Cecilia Vicuña is an established poet born in Chile. In 1980 Vicuña established a residence in New York City, and has lived alternatively in both countries ever since.
Her work extends poetics to a number of disciplines. As well as more traditional literary poems, Vicuña has involved herself with video, site specific and ephemeral installations (including those outside of galleries/museums), and other forms of sculptural and visual arts.
She has additionally taught internationally and all across the United States, at Naropa, SUNY Purchase, Denver University, and the University of Buenos Ares (Universidad de Buenos Ares).
In terms of written poetics, Vicuña has explored a number of themes and styles. Her work most notably fuses more canonized modern and post-modern traditions with that of the indigenous cultural and linguistic traditions of Chile. The form of this fusion frequently takes, as has often been the case in the last century, the quotidian and attempts to infuse them with their appropriate poetry, the hidden romanticisms and tales that they contain. Her poem “The Origin Of Weaving” is a perfect example of her co-habitating work.
“the first knot, begging of the spiral:
life and death, birth and rebirth
textile, text, context
from teks: to weave, to fabricate, to make
wicker or
wattle for mud-covered walls”
The indigenous practice of weaving, so common and so innate to the foundations of so many cultures, is given the most magnanimous of connotations, that of life and death.
“weave
from weban, wefta, Old English
weft, cross thread
web
the coming out
of the cross-star
the interlacing of
warp and weft
to imagine the first cross
intertwining of branches and twigs
to make a nest
to give birth”
Its practice seems to signify the life of the animal, the ecological, the cyclical time of those peasant cultures born from its womb, and finally the very linguistics that compose the poem itself. A precise cycle of communication, of wordly weaving, is enumerated here. Indeed, without any reservation, Vicuña’s poetry is then identified with life and death, the most essential aspects of nature extending even beyond humanity itself.
In Vicuña’s language the reader discovers the simply communicated, sentence like constructions that are common in ‘post-modern’ poetics. While abstraction is certainly indulged in, its presentation is simple, straightforward, and un-obfuscated. Again, her words mimic the humble practice of the weaver, popular, foundational, and yet of a definite artisanal beauty. This manifestation of the simple, the essential, seems to carry through out.
Accompanying her poetry, and intimately tied to such a poem around the nature of weaving, is her construction of the quipu. The quipu is an ‘ancient’ recording device predating the Incan Empire in the Andes. It consists of a rope or chord, intricately knotted to record numerical, and also theoretically symbolic data (tied to an unknown predilection for different colors). It served, then, as an early form of book keeping and legal exchange. Vicuña’s linguistic weaving is then tied implicitly to a physical practice. She ties poetic tradition to indigenous tradition directly in introducing these quipus into the world.
A certain mysticism seems to surround both practices, with tangible intentions attached to the placement of these talismans. The much celebrated Michele Bachelet, elected President of Chile in 2006, gave the occasion for a site specific ‘Menstrual Quipu” installation. Its significance is elaborated in a sort of prose poem “Letter to Michele Bachelet.” In it Vicuña states that she is unable to register and has thus “voted in another way,” in the form of her quipu. The statement doesn’t contain a trace of irony, suggesting that the quipu’s significance and the force of its connection is just as tangible as her literally casting a vote.
The letter goes on to invoke the power of the glaciers that had previously been condemned to foreign mining in Chile. “Now I am reading the history of Pascua-Lama and the agreements that Chile signed before you were elected, authorizing the destruction of the glaciers and my blood knows that by placing my vote at the mountain, and not in the urn I was to dream a reversal of the world,” Vicuña writes. Her quipu, while surely symbolic, is also intended to be equipped with a real magic/poetic force that will protect and preserve these traditional lands. She continues, “An ancient myth of the highlands says that as long as the camelids are grazing by the springs at the edge of the glaciers, there will be wealth and fecundity, well-being for all.” Certainly, “well being for all” has not been visited upon Chile at any time (including before the arrival of any foreign miners), but the sincerity of this evoked tradition is unwavering.
The quipu for Michele Bachelet is, importantly, “Menstrual.” The bond of woman to woman is instantly recalled in this cyclical physiology that marks all ‘adult’ women through out time. Recurring, cyclical, the shared, the traditional, all that reside in her poetics is again manifested through this ritual bond. A certain unity is sought through the activity of Vicuña’s poetics that will both preserve a culture, and wield it as a weapon of action.
