced the same sort of psychological cul-desac that I’d experienced in my teens when my therapist left. I hated even the thought of writing because writing was supposed to happen in that city, that garden!!! This inability to write was awfully frustrating, but I welcomed the way it forced me to take a break. I am very grateful for that break. I was reading Eileen Myles’s Chelsea Girls in Fowlds Park when I decided to open my notebook again. It was there on the grass that I wrote the most unhinged diary entry I think I’ve ever written. That diary entry became a short story and that short story eventually became a sequence of poems. My MA manuscript became an operating room and that room became a book. Writing is weird.

If a soundtrack were made to accompany this book, name a song or two you would include.

Oooh, I really love and appreciate this question! Some of my favourite poems are songs. A playlist exists and it is full of songs I listened to while writing the book and songs that just seem to hold the feeling of the poetry. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1LCY8io0jZLJdQWBOCVkxo?si=ERqBpBsET7iUD8pjmHeaMA

If you had to choose a favourite poem from over under fed, what would it be, and why did you choose it?

‘july poem’. I wrote this poem one hungover morning on the couch at my friend’s flat. Usually, I am at least thinking about my dreams when I wake up, but on this day there was nothing, or almost nothing. At some point I decided I was tired of hyperfixating on my lack of thoughts, so I started revisiting all the thoughts I had been having that month. This inevitably led to me thinking new thoughts and writing them down. So really, ‘july poem’ is a poem about thinking about thinking and I love that. I felt a bit like a wind-up toy as I was writing this poem and I also loved that. It was the poem doing the winding.

What three words would you use to summarise over under fed as a whole?

Erratic, wondering, obsessed.

What did you enjoy the most about writing this poetry collection?

Just going wild with it. I remember sitting in the Mount Street Cemetery moments after handing in my final MA thesis and realising that I hated almost every poem I had written that year. It is not unusual for me to hate a poem I have written, but to hate almost all of them, well that was an entirely new breed of yuck. Eventually I realised that I hated my poetry because it was so unlike the poetry I loved the most, and in wondering why that was, I came to conclude that I hadn’t given myself permission to go properly wild. I needed to be weird and disruptive and experimental, and gosh, I needed to stop giving a shit about what other people would think! As soon as I was going properly wild it was like I was writing poetry for the first time all over again. That’s what I enjoyed the most.

What did you do to celebrate finishing this book?

Writing a book involves many moments of finishing! I celebrated all of them, sometimes quietly with long showers and sleep, and other times rather noisily with music and beer.

What is the favourite book you have read so far this year and why?

Definitely Autoportrait by Jesse Ball. Wowee, this was such a delightfully surprising read! It was as though each line was undressing right in front of me, and at the same time there’s this real sense of cosiness because of the layering. I found that blend particularly wonderful and interesting. When I think of Autoportrait I think of a sweaty winter’s day, except it is the opposite of unpleasant!

What’s next on the agenda for you?

I’ve recently started working at the library so that’s new and lovely and busy. Other than that, I am just writing whatever the heck I feel like writing whenever the heck I feel like it. I am also thinking about starting or joining a band.

Auckland University Press