Warping the Word: The Technology of Weaving in the Poetry of Jorge Eduardo Eielson and Cecilia Vicuña

Abstract

This work evaluates the technology of weaving in Jorge Eduardo Eielson of Peru (1924-2006) and Cecilia Vicuña of Chile (1948). Although from different generations, with Eielson first publishing in the 1940s and Vicuña in the 1970s, both associate with the continuation of the avant-garde and display a common metapoetic theme in their work that incorporates the imagery of Andean textiles within a written, poetic medium. Although general literary criticism acknowledges the presence of the weaving metaphor in Eielson and Vicuña's work, this analysis does not go beyond the immediate observation of the finished woven-verbal product. Using information regarding textile composition by José Sánchez Parga, Teresa Gisbert, Verónica Cereceda, and Lynn A. Meisch, this article examines the presence of weaving technologies used in the poetic construction of Tema y variaciones (written in1950, published in 1976) by Eielson and Palabra e hilo (1996) by Vicuña. Because cloth remains a cultural product saturated with meaning, understanding its influence in the work of these two poets provides a fuller understanding of their poetic capacity to combine words and threads in order to augment the semantic capacity of the written word.

Keywords:

• Latin America
• Andes
• textiles
• poetry
• Jorge Eduardo Eielson
• Cecilia Vicuña