Beyond the Page: Poetry and Performance in Spanish America

3. Performing Poetry Beyond the Avant-Garde

79 Early in the twentieth century the Italian futurist Filippo Marinetti decreed an end to traditional poetic declamation. In his 1916 proclamation, “Dynamic, Multi Channeled Recitation,” he announced how the futurists are “renewing and quickening the spirit of our race, making it more manly” (193). With aggressive terminology, he planned to liberate “intellectuals from the age-old, static, pacifist, and nostalgic type of recitation and create a new, dynamic, synoptic, and warlike form of recitation” against a traditional style that, even when “supported by the most wonderful vocal organs and by the strongest of temperaments, always inevitably ends up being a monotonous series of high and low points, a hodgepodge of gestures, which time and again wash over the inveterate stupidity of lecture audiences in floods of boredom” (193–94). Included in his long list of suggestions for performance are the following: the dehumanization of the speaker through techniques such as electrification of the voice; the use of a combination of voices throughout the hall; the incorporation of motors , drums, and saws, especially to highlight onomatopoeia; and gestures by the performer that should be typographic or graphic, creating spirals, cubes, cones, and ellipses in the air—almost every proposition moves declamation toward performance and written work toward sound poetry. The performer is a cocreator and an inventor who in some ways dislodges the authority of the text and decenters the author (paradoxically both conditioning his own authority and heightening it). Marinetti’s ideas fit with Marjorie Perloff’s and Craig Dworkin’s observation that futurist artwork “represents the brief phase when the [European] avant-garde chapter three Performing Poetry Beyond the Avant-Garde 80 · Chapter 3 defined itself by its relation to the mass audience” (38), but only part of its mass audience, for while he may have been attempting to reignite interest in poetry and art through revitalized performances, Marinetti’s views in many ways augment the stylistic bifurcation we have observed between the popular and the elite. Even in the fragments just quoted, which seek to invigorate declamation, the futurist disparages some audiences for their “inveterate stupidity,” while he seeks to distance performed poetry from emotion, melodrama, and the spoken word (gendered feminine or effeminate in his perspective). The ongoing polemic about cultural categories is apparent in the futurist’s reconceptualization of poetry and performance, and it is one that will continue to structure my analysis of the relationships between the poetry and performances that grew out of the Latin American avant-gardes. As in many of the European avant-gardes, performance has a strong role in the Latin American vanguards. It is one of the ways in which artists demonstrated their interrogation of the role of art in society and restructured traditional boundaries vis-à-vis genre and the circulation of culture. Perhaps the most famous anecdote that arises in many accounts of performance and avant-garde poetry is the story of Argentine poet Oliverio Girondo ’s theatrical presentation of his book Espantapájaros: al alcance de todos [Scarecrow: At the reach of everyone] (1932). Following his stated desires to integrate art into a broader public sphere, Girondo had a giant aristocratic papier-mâché scarecrow constructed and hauled into Buenos Aires on a funeral carriage to parodically promote the sale of his new collection .1 While, as Oscar Brando has noted, the content of this new book was more radically experimental than his previous work and thereby potentially narrowed his audience, this marketing performance broke with the Fierro group’s general rejection of writing’s professionalization and, at the same time, extended his public. Perhaps this incident is so frequently recalled because it anticipates commentary on the society of spectacle to come (Debord, Baudrillard) and embodies many of the core paradoxes of the avant-garde: the desire to disseminate art in broader contexts yet resist its commercialization and the wish to combine political and aesthetic spheres and redefine the role of the artist, yet to do so by entering into dialogue with an international vanguard that required knowledge of particular aesthetic codes available to relatively few (García Canclini, 277). These paradoxes are compounded in the situation of Latin America, a region in which the issues of modernity and coloniality are intertwined, as it sought a place within “a larger modernity in which colonial projects, past and present, continue to be foundational” (Rosenberg 163).2 Performing Poetry Beyond the Avant-Garde · 81 As we saw...