The Staging of Poetrys Voice: ancient and present media art

By Luis Bravo* Translated to English by Fanny del Ro.

[] for voice to exist it is necessary that the part which strikes be animated and that some mental image is present. For voice is certainly a sound with significance, unlike cough which is noise of air aspired Aristotle, On the Soul The poems voice is writing that finds its tone and speaks to us Jacques Lacan

In the beginning, poetry was conceived as the staging of the voice for words. Always associated with celebrations of all kinds, from the oracular, prophetic and ritual practices, passing through myths and legends, to civic and sports events (hymns, odes), it reached an ellaborated form of rythm that earned it the invoked assistance of the Muses, each highly specialized in whatever motives, tones and channels the poet aspired to reach. These are all forms of poetry marked by oral tradition: the Aegean, Cretan and Greek epos and melos, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana from India, the Scandinavian sagas, the epic songs from the Middle Ages in several languages, the romances and poems of Castilians and Moors, and the rich corpus of multilinguism, undocumented still, except in some Native American languages, such as Nahuatl. One common trait they all share is that they are anonymous, a collective and multi-chronic composition born from an everchanging process until it becomes fixed in a piece of writing. They are also made to be sung, or vocally expressed, whether accompanied or not by a musical instrument, or interpreted in the company of other forms of art, particularly dance. Poetry has nurtured from those rich, ancient fountains of interpretations for centuries. Poetry has also become progressively secular, and in the process it has transformed essentially into a writing practice of one author, whose signature, and copyright, are a sign that a text is an individual property. The universe of readers, that began expanding with the invention of print by Johannes Gutenberg in 1455, is still expanding today, although it is threatened by

online telematics and all kinds of cyber-supports, like the personal screen called Kindle, that will soon contest against the printed book for its market of readers. And yet, in this global, multichronic world, in many cultures found in the Americas, in Asia, Africa and Oceania, the practice of composition and oral transmission as a vehicle of cultural expression is kept alive. It is in that context that the limitations of the term literature, whose etymology refers to the iron bed of Procrustes, the littera where the print is forced to fit the mold, are exposed. In Latin America, there is an ongoing debate around this issue, and a variety of perspectives in quarrel. One important line of thought was introduced by father Angel Maria Garibay, when, in 1953, he exhumed Nahuatl literature and attacked both the learned and the unlearned for subordinating literature to writing. i According to Walter Mignolo, it was only during post-colonialism that researchers began to study forms of speech in native languages, and that they contended the idea of literature as circumscribed to Spanish language and to Eurocentric esthetics. I believe that after understanding that the Colony was a complex cultural and linguistic model, a new perspective came to life, and it was reflected in a series of studies that began to be published around 1980. The dominion of texts written in Spanish that had a literary value, slowly gave way to the dominion of texts that were written in other languages, were orally transmitted, and do not necessarily have an esthetic value. ii In the works of Latin American critics and literary historians, there is a struggle to address the diversity of oral literature, whether pre-Colombian or contemporary, as a consequence of the hegemony of the Spanish language, even though Latin American literature has been produced in other languages. And yet, historians insist in a linguistic super-identity that has relegated to Spanish even other European languages incorporated to native cultures (Portuguese, French, English). Even the trans-culturality of Angel Rama ultimately circumscribes itself to a Creole centralism, separating itself from the indigenous cultures: Literature produced by Indians of the cultural resistance have established the boundaries of Latin American literature, as they are the utmost manifestation of a cultural otherness that demands a new function of literature, one with the responsibility to integrate them all within a single frame of reference. iii

The obnoxious Uruguayan critic of the 80s, Uruguay Cortazzo, contributed a series of concepts to this discussion when he proclaimed [] a pluralism that transcends the idea of regional differences or a model of unity in diversity. For a new literary theory that explains both the complexity and the conflictivity observed in the literatures of America, must necessarily abandon that fascination with unity to think instead in a plurisystemic model and a new concept of text cannot entirely fit in the Western concept of literature. iv Regarding the conflict betwen oral and written literature in our Continent, Cortazzo refers to the concept of indigenous textuality that was used in a Congress in London in 1991, echoing the need for a methodology that does not subordinate literature to writing but instead tackles the structural complexity of orality and of interdisciplines, as per Martin Lienhards notion that When indigenous textuality is ritual, it can only be conceived as multimedial, since it is connected to other elements of meaning: music, songs, coreography, dress, corporal paint. On one hand, the indigenous text is in the line of show theory, which demands an interpretation based on semiotics; on the other, it calls for a close collaboration with anthropology, because it deals with a different culture. v On this same respect, in The Singer of Tales, Albert B. Lord, following the studies of Milman Parry in considering the different models and functions of oral and written poetry since ancient times, included in the prologue to his book the following diagnostic by Harry Levin: The term literature presupposes the use of the alphabet and thus assumes that any verbal work of the imagination is transmitted by reading and writing. The expression oral literature is clearly contradictory. [] The word, whether spoken or sung, together with the visual image of the speaker or the singer, has slowly imposed itself once more, due to electric engineering. Our print-based culture, prevalent since the Renaissance, has left us a legacy of riches abounding, as well as a lot of snobbery that we should consider doing without. vi When Marshall McLuhan reproduced this quote in The Gutenberg Galaxy, he underscored that a study on the divergent nature of oral and written social organizationsvii was long due, yet unthinkable to undertake until those two forms of artistic speech were again to co-exist in conflict, as it began to happen around 1962. But in order to disassemble the false oposition between civilized writing and primitive orality, it is necessary first to consider some of the

losses paired with the passage from oral to written literature, despite the proverbial gains. ANCIENT TIMES, NARRATIVE VOICES, MULTIMEDIACY In the end of the 19th century, Stephane Mallarm said, The world exists to end up in a book. Such statement would have awakened the wrath of the poet Simonides. Born in Ceos in 556 B.C., Simonides considered that his profession was to compose and to memorize songs in order to recite them to an audience. Or at least that is how Mary Renault recreates it in one of her historical novels about Ancient Greece. In his memory files, Simonides kept the Homeric epos, and the lyrical poetry of Sappho and Archilochus, among others. He could not think of a way to transmit a legacy, essential to the art of composing and vocalizing, other than through an intensive vocal training. But during the illustrated tyranny of Pisistratos, writing gained ground and became the new support of memory. One bad day, Simonides found his disciple, Bacchilydes, writing on waxed tablets. Simonides accused him of betraying the Muse and tragically announced the demisse of poetry. But while Simonides vaticcinated the apocalyptic end of poetic art, young Bacchilydes stood in the threshold of a new era. For Simonides, writing was a form of treason to Mnemosyne and her daughters: the sacred memory of songs would no longer articulate human invocation and divine design. Whereas for Bacchilydes writing was to materialize in signs things that were too abstract. In that precise moment, the notion of poetry as something that happens in the voice began to die. Poetry is no longer evoked or invoked or made present in the vocalization of a text. Behold the seed of a loss: that of art as the staging of the voice, with its ritual assembling of the Muses, to provide a better performance to an audience. Researcher Gustavo Guerrero studied the notion of melos in the works of Plato. In the voice of Socrates (The Republic, B. III) he finds a classification of the different modalities of speech of the Lyric Ages. Melos is formed by three elements: logos, the word; armonia, the music; and ruthmos, the rhythm of dance. The last two were subjected to logos, but composition could not be fully satisfactory unless the three elements worked together. Therefore, melos was a form of poetry for the voice and of the voice. In Ion, Plato mentions

melopoios, an action which means to be inspired by the gods. It was used when a poet talked during a representation. In that sense, modern readers are better equipped to understand that, when they read the texts of Stesichorus, Pindaro, Sappho, or Anacreon, they are reading a fragmented piece of a text that had once a complex, multimedial dimension. The culture of the Guarani Mby of Paraguay kept their poetry secret until 1950, when anthropologist Leon Cadogan earned their trust, and was granted access to the poems. Their poetry, called e por tenonde, can be roughly translated as the fine words. According to Uruguay Cortazzo, a more accurate translation would be the adorning words, in reference to the feathers that the Mby wear on their hair. The adorning word is fine only in that it is also a synonym of sacred, as a bridge between the gods and humanity. To the Guarani people, words are spirits (n ng) that incarnate in the officiating priests of the ritual, who assimilate the energy of the Supreme Being, amand. In the words of Cortazzo: [] words cannot be categorized as signs, for they are the sacred substance itself manifesting through sound [] Words do not represent, but rather introduce and release, the sacred energy, that of the gods or ancestors.
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These two examples enable us to draw some conclusions. The first is that the interdisciplinary condition of the arts is not a product of modern ages but, paradoxically, that it was precisely the culture of typographic modernity what obliterated its communicating vessels. According to McLuhan, when writing replaced the forms of expression of an essentially oral civilization with one in which the visual sense is predominant, the concepts of time and space were altered to the point that they became linear: Reason abandoned its magical side to become logical and discursive, and that is how speech prevailed over metaphor. In the case of the Guaran, Cortazzo shares his conclusions with A. Brand in relation to the magical power of word in the native rituals: Orality is not a mere textual category that can be traslated into writing, but a unique condition where communication as a physical encounter with the sacred entities is possible. Writing destroys the somatic level of the encounter by eliminating the speaker as a presence, and by reducing the whole experience to a solitary intellectual decodification of signs [] a resistance to writing of several spiritual Guarani leaders has to do with that sense of loss: those who learn to read will not memorize the songs, gods will not manifest themselves as they did, words will lose their curative powers. ix

In these cases, the passage to writing implies a double loss: the multimedial reach of poetic representation and the obliteration of the sacred, magical power of words. When criticism and literary theory operate exclusively within a writing paradigm, they disregard the assimilation of multimedia phenomena. Curiously enough, this shortcoming seems to spring from the manifestations of voice, proven both in the native, indigenous or primitive manifestations of ritual chants, hymns or invocations, as in those tending towards rupturism, like the Avant-garde movements throughout the 20th Century, and in modern multimedia performances or transtextual publicatons found in the cyberspace. The problem could then reside in the issue concerning the critical tools of a written logocentrism that stands alone, in omission or in Olympic ignorance and superior contempt when dealing with borderline manifestations of discursive support, in which there are zones permeating the oral and the written codes. Charles Bernstein, a poet and a theorist of the Language Poets of the 70s, said this clearly in his essays on performatic poetry and speech:

While the performance of poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention to modern and contemporary poetry performance has been negligible, despite the crucial importance of performance to the practice of the poetry of this century. x
If, historically, poetry has oscilated between oral and written

manifestations, then we can say that both are valid and not mutually exclusive. In the electronic age, starting with the birth of the radio and the phonograph in the 20s until the climatic 60s with the first live transmissions on TV, that oscillation became even more pronounced in poetic practice, until the dynamic cyber age has slowly pushed poetry back to the original staging of the voice. Paradoxically, the technological changes of the 21st century defy poetry and poets to go back to the ancient practice of multimedial composition and vocal execution, and to stand before an audience, whether present or mediatic.
LISTENING AND MAKING SOUND: THE VOICE OF THE AVANT-GARDE

The leading role of the metaphore, the interpretation of artistic languages, the incorporation of technology in art, were all characteristic of the Avant-garde movement, during the first thirty years of the 20th century. Cubism, the poet Guillhaume Appolinaire, the futuristic Italian and Russian poets and artists, the radical performers of Dadaism, Huidobro the creationist,

all helped create a transtextual form of speech that combined graphism, sonority, movement and vocality, resulting in the end of rationality as a canon of the fine arts and letters. By attacking the format of the artistic object, making it impossible to classify, transforming it to an absurd and anticommercial itme, they attacked the bourgoise order. The structure of the speech of the Avant-garde refracted on linguistic and paralinguistic signs, transforming that speech into the prime matter of their art. They devoted themselves to what F.T. Marinetti called a lyrical obsession with matter and they attacked the declamatory, confessional nature of the romantic I, substituting it with the syntactic linearity and the simultaneity of perception of the paroliberi. Politypography was determinant to contemporary visual poetry (the grammarians of Alexandria, like Simias of Rhode in 300 B.C., and the medieval poets, like Raymund Lull, in the 13th century, had already worked that form of poetry xi), but in the futuristic and dadaistic texts, graphism was not merely a visual tool but a musical score of vocal representation. In The Surprising Alphabet (1916), Marinetti said that a letter simultaneously carries plastic, musical, erotic and sentimental sensations. An example of this is the protagonism of sonority, an event of onomatopeia beginning with the title of SCRABrrBrraaNNG (1919) by Marinetti, where the subtitle refers to the auditive violence of the battlefield that she reads. With her naked silhuette in black, on the right corner of the poem, she reproduces in her inner ear what her gunner tells to her in a letter. The chaos of sound is represented by a graphic explosion, and that is what the poet will read out loud, surrounded by a chorus of voices and specific instruments.

F.T.Marinetti, 1919. SCRABrrRrrraNNG. (That evening in bed she read again the letter of her gunner in the battlefield)

Ever since the 80s, many visual techniques, once rejected by the Avantgarde movements, have being assimilated to such an extent that they have become common. Telematic advertising, graphic design, animation applied to the industry of videogames, they all have massified the use of domestic supports (the video, the cdlaser, the cdrom, the DVD, the websites, blogs, msn, twitter). These resources of expressiveness were once considered a transgression. In a sense, what is now perceived as a post-modern lightness consists precisely in an over-exposure of visual languages that has saturated our retina and banalized any meaningful criticism. In one second, a concretist poem is used as a synopsis in a television commercial break, without anyone even noticing it. And yet, the unrelenting voice of the Avant-garde in poetry is still there, distorting the sound of globality. In the ecstasy of onomatopeia, of the parole in libert, in Zaum or the transactional language of the futurist Russians, in the Dadaist xenoglossia, in the semic segmentation and in the phonetic value, in the anasemantic waste of phonic poetry, in the energy of the projective verse of Olson that paved the way to the Howl of Beat Poetry, there is a subversion of speech that has not been domesticated. Reading the Avant-garde Manifestos is useful, but if we were to be faithful to them, we should only focus in the staging of the voice. As we understand it, many of those Manifestos are not a mere declaration of principles but the result of performatic praxis. A clear example is how, after the opening in Rome in 1914 of Piedigrotta. by Francesco Cangiullo, and of

Zang Tumb Tumb, by F.T. Marinetti in London, The Dynamic and Synoptic Declamation (Milan, 1916), was born: Tradicional declamation, sustained by wonderful vocal organs and stronger temperaments, is inevitably reduced to the monotony of ups and downs, an oscillation of gestures that fills the filthy imbecility of crowds attending any Conference with boredom. xii Although this complaint against traditional poetry reciters and their venerable audiences is illustrative of the esthetic confrontation, what is far more interesting today about the Declamation is its detailed description of the multimedial operativeness at that time. The use of the voice, the movements, the scenography, the clothing, and the parodic reach of the onomatopetic instruments invented by the futurists are revealed in eleven steps. The multimedial mise en scene, in which participate artists, poets, musicians, and actors, puts the emphasis on sound, which is the main objective of the first performances of the 20th Century.
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Thus, instruments are introduced: the tofa, a huge seashell whose tragicomic, dark turquoise melopeia is a stinging satire of mythology and its sirens, its Tritons and its seashells. The putipu, whose noise is orange, vibrates when caressed with wet fingers; it points to the violent irony with which a healthy and young race corrects and combats the nostalgic toxicity of Claire du Lune. The scetavaiasse (a pink and green rumor) with its arc like a wooden siren covered with bells, is a parody of the violin as an expression of inner life and sentimental sadness. It makes a mockery of musical virtuosness, of Paganini, of Kubelik, of musician cherubins playing Benozzos viola, classical music, concert halls, all tedious and depressingly dark. The triccabballacche (red noise), a lyre with chords like rods that end in hammers sounding like platters, is a satire of the Greco-Roman sacerdotal procession and of the cytar players that adorn traditional architecture. xiv Strictly speaking, it was the German poets who first dared use their voices as an instrument of a type of assemantic poetry they called phonetic. Paul Scheebart with Untitled (1897) and Christian Morgenstern with Night Song to Fish and The Great Lalula (1905) were the movement pioneers. But it was Zurichs Cabaret Voltaire, in 1916, which established a system of production and execution of phonetic poems. It introduced the enchanting poetry of Hugo Ball, with the participation of Emmy Henings, and pointed to a crisis of the communicability of meaning in verbal poetry.
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An

essential testimony of what was going on precisely at that moment, with accurate reflections on what I have called the staging of the voice of poetry, is the Journal of H. Ball. On July 18 of 1916 (the Cabaret had been opened in May), Ball declares that the visual innovation that Dada is creating on stage is also a re-discovery of the magical value of the word: We have forced the plasticity of word to such a point that it may never be equaled. We have done this by constructing a sentence with reason and logic. We have charged the word with enough strength and energy to help us rediscover the evangelic concept of the word (logos) and its magical, complex image. xvi Although Balls wordless poetry (Lautgedichte) emerged from a signic base of materialistic nature, at the same time it possessed a certain philosophical mysticism: [] with phonetic poetry we abandon language that journalism has corrupted and abused. We must go back to the most profound alchemy of words; we must even abandon words, if we are to preserve poetry as their last, and most sacred, sanctuary. xvii In Balls Journal I have found one of the most precise and precious arguments of the importance of the staging of the voice to explain the integrality of poetry in this dissertation: Nothing reveals the weaknesses of a poem more than a public reading. One thing is certain: art triumphs only when it has a life and a richness of its own. To read out loud has become the milestone of a poems quality, and I have learned (on stage) that, today, literature is taught from a desk, to a group of passive collectionists of words, instead of reciting it in the ears of living human beings. xviii We can conclude that Ball believes that a written text is a mere lining up of signs in need of the vocal vitality of the poem and of its execution in order to display its esthetic quality in its entirety. According to Michel Certau, for whom Avant-garde heteroglossy allows a disturbing permeability of energies between textuality and corporability,
[] The voice moves, in effect, in a space between the body and language, but only in a moment of passage from one to the other and as if in their weakest differenceThe body, which is a thickening and an obfuscation of phonemes, is not yet the death of language. The articulation of signifiers is stired up and effaced; there remains nonetheless the vocal modulation, almost lost but not absorbed in the remors of the boyd; a strange interval, where the voice emits a speech lacking truths, and where proximity is a presence without possesion. xix

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THE STAGING OF THE VOICE: A THEORETICAL APPROXIMATION

What I call the staging of the voice of a poem is not just the oral reflection of a previous scriptural dimension. Whatever structure the poem may have had originally, in the staging of the voice, the poems phonic materiality is in center stage. Who stands before an audience has created a text for the sake of sound, not for the sake of the circumstancial, physical presence of the poet on stage. On stage, the poem recovers something which is natural to it: it becomes an object of language, composed for the voice of the speaker and the ear of the listener, to be seen and heard internally by the reader. In that sense, to read out loud is not a mere procedure nor a transfer from paper to the stage. The objective of the staging of the voice is not to motivate the hearers in order to transform them into readers. What is really at stake is the comprehensive significance of the poem, its rythmical qualities, its tones, its pauses and its intensities. It targets the heart of the receiver through the active presence of the spectators every sense. Roger Chartier says that the members of an audience in a poetry performance are oralizingreaders, because they are not passive consumers of speech but interactive presences in the ongoing textual event.
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To use a game of words: to read

poetry without the elaborated staging of the voice is something that happens to poems every day, but poems can only happen when the staging of the voice has been formally elaborated. The oral staging of the voice is a performatic action in that it subscribes to a unique and unrepeatable space and time, in which the word works as a major event to an audience interacting with its presence. The receiver relies in a compulsive expectation. Because there is no control, the receiver will either surrender to the event, or resist it. The staging of the voice is a collective ocurrence, rather than a personalized phenomenom, as isolated as reading from a book. The occurrence implies a corporal mediation and an intensity in the exchange of energy between the interpreter and its audience. That explains why the ritualization of the staging of the voice is a recurring event. But, in any case, the challenge is to test the texts poetical reach through the voice and the interpretation of the poet. The volatile reflection we call voice materializes, on a esthetic level, a series of elements that determine the poetical fact itself.

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Rgis Durand conceives the volatility of voice as a cultural and psychoanalytic concept positioned between reality and representation, and functioning as a metaphorical support of pure time and of physicial production.
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To voice, which is a series of sound waves produced in the

larynx by air that causes a vibration in the vocal chords, one must add the tone, determined by the length and the mass of vocal chords, the chest resonance, the throat and the cavity of the mouth, diction, intonation, the accentuation of the speaker, every single variable acting upon the esthetic value of the staging of the voice. Roland Barthes introduced in the theories of voice the concept of granularity. This is how he conceived the paralinguistic effects of vocal modification: [] as an entwinning of timbre and language whose aim, we are sure, is not the clarity of messages, but the blissful search for pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning of language. xxii If for De Certeau, voice is a sign of the body that comes and talks, for Steve McCaffery, voice is a polis of mouth, lips, teeth, tongue, tonsils, palette, breath, rhythm,timbre, and sound. The same author adds: [voice] is less a component than a production of a materiopneumatic assemblage of interacting bone, liquid, cartlege, and tissue. Enjoying such complexity even a single voice resonates as a simultaneity of corporeal, acoustic events; the consequence of energy and respiratory force in flight through fixed cavities and adjustable tensors. xxiii Going back to the staging of the voice, Mike Weaver describes the modus operandi of voice poeticals as the figure (sound) rising off the ground (silence) producing a configuration of filled time against emptied time. xxiv. Concidentally with H. Ball, theoricist E. Buenaventura says, despite how poetic a written text is, the real dimension of its poetic function is achieved only during the process of the mise en scene and its relation with the audience.
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To stress the loss of artistic value of the live word in western civilization,

Buenaventura turns to A. Artauds reflections on Balinese theater: Verbal language as we conceive it in Europe, is simply the finalization of a process, just like a corpse is the completion of life. We have got to get rid of this cadaveric convention of language [] Because of its specific nature, fixed once and for all [the words] stop and paralyze thought, instead of encouraging and favoring its development [] Everything that has to do with the particular enunciation of a word, with the vibration it has in space, is then lost to us xxvi

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Why are poets the privileged regarding an oral mise en scene? Because poets know more about the poems intentions, they have listened to the tone of the inner voice in the process of creating the poem. Part of the poets trade consists in putting rhythm and giving a voice to their creature of language. Why are poets often the worst interpreters of their poetry? Because they have forgotten, or cut off, a crucial part of the nature of the poem, that part of art that is the staging of the voice. This is not the place to delve into an explanation of why this mutilation has taken place; suffice it to say that it has become a defect. The rich oral tradition of poetry in the form of the aoidos, the rhapsodist, the trouvadour, the poet/jongleur, and the performer, has never disappeared, but it seems to be absent in the work of modern poetry, if we (mistakenly) understand modern poetry as the production of a writer who writes exclusively for and from the homotypographicus. Such a behavior, which is determined by the technological aspect of writing, must be permeated, de-fossalized, un-alienated, if poets pretend ever again to be able to use their work in the staging of the voice. But unless poets realize this, they will be limited to a mimetic reading of a text, which is perfectly valid, unless the mere testimonial is confused with a representational form of the artistic value of the poem. In this sense, awareness consists in activating a poiesis which has not been modeled after the regular practices of writing, like considering that what is written is the poems final word, something which might be considered a projection of the poem-epitaph as a concept, after Artauds premise that there is a cadaveric convention of language. The notion of the staging of the voice establishes a conception of poetry that is not limited to its written form, but is susceptible to an expressive vocality. The written text, then, is a starting point, but not the poems finishing point. The writing is a guide, or even a matrix reference, but the poem is a vocal energy that aspires to become sound. Modulation conjugates voice in a complex way, as an instrument, and the written speech is an approach to, but never an inscription, of truth. Finally, as I conceive it, the staging of the voice possesses several aspects that are related to the poetic composition itself, to the notion that poetry is constructed by, or is given to, each individual poet. Therefore, it does not necessarily deal with the communicability of the text.

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It must be underscored that a poem is a phenomenom in which voice and writing complement each other, just like Jacques Lacan said: The voice of the poem is writing that finds its tone and speaks to us. The reader updates and re-creates, in a way, the authors voice. The inner ear of the reader finds in writing a good guide to the texts voice. The best reader of poetry looks for, and finds, the tone of the dialogue that goes on between voice and writing (of the author, of the poem and of the reader) and the poetic language.

THE STAGING OF THE VOICE OF URUGUAYAN POETS

There is one aspect in particular about the importance of the poems voice that is found in the Lyrical Autobiography of Juana de Ibarbourou (1892-1979), a conference held in 1956 by the Uruguayan poet, where she speaks about the process of creation that takes place in the inner voice: I am used to the oral production of poetry. The first verse simply pops out. Then, as Jinarajadasa once explained to me, in the tender tradition of the Indian people [] I round out the poem, by repeating it once and again until it is finished, completed. After that, I repeat the poem to myself, perfecting its inner recording. I rarely transfer it to paper, until I find the perfect opportunity to do it [] The poem that has been created in this way is not just another set of verses, beautiful or not. It is like breathing, or dreaming, or eating: perfect consequences of our functions. It is also a flourishing of the mind, orchestrated by God for the poetical transmission of universal accent and emotion. For artists speak of the divine [] An artistic creator has a certain, unique quality, like a medium to whom is dictated the unknown [] I believe the poet is merely a reproducing machine of a mysterious voice received. xxvii A poem is a slow construction of inner sonority, with the mediation of a voice that Juana de Ibarburu considers is not entirely her own, like the aoidos and the rhapsodists of India. When memory finally fixes the sonority of the speech, she then transfers the poem into writing. In this way, the staging of the voice precedes writing: it belongs with the poems composition itself. At the same time, the poem is the organized sonority of a voice that transcends the individual and connects him or her with a certain form of divinity. A different challenge is to re-visit the process of textual production, after the final writing. In this case, creation is re-activated and the written work can be altered. The elements that are intimately reviewed by the staging of the voice, relate to the phonic system in every dimension: rhythm (pitch, metrics, rhymes, accents), homophony, homology, and the tone that the poem demands in order to be orally forwarded.

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In the Introduction to Long Play (1967) that was, for years, his only published work, the Uruguayan poet Fernando Pereda (1899-1992) said, A poem can live only if it is being read or listened to. According to the plaquette that was published with the record, the poet worked several months before he found his texts right way of saying, just like they sounded to the poets inner ear. In the back cover of the record, Pereda adds: The poem is inseparable from its music. That is why we learn more about it when we hear it live. When it shies away from that test, it becomes suspicious, and what is usually revealed is a lack of vitality that sacrifices its magic, without which the poem can no longer exist. xxviii There are elements in this quote that we have already mentioned (magic, the life of the poem in the voice) but it is interesting to point out Peredas notion that there is a right way of saying in every poem that responds to what it should sound like. In that way, the written text does not have the last word, but it is rather a transitional step. The poetic work would then consist less in the writing and more in the quest to find in the staging of the voice the sound richness that the poem has, as the virtual vocal representation it is. It is important to underscore Peredas radical idea that what we call the staging of the voice is a confirmation of the magical and vital value of a poem. Without any of this aspects, Pereda says, the poem as an object cannot exist. This is completely the opposite of what most poets and critics of the writing canon believe. To them, the written text alone can procure the esthetic success (in the form of resistance and value) of the poem. A third example of a reintepretation of a text in its phonic nature when prepared for the staging of the voice is the case of poet Amanda Berenguer (1921-2010), as she recorded the record Dictions: The poet wrote: The poem was already written and I threw myself at it to say it out loud, to distort it, to shout it, I dont know, to re-invent it again in my voice [] The experience is direct, improvised, and I cannot repeat it. I found myself re-creating the written poem, in my voice. I could try doing it again, and it would come out differently. No version would ever be the same. xxix And yet, Berenguer made an attempt to create a certain pattern of the event: I wanted to use some vowels in one way and some in a different manner, I wanted to use the syllabic structure to produce a gradation of the powerful meaning of words. Instead, she seemed to fall in a trance. She says, I entered the poem from one end and left it from the other, in a state that was

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similar to a total rendition of my being. xxx. The staging of the voice that was established for a recording had opened a door to phonic ennunciations that were not present in the written text, and that never would have appeared in a conventional reading. Finally, I will quote the words of the critic E. Foffani on the performatic quality of the poet Marosa di Giorgio (1932-2004). Foffani opens another interpretation to the power of the staging of the voice in highlighting the textss poetical attributes: [Marosa di Giorgios] diction possesses multiple intonations. She uses her voice as the home to speech, as a luminous hearth where every word, every syllable, every breath creates a different language. Both different and distinctive, Marosas voice has a rare quality: it leaves no trace of her writing. Every poem seems to be said for the first time. It is as if her tone could erase the dimension of the written words. xxxi The staging of the voice of Marosas representation as High Priestess made the creative art a ritual. She did this by adopting the cosmogonic tone contained in her poetry, and by seducing the receivers of her staging of the voice, transforming them from readers into the transfixed listeners of a voice that seemed out of this world.

CODA

We face an undeniable marginalization of poetry from the publishing market. Poetry stands at a crossroad, where it finds itself face to face with its remote origins in the form of an oral emission of a text for an audience, whether present or mediatic. Todays poets are forced to ackowledge a paradox: state-of-the-art technologies challenge poets to think of their writing art in the light of the ancient form of a multimedial staging of the voice. At the same time, they are forced to come to terms with cybernetic transtextuality. It is an established fact that poetry in the 21st century must work with social media and the tools these provide, mixing words with many other forms of language. The reshaping of theoretical paradigms that will create a new methodology for critics and historians of the genre is not only a demand of the present but also a historical debt with the genre. Poetrys distant origins, and its revolutionary canons, have always been a challenge to the narrow boundaries of the littera. At the same time, if poetic composition (as created and promoted with new technological supports) pretends to have any artistic value at all, it will

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require of poets to think more about the staging of the voice in its different forms. To say it more clearly: although poets will never return to orality, having been transversed by writing, they face a challenge to understand that the esthetic value of their poems is also played in and put to test by the staging of the voice. Quotes:

Garibay, K, A.M. Historia de Literatura Nhuatl, Vol. I. Mxico, Porra, 1953, p.11. Mignolo, W, Op. Cit. p.4. iii Cf. Rama ngel, Transculturalidad Narrativa en Amrica Latina [1982], Fundacin . Rama, Montevideo, 1989, p.57. iv Cortazzo, U. Indios y latinos / Utopas, ideologas, literaturas, Vintn editor, Montevideo, 2001, p.48. v Lienhard, Martin, La percepcin de las prctica Mignolo, W. (1986) La lengua, la letra, el territorio (o la crisis de los estudios literarios coloniales) [1986], en Lectura crtica de la literatura americana, Sal Sosnowski (comp.), Biblioteca Ayacucho, Caracas, 1996.s textuales amerindias: apuntes para un debate interdisciplinario, en Pizarro, Ana (comp.) Amrica Latina: Palabra, Literatura e Cultura, So Paulo, Unicamp, 1995, Vol.III., pp.169-185. vi Lord, Albert B.: The Singer of Tales, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1960. vii McLuhan, Marshall: La galaxia Gutenberg (Gnesis del Homo typographicus), Barcelona, PlanetaAgostini, 1962, p.8. viii Cortazzo, U, Op.Cit. p.53. ix Cfr. Brand, A.Se os anderu consigueren falar novamente con Deus, en Sidekum,A. (org.) Histria do imaginario religioso indigena, So Lepoldo, UNISINOS, 1997, p.156. x Bernstein, Charles (Comp.), Close Listening, Poetry and the performed Word, Oxford UniverstiyPress, New York, 1998, p.3. (La traduccin es de mi responsabilidad). xi Zrate, Armando, Antes de la vanguardia, Rodolfo Alonso editor, Buenos Aires, 1976. xii Marinetti, F.T. La declamazione dinmica e sinottica, pliego [Miln, 1916], en Sarmiento, J.A. La poesa Fontica, Libertarias, Madrid, 1991. xiii En Youtube pueden verse, entre otros, los videos: Fragmento Bombardamento de Zang tumb tumb/ por Marinetti: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pt2xvCP7cg&feature=related El poema "Piedigrotta" del futurista Francesco Cangiullo, en versin de Luciano Chessa, en el Italian Cultural Institute de San Francisco, en el marco de The Fortunato Depero opening night: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-HGNAgilaQ. xiv Sarmiento, J.A. La poesa Fontica, Libertarias, Madrid, 1991, pp.107-108. xv Fragmentos del poema Karawane de H.Ball, en una versin de su performance de 1916, puede verse en: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7QspfFDdmU La voz de Hugo Ball leyendo Karawane, en una animacin de video actual puede verse en: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDgvA8OcNSI&NR=1 xvi Ball, H., Flight out of Time: a Dada diary, Viking Press, N.Y., 1974. (Todas las traducciones de este texto son de mi responsabilidad).
i ii

xvii

Ball, H. Op.Cit. p.53. Ball,H. Op.Cit. p.54. xix De Certeau, Michel, The Writing of history, Columbia University Press, New York,1988, p.230. xx Chartier, Roger, El mundo como representacin. Historia cultural: entre prctica y representacin, Gedisa, Barcelona, 1992 xxi Durand, R, The disposition of the voice, en Performance in Postmodern Culture, ed. M. Benamou & Ch. Caramello, Coda Presq31s, Madison, 1977. (La traduccin es de mi responsabilidad).
xviii
xxii

Barthes, R., The pleasure of the text, Hill & Wang, New York, 1975.

xxiii

McCaffery, S., Voice in extremis, en Close Listening/Poetry and the performed word, Edited by Charles Bernstein, Oxford Universtiy Press, New York, 1998. (La traduccin pertenece a L. Haiek y L. Bravo.
Weaver, M., Concrete Poetry, Lugano Review, Ns 5/6, 1966.

xxiv

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xxv

Buenaventura, E. Texto visual, texto sonoro, Revista Graffiti, N10, Julio 1991,Montevideo. xxvi Buenaventura, E. Op. cit. p. 26. xxvii Autobiografa lrica (conferencia, 1956) de Juana de Ibarbourou, cuyo texto agradezco al envo va correo electrnico del investigador Andrs Echeverra. xxviii Pereda, Fernando, Entrada a la poesa / En la voz del autor, Grabado en S.O.D.R.E., Ed. por AS, Montevideo, 1967. xxix Berenguer, Amanda, Renovar la poesa, entrevista de Jorge Ruffinelli, Semanario Marcha, Montevideo 30.6.1973, en El monstruo incesante / expedicin de caza, Arca, Montevideo, 1990 xxx Berenguer, A., en Dicciones, Ayu, Montevideo, 1973. La introduccin del disco, as como un par de sus dicciones, pueden escucharse en: http://audiomaquina.blogspot.com/2010/08/luis-bravo-y-amanda-berenguer.html
xxxi

Foffani, E., Poesa, erotismo y santidad. La flor de Lis, La Nacin, Bs. Aires 21/11/04.

* Luis Bravo (1957). Poet and perfomer, essay writer and teacher at the Teachers College of Uruguay and the University of Montevideo. Previous versions of this essay were published in the Internet:, after his participation in Festival Poesa en Voz Alta, UNAM, Casa del Lago, Mxico, 2007 ; XIX Festival Internacional de Poesa de Medelln, Colombia, 2009; Conference at VI Congreso Nacional y V Internacional de A.P.L.U Fronteras en cuestin, Montevideo, 2010. Published in Revista [Sic] N1 of A.P.L.U., April 2011 and in Peridico de Poesa, UNAM, Mexico, October 2011. Conference in Ohio State University (Coordinated by Professor Abril Trigo), September 2012; Conference at Notre Dame University (Coordinated by Professor Mara Rosa Olviera-Williams, October, 2012. The author points out that this essay is part of an ongoing research.

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