Pause the Document is a pause, or a complete rupture, in the workings of Mónica de la Torre’s poetic and political work. We’re asked to consider the documentation of our lives—whether through language, memory, time—and the dissonance in that documentation. The result is a complete paradigmatic break; Pause the Document points us towards other forms of movement (choreographies of words, absences) and meaning-making.
Her conversation is with language and its limits, illness and survival, at once playful and profound—all the while speaking to the intimacies that abound in any interaction with the world around us. She expands on those themes, and others, in our conversation below.
—Dante Silva
Dante Silva: I wanted to start with the title, which makes problematic our social, poetic, political practices. Is it an invitation to depart into more of a dreamscape? A rejection of regimes of the rational? How did you conceive it?
Mónica de la Torre: I like what you write: “a rejection of regimes of the rational.” The title of the book, like many other elements of my writing, just came to me, out of the blue. I distinctly remember being in Providence with Eleni Sikelianos back when I was teaching at Brown in 2018. We might have been talking about the joys of perimenopause . . . Somehow I heard myself saying to her, jokingly, that I’d call my next poetry book “Pause, the Document.” We laughed and one or both of us said it’d be better without the comma since you could have it both ways. (Think Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée.) I mentioned our conversation the other day to her, she doesn’t remember it at all! Maybe this episode never happened. A couple of years later there was that other big “pause”: the pandemic. In 2022, I got a grant and took a leave from teaching for a semester. A week into my leave, I received a frightening diagnosis. I had to put everything on pause. Euphemistic pauses kept appearing in other contexts, in discussions about possible ceasefires in Ukraine, in Gaza. Climacteric times, both personal and global. I’ve often been tempted to engage in documentary modes. But then I’ll go down a rabbit hole from which I can only escape by turning the whole enterprise on its head.
Dante Silva: So much of the project references the pandemic, wherein the failures of our social and political arrangements were made abundantly obvious. How much of Pause the Document was completed because, or in spite of, the pandemic?
Mónica de la Torre: I’m a very social person. I started writing some of the poems in the book as my previous book, Repetition Nineteen, was making it out into the world. (It launched only a few weeks into the shutdown in 2020.) The anthology I coedited, Women in Concrete Poetry, 1959–1979, came out in the fall of that same year. Alex Balgiu and I were working on it well into the summer. Had it not been for the pandemic, it would’ve taken me much longer to get started on anything else. Save for teaching remotely, I went from feeling like I was in an artist’s residency, at home—or maybe it was more like a durational performance, which becomes manageable if you keep shifting your perspective on what it is that you’re actually doing. I wanted to track the micro-shifts of the general mood as well as my own, the intense and sudden shifts in our sense of continuity and discontinuity. Once I laid the groundwork for the manuscript, the rest gradually fell into place. I wrote some of the poems in the book as recently as 2024.
Dante Silva: There are also references to other ecologies, other epistemes. The poems have an “impulse, pastoral” to consider, and to complicate, our relation to the surrounding world. How do you cultivate that impulse?
Mónica de la Torre: I grew up in a boisterous, gregarious environment in Mexico City, the eldest of four siblings. I shared a bedroom with one of my sisters until I left for grad school. When we’d visit my maternal grandparents in Connecticut over the summer, we were hardly ever indoors. Being out in nature there we could imagine our own world, outside of that of adults, free from the chaos and dangers of the city. As a teenager, if I needed my own space, I’d go out to nature and tap into this other intelligence. My experience of nature was more mystical than sporty. My parents were very athletic and were always outdoors playing sports. I rebelled by smoking and writing bad satirical and nature poetry instead. The moon was rarely absent from my early poems. Later, when I moved to NYC, the continuity that nature offered was a balm and counterpoint to the rupture and displacement I’d experienced from relocating here.
Dante Silva: I’m reminded of Alejandra Pizarnik, whom you reference. “No puedes con el lenguaje,” she once wrote. “El lenguaje no puede por ti.” How do you work against, and appropriate, language? How do different poetic forms allow you to do so (there are lyric poems, ekphrastic ones, a conceptual essay)?
Mónica de la Torre: My perspective on my languages has shifted a lot through the years. Back in Mexico, and in my first decade or so in New York, I used to have a rather static view: their relationship was mostly antagonistic, within a zero-sum framework. With either one, I had that perpetual feeling of insufficiency and defeat articulated so piercingly by Pizarnik: “No puedes con el lenguaje” (“You can’t handle the language,” but also a more open-ended sense, “You can’t, with language.”) I felt I wasn’t fully in control of either and that stumped me. But later I adopted a much more life-affirming angle, which Rosmarie Waldrop puts beautifully as working with language, collaborating with it, as opposed to trying to “master” it. That resonates deeply with me, as well as her take on Benjamin’s “task of the translator.” She writes: “Translation’s ultimate task may be to bear witness to the essentially irreducible strangeness and distance between languages—but its immediate task is exactly to explore this space.” For me writing is coterminous with translation. I can’t separate the two. My approach to form is similar—ekphrastic poems, in particular, are a form of intermedia translation where I’m interested in exploring not the similarity between, say, the painting and my verbal rendering of it, but the distance between the two versions. My rendition can only be fragmentary, opening a tiny portal into an irreducible totality.
Dante Silva: In the poem “Bogotá Notebook” you write, “No one returns unmoved from Bogotá.” Movement is a central part of the piece, even words are choreographed. How did “Bogotá Notebook” come about? How do you move towards a more embodied poetic practice?
Mónica de la Torre: This poem came out of my participation at a gathering of South American dance and movement research artists that took place in Bogotá in 2021. It was called “Cuerpo etc.”—the “etc.” was a nod to expanded practices—and was organized by the Goethe Institute. It took place at the Sabana railroad station which had sat abandoned for decades in the 20th century. I was the only poet in the group. A lot of the participants use language in innovative ways that I found completely inspiring. In the literary arts we talk a lot about embodied writing, about writing with the body, but always start with the writing and only later think about how to engage the body. Someone like choreographer Moriah Evans, who was in Bogotá as well, makes dances in which performers are instructed to locate certain sensations and memories within the body (and lodged in certain organs), while moving rather strenuously, and to verbalize their findings on the spot. What comes out of them is a type of improvisatory writing unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. It’s different every time—a sounding of the body in real time, before an audience. While in Bogotá, I had a small pink Moleskine I brought with me everywhere to take notes while and after participating in exercises and workshops. I’d never thought of movement in this way, and it led to writing I most certainly wouldn’t have arrived at on my own. At the same time, the decolonizing movement in Colombia had gathered a lot of steam. There were toppled statues everywhere, and as I mention in the poem, those of Queen Isabella of Castille and Christopher Columbus had been taken down preemptively by the authorities and were supposed to be hidden at the railroad station. It was futile to try to keep them from our view, much as they tried. Many of us snuck forbidden snapshots. “No one returns unmoved from Bogotá.”