Interview: Margo Montes de Oca talks about AUP New Poets 11

Margo Montes de Oca is a poet and researcher of Mexican and Pākehā descent living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She holds degrees in English literature and in ecology and biodiversity. She was a 2024 Starling writer-in-residence at the New Zealand Young Writers Festival, and her poetry has been published in issues of Starling, Sweet Mammalian, bad apple, Minarets and Mayhem Literary Journal. Margo talks to NZ Booklovers.

Tell us a little about your poems in AUP New Poets 11.

I write a lot about place, and the layers of feeling and memory that landscapes can hold – personal memories, ancestral memories, geological memories, evolutionary memories. I also write a lot about swimming/water and sleep, because I am drawn to these in-between states where we can find portals to worlds both unknown and familiar, both outside of ourselves and also a very important part of ourselves. I also write about family, home and belonging, because it would be impossible not to.

What inspired you to write your collection of poems?

Mostly the sea, to be honest. Every time I am in or beside the sea I want to write about it, and nothing I’ve written has ever done it justice, but I’ll keep trying!

What was your routine or process when writing your collection?

I wrote a lot of these poems during an Honours course taught by Anna Jackson up at Vic a couple of years ago. What a special course that was – we wrote poems as responses to and in conversation with our studies of poetry, sharing them with classmates. I felt electrified after every class, crackling with energy, and it made my writing process feel full of possibility. I love to catalyse my writing with a prompt, and Anna’s prompts (some of which she includes in her book Actions and Travels) were so exciting and expansive. The other poems were written in various places, sometimes outside, often late at night.

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

I’m tempted to say Wandering Aengus by Tiny Ruins and Hamish Kilgour, because it’s my favourite ever poem and my favourite musical version of it too, it’s like a window into the night-time. But it would probably be something instrumental, like any of Satie’s Gnossiennes, which are shimmering and rhythmical and always remind me of the ocean.

If you had to choose a favourite poem from your collection, what would it be, and why?

I don’t know about a favourite, but I enjoyed the process of writing ‘the pool’ and ‘bajo la luna, un caballo de noche’. It was so much fun to work with these established forms, like putting together a puzzle, and it was lovely to be able to treat a poem like a collage or a patchwork quilt, openly acknowledging the influence of my favourite writers on my life and thinking.

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

The Archipelago Conversations by Edouard Glissant and Hans Ulrich Obrist, a pocketsized book of hope-filled philosophy and friendship. Second place would be a tie between Ted Hughes’ Crow collection and Homero Aridjis’ Self Portrait in the Zone of Silence, poetry that is both strongly connected to place and also coloured by the dreamlike and the strange.

What’s next on the agenda for you?

I am moving overseas at the end of the year to travel and start my Masters, so I am very much looking forward to discovering inspiration in new landscapes and reading lots of geographically relevant ghost stories!

Auckland University Press