CECILIA VICU\u00c3\u2018A \/ SPRING EQUINOX INTERVIEW (3\/20\/2001)
\necopoetics, volume 1, pp 112-126<\/p>\n
DIstilling two thoughts from this interview, or maybe three, about the practice of poetry, and the uses of poetry. <\/p>\n
Exchange of energy. <\/p>\n
CV: You have to have an exchange of energy. If this exchange of energy is interrupted, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s like interrupting a song, you see. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s interrupting a flow of sound, and this flow of sound has to be harmonious, it has to be a mutual benefit. The first acknowledgement is that we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know what this energy is or how to name it, so we pick a name, and this name has to be pleasing to both, for the exchange to take place. And the idea that you can use a plant, without giving anything in return, destroys the music from the start.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Precarios<\/em>. Poem as gesture, a making that doesn’t necessarily use words. <\/p>\n
I was on a beach the way most Chilean girls might be on a beach playing, and suddenly, I could feel the presence of this infinite beauty, of the colors and sounds of the place. I felt all this was a language, and that I needed to participate in that language by responding. This could be my place in the world\u00e2\u20ac\u201dto respond to that beauty, to say: I am part of you too, here I am. And the way of doing that was to pick up the debris that was lying horizontally on the beach and make it stand up vertically. That gesture, for me was the beginning of weaving, which is to cross the vertical and the horizontal\u00e2\u20ac\u201dstanding whatever stick or stone, whatever bit of plastic debris, or whatever twig, broken twig, I could make to stand\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbecame language, it became like a word, and then the waves would instantly come and erase it. And so this language would stand up and fall, and be part again of the rhythm. So then, if you substitute the twigs for words or if you substitute them with whatever object that you find in the street, or the seeds themselves, each one is like a syllable in this language. But they are never fixed, because they are always in the process of flowing into something else.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And poetry as transformation of emotions. I think of this as “chewing” or “digestion” but she calls it “prayer.”<\/p>\n
JS: How do you deal with the pain of witnessing what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s happening at the moment, in particular the tone right now, with the current administration? In your writing, where does pain sit?
\nCV: It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the key of everything, pain is the key of everything…. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think any writer ever could have written if it weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t for that pain that is burning inside. And it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the necessity of transforming that pain that pushes you to write. I think this is the energy of prayer; prayer is transformation of energy. So there is a commonality between prayer and poetry, in the transformation of this pain. When you come to a river that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dying, when you come to a forest that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dying, our emotion is the same as that of the animal\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthe animal that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dying. You go to the forest and you perceive the sadness even in the leaves. There is a commonality of sadness that is now joining the world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nShe says “I think without poetry we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re completely doomed.” I’m uneasy about such a big claim for poetry, unless your definition of poetry is also very big. Even then, even with the big definition poetry, we are completely doomed. But in the face of that, it is charmingly human to seek an exchange of energy, to make a small thing out of twigs. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
CECILIA VICU\u00c3\u2018A \/ SPRING EQUINOX INTERVIEW (3\/20\/2001) ecopoetics, volume 1, pp 112-126 DIstilling two thoughts from this interview, or maybe three, about the practice of poetry, and the uses of poetry. Exchange of energy....<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecopoetics","category-volume-1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1708"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1713,"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1708\/revisions\/1713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}