Prismatic Park: A Workshop with Mónica de la Torre

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Picture a prism refracting a ray of light and making rainbows. Once it was thought that light was colorless and that prisms produced the colors they emitted. Later Newton demonstrated that all the colors already existed in the light and that prisms fanned out the colors of the spectrum because particles of varying hues traveled through them at different speeds. Now imagine that a line of poetry is a ray of light, and that a prism is a translation machine of sorts. In this workshop we will generate original material by experimenting with a range of techniques including translations from English to English, antonymic, homophonic and homographonic translations, and creative mishearing.

About

Mónica de la Torre is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat Books, 2020), and a translation of Defense of the Idol (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018) by Chilean Modernist Omar Cáceres. She coedited the anthologies Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–79 (Primary Information, 2020) and Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (Copper Canyon, 2002). In 2022, she received the C.D. Wright Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Born and raised in Mexico City, she came to the U.S. on a Fulbright Fellowship to pursue an MFA and PhD in Spanish literature at Columbia University. A former editor for BOMB Magazine and The Brooklyn Rail, she teaches at Brooklyn College and Bard’s summer MFA program.