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- Title
Plastic Poetry of the Page: Cecilia Vicuña's Instan.
- Authors
Robinson, Rachel
- Abstract
By examining the poems of the contemporary Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña in her book Instan (2002), this essay shows how they, through their experimental form, model visionary feminist and egalitarian social relationships. Consisting of letters or parts of words connected by drawn lines forming short words or phrases in English, Spanish, Latin and Quechua, these visual poems invite the reader to follow the paths of the lines with his/her eyes and body in a visual and kinetic consciousness. The readers are encouraged to make their own connections between letters, words and phrases, producing a process that allows them to occupy a place between narrative, time and space. Poems that allow for such radical readerly involvement can be called 'plastic', that is, mouldable by the reader. This poetic space of between-ness both emerges from and transforms Vicuña's biographical condition as an exile from Chile during Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship and as one alienated from the contemporary capitalist world. Vicuña both biographically and poetically inhabits a 'non-place' (a term used both by Marc Augé and Vicuña herself). Rather than seek to dissolve or overcome betweenness, she recreates it in her poems as a dynamic transformative position through constant change, crossing over, that is, translation, from language to language. This essay thus illuminates how Vicuña's 'non-place' is a highly energized and plastic field capable of 'moulding' new relationships for the exile and imagining an egalitarian and feminist society.
- Subjects
VICUNA, Cecilia; POETRY collections; SOCIAL interaction in literature; FEMINISM in literature; EQUALITY in literature
- Publication
Latin American Literary Review, 2018, Vol 45, Issue 90, p33
- ISSN
0047-4134
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.26824/lalr.55