Listening to Peruvian Sound Poetry

Poetry has long been connected to popular oral cultural traditions in Peru. This article examines some recent examples of how these oral traditions have been transformed in contemporary mediatized performances in which sound is central. Bringing sound to the forefront confronts some of our cultural assumptions about how poetry operates and opens up possibilities for understanding the genre in new ways, provoking creative responses to the poem as a literary event. Sound poetry’s challenges create other kinds of listeners, new ways of arresting our attention, urging us, perhaps, to release cognitive control. Sound most often does not function as an echo or reinforcement of meaning (as it may often be understood in a conventional reading of poetry), but rather, is another way of creating significance. The prominence of sound makes us listen differently. Poetic listening may allow us to perceive how sound is produced, recorded, and heard in certain historical moments and contexts; who speaks and how; ways in which voices may reinforce authorship or distance us from this: and lead us to think more precisely about the social and emotive powers of sound.