Beyond the Page: Poetry and Performance in Spanish America

Conclusion: Voice and the Public Space of Poetry

138 I began this study suggesting that the oral and written elements in poetry form a continuum that has been obscured by our preoccupation with reading poetry on the printed page. Rather than maintain the separation between these two realms, I have sought to reunite them by examining how written works are spoken or put into action through a variety of media and in a range of settings. George Quasha seconds the idea of bringing together the oral and the written when he observes that the word “versus” (in the opposition oral versus written) has its roots in the word “turning”; therefore, he suggests, we need to think of this less as an opposition and more as “speech turning with writing” (485). The concept of speech intertwined with writing resonates with what I have found in this exploration of what artists and entertainers, poets, readers, and translators have done with poetry’s hybrid, performative capacities in Latin America. In the first chapter we saw that early twentieth-century performances via declamación combined written and theatrical realms, popularized poetry, and brought it to different audiences. Poetry’s performance created a space and a means for forming an alternative or expanded canon and also offered ways to circulate poetry outside of publishing, characteristics that continue through the present day. Examples of this are the recent projects of Argentine author Arturo Carrera, who runs a “Caravana de Declamadores” [caravan of declaimers] every year at his restored train station on the Pampas in the town of Coronel Pringles. He has defended his reactivation of the practice of declamation in this way: “Aunque todo se instala en las convenciones del kitsch, cada nuevo poema exige inevitablemente una revision de los Conclusion Voice and the Public Space of Poetry Voice and the Public Space of Poetry · 139 recursos sensibles y técnicos de su dicción” (Martyniuk) [Although everything is installed in the conventions of kitsch, each new poem inevitably requires a review of the responsive and technical practices of its diction]. Supplementing these ideas in a different essay on “The Voice,” he begins with this observation: Recuerdo algo que dijo el poeta ruso Ossip Mandelstam: que quien no hubiera escuchado la voz de Ana Ajmátova, no conocería nunca su poesía. Recuerdo también ese poema de Bonnefoy: “La voz de Katleen Ferrier,” donde él se decide a pensar definitivamente, me atrevo a decir eternamente, la filiación del sentido y la voz. O la percepción—en todo caso—de la poesía como voz, como una voz aislada de ese material que es la escritura. ¿Pero no hay en cada lectura y en cada acto de escribir una voz escondida que a su modo nos atraviesa nos dirige y no nos salva? (Carrera 27) [I remember something that the Russian poet Ossip Mandelstam said: that whoever has not heard Ana Akhmatova’s voice will never know her poetry. I also remember that poem by Bonnefoy, “The Voice of Kathleen Ferrier,” where he decided to think definitively, I dare say eternally, about the affiliation of meaning and voice. Or the perception, in any case, of poetry as voice, as a voice isolated from that material that is writing. But is there not in every reading and every act of writing a hidden voice that in its own way goes through us, directs us, and does not save us?] Returning to the oral performance of poetry may revitalize it, create new relationships between authors and readers or performers, and take it on the road—in this case, fostering its circulation outside of Buenos Aires, a city that stands for the urban areas that tend to dominate cultural life today. Changing technologies such as radio, film, and records also altered how poetry was produced, distributed, and received and, as observed in the second chapter, allowed poets and performers like Eusebia Cosme, Luis Palés Matos, and Nicomedes Santa Cruz to construct alternative cultural identities by capitalizing on the performative capacities of poetry. At the same time, we observed how Cosme’s role in the circulation of poetry and Santa Cruz’s poetry itself has been excluded from the realm of literature and has been understood solely in popular terms. Their very “popularity ,” in the English sense of reaching mass audiences and in the Spanish one of representing the people, may have marginalized their literary roles. 140 · Conclusion Looking back at their...