Cecilia Vicuña is one of many talented and fascinating writers, artists, and thinkers who will be participating in the Poetry Center's third international, biennial symposium, Poetry Off the Page.
Read an interview, featured on the UA homepage, between Vicuña and Tucson artist Noah Saterstrom.
Photograph by Joe Leavenworth.
About Cecilia Vicuña
Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, visual artist and filmmaker born in Santiago de Chile. The author of twenty books of poetry, she exhibits and performs widely in Europe, Latin America and the United States. Her multidimensional works begin as a poem, an image or a line that morphs into a film, a song, a sculpture or a collective performance. She calls this impermanent, participatory work “lo precario” (the precarious), transformative acts or “metaphors in space” which bridge the gap between art and life, the ancestral and the avant-garde. The precarios began in the 60s in Chile, as unannounced works that disappeared without a trace.
In Chile, she founded the Tribu No in 1967, which produced anonymous poetic actions throughout the city. Exiled in London, she co-founded Artists for Democracy in 1974 to oppose dictatorships in the Third World. In 1975 she moved to Bogotá, Colombia. She arrived in New York in 1980 and was invited to join the Heresies Collective that published Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics.
Chain Links just reprinted her first book Sabor a Mí, originally published in England in 1973. Chanccani Quipu, a quipu edition of 32 copies, is forthcoming from Granary Books in 2012. Spit Temple, Selected Oral Performances of Cecilia Vicuña, is also forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012. Her film/poem Kon Kon Pi was included in the ON LINE exhibition at MoMA in 2010. “Soy Yos”: Antología l966-2006 was published by Lom Ediciones, Chile in 2011. She co-edited The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry (2009) and co-founded oysi.org, a wiki website for the oral cultures and poetries of the world.
About Poetry Off the Page
The University of Arizona Poetry Center presents its third biennial symposium, which will showcase some of today’s most intriguing and adventurous poets, they who forge new literary territory with the help of modern technologies;those daring to make new work that is best “read” off the page or performed in collaboration or in tandem. Presenting diverse and electric performances, this symposium is based in spectacle and community engagement. We invite you to participate and share in our investigation:
What is a poem if it isn’t written down? What are the implications for literary publishing in this digital age? How can we interpret connections between hybrid poetics and documentary poetics in terms of performance? How do voice and recitation play into the crafting of sound, slam poetry, or poet’s theater?
Don’t miss this spectacular weekend extravaganza, featuring poets who work in other art forms, such as theater, film/video, sculpture, digital code and graphics, song/sound, dance and more! The weekend is packed with performance, classes and panels.
Read more here.