Spit Temple is a compilation of poetic performances and autobiographical memory by Cecilia Vicuña, one of the greatest visionaries of our time.  The 2012 release is a blending of metaphysics, aerodynamics, humor and honesty, unlike anything else.

Vicuña shows us how the body is a wave that can tremble with ecstasy or sorrow, and how being in the presence of the poem is like being in the presence of the sea.

The text is ancient & present–beautiful documentation of Vicuña’s power of incantation and improvisation that creates music by playing with the sun and wind.

Spit Temple explains Vicuña’s non-method, which brings us closer to the non-knowing of mystery and the eternal trust required for being an outsider rambler jangle planet eye bloom.

Vicuña muses,

A poem only becomes poetry when its structure

is made not of words but forces.

 

The force is poetry.

 

Everyone knows what poetry is, but who can say it?

 

Its nature is to be felt, but never apprehended.

 

This is an important assessment: the forces are the poetry; the words are the lips.

Vicuña describes being in animal presence—and how we can be the slick black wings over ice sky.  We can use animal instincts to pay attention to the receptors of fur, a natural sixth sense always communicating with the earth.  Spit Temple describes how Vicuña grew up with no separation from the land; as a small girl  a rooster literally watched over her in a field for hours, telling her how to see and crow.  Vicuña tells us about her other art ancestors as well, such as Violetta Parra and Gabriela Mistral.

A native of Chile, Vicuña emerged as a performance poet during a time when genocide was being committed against her peoples—the 1973 Chilean coup.  Spit Temple discusses Vicuña’s political, spiritual and artistic foundations, and shows a continuance of her roots—using poetry as prayer, healing, political commentary, incantation, and defendant of humanity and nature.

It’s especially divine how Vicuña describes her childhood of inventing ways to overcome her fears:

“When kids threw rocks at me, I imagined that I wasn’t a few feet away, but high above, among the galaxies, watching us on that tiny planet below.”

*

“I was afraid of going blind, so I healed my fear by rehearsing blindness.  I rode my bicycle with my eyes closed, trying to guide myself by sensing the irregularities of the pavement beneath the tires, like reading braille. “

Vicuña is an ambassador of seed survival:

“farmers

losing

crop

 varieties

as

species

dwindle

dwindle dwindle dwindle ?

Remember that song?

 

80 percent

of seeds

available a century ago

now extinct

extinct

extinct

extinct

extinct

 

and now I speak of other forms

of extinction

 

People wanted to know how this music

of the seeds

how the seeds’ song

began for me

 

it began on a hot

summer

day”

 

 

She parallels destruction with the divine, and environmental consciousness with natural reality.

“everybody knows that Antarctica

a good part of it is about to

kkkwaaak

 

onto the sea

 

the water

lapping

us

 

Bill McKibben I’m sure you know him

he was telling a story

of how in a place in Tibet

people started planting trees

and this had changed

the speed of the wind

so people instead of being attacked

by a brutal wind

would be

TOUCHED

by a soft

stopped by trees”

 

She explains a universal truth: just as the peril we inflict on nature comes back to harm humans, the love we give to nature comes back to protect us.

Vicuña shows how repetition of breath can create song, and how threads pass between our hearts invisibly, as well as ceremoniously and symbolically in her performances, to create living poems.

“I’m awake now

and I’m taking the bus

and I’m riding the bus

and all of a sudden

and what do i see?

Threads coming from a building

to building

but they were

not empty like this, the

threads have pictures

and photographs on them

and what is it?

it’s the photographs

of the desaparecidos

of the people that had been killed

by the military

so the women

had devised

a thread installation

to run

all across

La Avenida de Mayo

between the Congress

and the House of Congress

threads

white threads

with the pictures

 

there

hanging”

-Cecilia Vicuña

Cecilia Vicuña reminds us of the stories of the innocent killed, and of the lifeblood we share and struggle to protect today; how the spit inside my temple is the same as the sap inside the tree.