Beyond the Page: Poetry and Performance in Spanish America

Introduction: A Renovating Return to Roots

3 In the first decade of the twenty-first century, poetry enjoyed a revival through its oral presentation in slams and festivals, its circulation on the Internet, and its availability on CDs. Combining poetry with performance is one of the important ways in which the genre transforms, evolves, and gains diverse audiences in different transnational social and cultural settings . Electronic and multimedia presentations move poetry beyond the text and in so doing invite questions: Is this poetry? How is it poetry? What are the different demands it makes of its readers, listeners, or viewers? I begin to answer these questions here and will continue this dialogue in the pages that follow. When we include poetry’s voicing or oral presentation and make textual analysis a secondary feature, the visual, aural, and performative become factors that cannot be read around or left out. These elements highlight changes in definitions of the “poetic” and demonstrate that our generic expectations are historical constructs that can (and do) change. Dana Gioia has observed a shift in the position of print in late twentieth-century USAmerican culture that he deems an epistemological transformation, a change in “the means by which our society uses language , images and ideas to represent reality” (5). There is a similar epistemological shift in Spanish America, although it is grounded in distinct cultural histories, as we will see. This book addresses the performative aspects of poetry in order to reverse the prevalent twentieth-century tradition that has fixed the poem on the page as a self-sufficient “verbal icon.” Taking performance into account gives us a distinct kind of cultural event record; performance Introduction A Renovating Return to Roots 4 · Introduction embeds reading in the everyday world, and performed poetry often reaches a different audience. While the historical relationship between speech and writing is frequently contentious in postcolonial regions, looking at performance in Spanish American poetry throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first allows us to see how the relationship between terms might be complementary rather than opposed. Oral and written elements in poetry form a continuum of results; these range from the democratization of verse culture in early voiced performances to more recent shifts in roles for print culture in increasingly visual and aural environments . Studying poetry’s “voicing” demonstrates how readers and performers appropriate written texts and, through this, how poetry may become a site of tension between authority and power and a possible place of subversion, re-creation, and innovation. Performance also allows us to reconceptualize the relationships between popular and elite realms of production and reception. By examining instances of performances that range from early twentieth-century recitation and declamation to twenty-firstcentury performances on film, CDs, and the Internet, this book offers its readers analytic tools with which to chart the circulation of poetry beyond the printed word. Each written poem is a “scene of language,” and poetic texts create speakers or “ventriloquize voices,” as Edward Hirsch puts it, but when poetry is actually spoken it embodies the written voice in distinct ways, often either subverting or reinforcing the author’s inscribed speaker (117, 124). Examining poetry’s voicing throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first illustrates how authors and performers of this genre of Latin American literature incorporate performance in ways that resituate and expand conventional assumptions about the uses for poetry. It also combines two areas of study that have heretofore employed contrasting approaches. Poetry, while rooted in the oral, became a predominantly textual and literary genre after Western romanticism, and more recently performance studies have infiltrated multiple aspects of contemporary life but often exclude poetry because of its perceived “literariness.” In order to read poetry in performance, one must break the oral-written barrier and include elements that have been sidelined by both approaches alone. The poem is set in a context beyond the page and the book and the place and means of performance can alter meaning. Voice adds volume, texture, aural punctuation, and vocal markers of gender and race, among other sound elements (such as noise and music), and when poetry is embodied, we must take into account the gestures, costumes, and many other visual elements that multiply with contemporary technological possibilities, such A Renovating Return to Roots · 5 as video. Reading, hearing, and seeing features of performed poetry together , as I do throughout this book, demonstrate the kinds of issues that arise in their...