Abstract
‘La palabra es un hilo y el hilo es lenguaje’ [The word is a thread and the thread is language]. This is what Cecilia Vicuña writes in her poem Palabra e hilo (1966), equating weaving to poetic production, thread to words and lines. By bringing scholarship on poetry and poetics into dialogue with textile arts, this paper investigates a series of works produced by women poets across languages and cultures, which are the result of productive entanglements of the poetic text and textiles. This contribution discusses how a comparative framework can be helpful in better understanding the nature of ‘textile poems’ produced by women poets today. This paper focuses on the innovative use of textiles by a series women poets and artists: Cecilia Vicuña, Susan Howe, Elisa Biagini, Antonella Anedda, Maria Lai, Sabrina Mezzaqui, among others. These poets are quite distinct from one another, but all of them profoundly challenge the traditional dimension of poetry through the incorporation of extra-literary techniques: their woven textile poems disrupt canonical practices and forms in order to encourage the reader to interact with the works as objects. What is worth analyzing is how, nevertheless, all their works as material objects do remain fundamentally poems. In doing so, they demand us to re-think how we read poetry today for works that extend themselves outside the space of the white traditional page.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Intermediality, Poetry and Poetics, Textile Arts, Gender and Women’s Studies
