#quipoem

National Poetry Month: Cecilia Vicuña

Today we highlight the work of Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948). Exiled in the early 1970s, after the military coup against Salvador Allende, Vicuña fled to London and co-founded Artists for Democracy in protest against the brutality of the Pinochet regime. Her writing, visual art, and performance work center ecology, human rights, precarity, and the re-interpretation of ancient culture – including the pre-Columbian quipu system of knotted communication – as a guard against “cultural homogenization.”

The images here are drawn from three of her collections: quipoem (1997: Wesleyan University Press, Hanover); Word Weapons (2023: The Wattis Institute; RITE Editions, San Francisco), and Deer Book (2024: Radius Books, Santa Fe). Vicuña examines the power of language – word weapons – laments the imagination lost under authoritarian rule, and considers those disappeared. In a recent interview with Brooklyn Rail, she describes her imagination as “Amerindian”:

The Amerindian scale is a scale that you find throughout the Americas and you also find throughout the entire world, until the takeover of what is now called Western culture. It is this concept of the body in relation to the cosmos…I was not in the scale of a person. I was in the scale of the sun, of the ocean, you see?

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--Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Intern

Happy World Poetry Day & Women’s History Month!

Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948) is a Chilean poet and artist based in New York and Santiago, Chile. Vicuña has been creating a body of impermanent, participatory work she calls “lo precario” (the precious) since the mid-1960s.

Vicuña’s multi-dimensional works begin as a poem, an image that morphs into a film, a song, a sculpture, or a collective performance. These ephemeral, site-specific installations in nature, streets, and museums combine ritual and assemblage.

Her work calls attention to the politics of ecological destruction, cultural homogenization, and economic disparity, particularly the way in which such phenomena disenfranchise the already powerless.