poem as voice; voice as bridge

I’m grateful.

I’m grateful to Cecilia Vicuna for how she so brilliantly “weaves out” the knot of difference between orality and textuality. Through her “word work,” she both confronts and incorporates (questions and answers) the entire “axiom of frames” in which she’s situated. It is through this simultaneous challenge and incorporation, this exuberant struggle between the interiority of “what is” and the exterior realm of determinate meaning-making, that Vicuna is able to super-situate (i.e., both contextualize and explode) herself, her words, and her performance.

Vicuna occasions the merging of orality with textuality by way of uniting her inner body with its external “frames.” In a rather direct (albeit metaphorical) manner, Vicuna acknowledges that her body can be read. (She states in the first recording made available on AudibleWord, “A body is already a writing of arteries and veins traveling without end.”) Also, in a less forthright (i.e., de-worded) manner, Vicuna synthesizes (and, thereby, invalidates the independence of) the ostensibly separate concepts of inner purity and outer contaminations/complexities. Her sounding out of words, made palpable with emphatic use of breath (and saliva), remind one of an industrial factory…pneumatic machines releasing compressed air in a strictly patterned rhythm and tempo. Further, on at least two occasions, Vicuna brings within herself (via her words) the greater, external phenomenon of the echo.

I’m also extremely grateful to Dr. Sherwood for his both illuminating and provocative treatment of Vicuna’s 1994 performance in Buffalo. In “Sound Written and Sound Breathing: Versions of Palpable Poetics,” Sherwood reminds his readers that The New Critical perspective, founded upon the idea that a work of art is an object unto itself, generates the ancillary impulse to confine our evaluation of art to the terms of “the (singular and stable) work” itself. Further, the conflation of oral poetry with the idea of myth results in these poems’ distilled textualizations “in the course of which the variations between the tellings, the exact phrases used, the very names of the tellers, may be dropped off as a new, generalized, and condensed Myth is produced”(76). When combined, the perspective of New Criticism and the notion of “oral poem as myth” serve to circumcise the span and to castrate the virility of poetic performance. As Sherwood notes and Vicuna demonstrates, poetry can be created and understood by delving into the “versioning” of individual words, poems they comprise, and language systems at large.

In short, Sherwood shatters the relatively myopic “poem-as-site-of-meaning” perspective by echoing, through analysis, Vicuna’s sentiment that “poems have a desire of their own.” As desiring subjects (as opposed to inert objects), poems cannot be pinned down and studied as stagnant singularities. Rather, notes Sherwood, “…the difficult navigation across the versions’ spans is the only site that a poem can have”(92).