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Cecilia Vicuņa bridges worlds and traditions often
kept artificially at odds. The old world and the new, the north and the south, the
avant-garde and the traditional. Rather than borders these opposed positions become as
combinatory threads in the verbal/aural weavings that constitute her work.
The poetry emerges from deep
belief, an ethic that one might describe as ecological, spiritual. Exploring the rootedness of word in
sound, Vicuņa brings into contemporary Spanish and English-language poetry a vision
informed by traditional Andean myth and a philosophy of the sacred.
In an apparent paradox, the poetry is also inspired
by modernist and postmodern aesthetics--from Lezama Lima to Joseph Cornell. The
paradox dissolves if one recalls the cross-cultural quip attributed to a Balinese: We
don't have art, we do everything well.
There is an inter- or cross-disciplinarity that
informs her words, performances, film, and visual art installations (which by the way have
been commissioned by leading museums on three continents).
More than any other poet today, Vicuņa creates a
poetic space through her performances, immersing the audience in a bilingual play of word
and tone that exemplifies the metaphors of connectedness that ground her poetics.
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