Cecilia Vicuña Quotes (1948-)

“(What did ecofeminism mean to you in the 1970s and what does it mean for you, today in 2020?) CV: First of all, I never heard of the term ecofeminism in the ’70s, no one was using that term. [Laughter] I don’t know if anyone used the term to classify their art. I was thinking about it–I was doing it in the ’60s–I was working through what I was seeing and feeling while living in Chile, you know and being near the South Pacific Ocean. I was doing and making what people now call land art long before that language existed as a name or concept, and I’m not the only one either who was shaping the movement without using any terminology to define it.”

“Other poets wrote of the special connective qualities of sound...Alfonsina Storni finds in her own body "wells of sounds/... where the spoken word/and unspoken word/echo"...”

“"Catatau" by Paulo Leminski captures that impulse as he imagines the French philosopher René Descartes driven mad by Brazil, a country where everything gets mixed and defies categorization.”

“Dante Alighieri wrote in the fourteenth century that the spirit of poetry abounds "in the tangled constructions and defective pronunciations" of vernacular speech where language is renewed and transformed. His vision resonates today with the faulty speech of migrants creating the sounds and intonations of the future.”

“Some of the greatest Latin American poets have been women. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Gabriela Mistral, María Sabina, and Violeta Parra are among them, but their true place in the history of poetry has yet to be fully acknowledged...Sor Juana, who was the principal poet of the Americas in the seventeenth century, fought for the right of women to write and paid with her life.”

“Some of the greatest Latin American poets have been women. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Gabriela Mistral, María Sabina, and Violeta Parra are among them, but their true place in the history of poetry has yet to be fully acknowledged...At the turn of the century, a legendary group of women poets emerged, including Delmira Agustini, Alfonsina Storni, and Gabriela Mistral. Their work caused scandal and outrage but ultimately opened the way for other women to explore their experience in a woman's voice...Mistral was the paradoxical mestiza, who embodied contradiction. A childless woman who exalted maternity, she simultaneously embraced and scorned her indianidad. Her extraordinary mix of biblical and Amerindian rhythms got her the Nobel Prize in 1945.”

“The migrants' plight has transformed border crossings into a key image in contemporary Latin American art and poetry. José Martí, who lived in exile in New York, said that shame of the indigenous mother culture is at the core of Latin America's dependency, fueling the sell-out of natural resources and the cycle of poverty. Gamaliel Churata concurs. It is no coincidence that the main theorization on this issue has come from the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, a mestiza born and raised on the border. She writes: "The U.S. Mexican border is an open wound where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. . . . We, indias y mestizas, police the Indian in us, brutalize and condemn her." In her work, the negative space that defines women by what they "are not" (nonwhite, non-male), is transformed into creative space, by a will "to fashion my own gods out of my entrails. " Her work indicates the difficult edge all mestizos navigate, the hidden rage and complex paradoxes that women poets often acknowledge.”

“Marshall McLuhan prophesized that the global electronic age would bring about a rebirth of oral culture. He wrote that orality breeds complexity while literacy breeds homogeneity. The nonlinear understanding of space-time characteristic of oral cultures is making a comeback in the new context created by the Internet and globalization. Latin America, with its immense diversity of languages and cultures, offers a prolific reservoir for the future. The richness of its poetry stems from the interaction between oral culture and literacy, which creates fertile ground for experimentation. The new historical developments point to a much wider participation by women and indigenous poets writing in their own languages. A wide range of migrant or nomadic voices add to its complexity. Dante Alighieri wrote in the fourteenth century that the spirit of poetry abounds "in the tangled constructions and defective pronunciations" of vernacular speech where language is renewed and transformed. His vision resonates today with the faulty speech of migrants creating the sounds and intonations of the future.”

“The poet that fully realizes the creative potential of conflict is César Vallejo. Poor, illegitimate, and shamed since childhood for his mestizo origin, he wrote from his experience as Garcilaso had done four hundred years before. But his orientation was radically different. Vallejo searched for unity, the connectedness of all peoples: "Oh exalted unity! Oh that which is one/for all!/Love against space and time!" and he found it in sound, in the intonation of his mother's voice. She held to the indigenous music while speaking Spanish. In "Trilce XXIII" the poet speaks of his mother, then he speaks to her. By the end we hear her voice as his when he says, "dí, mamá"...Poe, Mallarmé, and Baudelaire had already disrupted poetic diction by incorporating silence and the dark side of the soul. José María Eguren understood it as a philosophical and formal lesson. But Vallejo added two more elements: the Andean aesthetics of dissonance, which had been invisible in writing until then, and the ethical dimension of compassion. This was a monumental achievement. In a single poetic line, his verbs and nouns fight each other as people do in Andean ritual festivals, where dissonance operates through a clash perceived as unity (solidarity). In these festivals, dissonant sounds are experienced as "a single heartbeat"....Today, despite the onslaught of globalization, mestizo poetry continues to thrive. José Lezama Lima wrote that "a secret pulsation of the invisible moves towards the image, and the image desires to know and be known." The reciprocal exchange within the image is thus transformed into a new understanding of life force. A few decades before, Vallejo wrote that artists engender revolutions by creating "a cosmic hunger for human justice." The poet's work is to give shape to "the new chords that will produce those tones." Placing poetry in the vibratory field where perception participates in the co-creation of the world, Vallejo reclaims poetry's full potential, echoing the early vision of Huidobro: "Poetry is the life of life."”

“Chilean Cecilia Vicuña is obsessed with constructing a new way of writing poetry, of uniting fragments and objects through conjunctions and through the elaboration of well-arranged, pre-fabricated words. Her poetry, which reflects a gaze filled with beauty and seduction, implies a new configuration, as well as the constant knowledge that language is the legacy of women.”