Cecilia Vicuña, Seehearing the Enlightened Failure (Witte de With Publishers, 2019)
What is #SeptWomenPoets?
Drawing inspiration from fellow poet Nicole Sealey’s #SealeyChallenge, Shara Lessley, poet and Assistant Poetry Editor at Acre Books, started the social media hashtag #SeptWomenPoets to form an international community of readers interested in the work of women poets. Readers share and discuss their favorite work on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media outlets.
What We’re Reading
This week we’re reading Seehearing the Enlightened Failure (Witte de With Publishers, 2019) by Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña. Seehearing features Vicuña’s poems and visual art, as well as a selection of critical essays.
Why We Love It
Vicuña’s lifelong engagement with innovative, hybrid forms of poetry and visual art embodies the aesthetic spirit of House Mountain Review. Her work is historically-informed, socially-engaged, and achingly precarious and beautiful.
Consider this sequence from “Word & Thread”:
The weaver sees her fiber as the poet sees her word.
The thread feels the hand, as the word feels the tongue.
Structures of feeling in the double sense
of sensing and signifying,
the word and the thread feel out passing.
or these lines from “Language is Migrant”:
Language is migrant. Words move from language to language, from culture to culture, from mouth to mouth. Our bodies are migrants; cells and bacteria are migrants too. Even galaxies migrate.
What is then this talk against migrants? It can only be talk against ourselves, against life itself.
To learn more about Vicuña’s retrospective exhibition, which closes November 24, 2019, visit the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art.