Event Type
This workshop explores the particularities of writing poetry with a bilingual brain that navigates between two voices, two languages, and often two personalities. Although the facilitator is a bilingual Mexican poet writing in Spanish and English, poets of all language backgrounds are welcome. The workshop will start with a 15-20 minute discussion circle, where we will introduce each other and reflect on how we inhabit language, whether we are monolinguals, bilinguals, or polyglots.
The poet/facilitator will then share some examples of bilingual poems, including poems of her own, to explain different approaches to writing in two languages and self-translation. We will then explore the possibilities of bilingualism as a metaphor and as part of a greater network of liminal identities. In the poet, there are parallels between how she inhabits being bilingual, being bisexual, and living with a BPD diagnosis. Dialectical behavioral therapy provides a model for holding two truths at once that is useful for understanding both bisexuality and bilingual brains, as well as its intended purpose of helping neurodivergent people navigate a normative world.
The poet will encourage workshop participants to find “incongruous juxtapositions” and dialectical dualities in their own identities and life experiences, considering the cultural, the geographical, and all the situations in which code-switching occurs to create a poem that somehow maps their bilingual (or other-lingual) brains. The poems will be free in form, but there will be collage materials to encourage playfulness, multimediality, and self-expression.
The “theory” part of the workshop should take roughly 50 minutes, leaving an hour for the “practical” segment: 30 minutes to create their poem, followed by 30 minutes of sharing (final pieces, closing reflections, or both). Segment times may vary, but the workshop is designed to last 1 hour and 50 minutes.