The Staging of Poetry´s Voice: ancient and present media art

By Luis Bravo*

Translated to English by Fanny del Río.

“[…] 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 poem’s 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 ever-changing 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

1

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

2

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 pluri-systemic 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

Lienhard’s 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 organizations”vii 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

3

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 Mallarmé 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

4

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 Mbyá 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 ñe’ ê porä 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 Mbyá 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 (né ëng) that

incarnate in the officiating priests of the ritual, who assimilate the energy of

the Supreme Being, Ñamandú.

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.” viii

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 Guaraní, 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

5

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

cyber-space. 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

6

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 anti-commercial 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.”

i Garibay, K, A.M. Historia de Literatura Náhuatl, Vol. I. México, Porrúa, 1953, p.11.ii Mignolo, W, Op. Cit. p.4.iii Cf. Rama Ángel, Transculturalidad Narrativa en América Latina [1982], Fundación Á. Rama, Montevideo, 1989, p.57.iv Cortazzo, U. Indios y latinos / Utopías, ideologías, literaturas, Vintén editor, Montevideo, 2001, p.48.v Lienhard, Martin, “La percepción de las práctica Mignolo, W. (1986) “La lengua, la letra, el territorio (o la crisis de los estudios literarios coloniales)” [1986], en Lectura crítica de la literatura americana, Saúl Sosnowski (comp.), Biblioteca Ayacucho, Caracas, 1996.s textuales amerindias: apuntes para un debate interdisciplinario”, en Pizarro, Ana (comp.) América Latina: Palabra, Literatura e Cultura, São Paulo, Unicamp, 1995, Vol.III., pp.169-185.viLord, Albert B.: The Singer of Tales, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1960.vii McLuhan, Marshall: La galaxia Gutenberg (Génesis del “Homo typographicus”), Barcelona, Planeta- Agostini, 1962, p.8.viii Cortazzo, U, Op.Cit. p.53.ix Cfr. Brand, A.”Se os Ñanderu consigueren falar novamente con Deus…”, en Sidekum,A. (org.) História do imaginario religioso indigena, São Lepoldo, UNISINOS, 1997, p.156.x Bernstein, Charles (Comp.), Close Listening, Poetry and the performed Word, Oxford UniverstiyPress, New York, 1998, p.3. (La traducción es de mi responsabilidad).xi Zárate, Armando, Antes de la vanguardia, Rodolfo Alonso editor, Buenos Aires, 1976.

7

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 againthe letter of her gunner in the battlefield)

Ever since the 80s, many visual techniques, once rejected by the

Avant-garde 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 libertá”,

8

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. xiii

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

xii Marinetti, F.T. “La declamazione dinámica e sinottica”, pliego [Milán, 1916], en Sarmiento, J.A. La poesía Fonética, 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 versión 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.

9

expression of inner life and sentimental sadness. It makes a mockery of

musical virtuosness, of Paganini, of Kubelik, of musician cherubins playing

Benozzo’s 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 Zurich’s 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. xv 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 Ball’s “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

xiv Sarmiento, J.A. La poesía Fonética, Libertarias, Madrid, 1991, pp.107-108.xv Fragmentos del poema “Karawane” de H.Ball, en una versión de su performance de 1916, puede verse en: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7QspfFDdmU La voz de Hugo Ball leyendo Karawane, en una animación de video actual puede verse en: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDgvA8OcNSI&NR=1xvi Ball, H., Flight out of Time: a Dada diary, Viking Press, N.Y., 1974. (Todas las traducciones de este texto son de mi responsabilidad).

10

In Ball’s 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 poem’s 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 difference…The 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

“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 poem’s 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

xvii Ball, H. Op.Cit. p.53.xviii Ball,H. Op.Cit. p.54.xix De Certeau, Michel, The Writing of history, Columbia University Press, New York,1988, p.230.

11

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 spectator’s every sense. Roger Chartier says that the members of an

audience in a poetry performance are “oralizing-readers,” because they are

not passive consumers of speech but interactive presences in the “ongoing”

textual event. xx 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 text’s 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.

Régis 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.” xxi 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

xx Chartier, Roger, El mundo como representación. Historia cultural: entre práctica y representación, Gedisa, Barcelona, 1992xxi Durand, R, “The disposition of the voice”, en Performance in Postmodern Culture, ed. M. Benamou & Ch. Caramello, Coda Presq31s, Madison, 1977. (La traducción es de mi responsabilidad).

12

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.” xxv To stress the loss of artistic value of the live word in

western civilization, Buenaventura turns to A. Artaud’s 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

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

xxiiiMcCaffery, S., “Voice in extremis”, en Close Listening/Poetry and the performed word, Edited by Charles Bernstein, Oxford Universtiy Press, New York, 1998. (La traducción pertenece a L. Haiek y L. Bravo. xxiv Weaver, M., “Concrete Poetry”, Lugano Review, Nºs 5/6, 1966.xxv Buenaventura, E. “Texto visual, texto sonoro”, Revista Graffiti, Nº10, Julio 1991,Montevideo.xxvi Buenaventura, E. Op. cit. p. 26.

13

Why are poets the privileged regarding an oral mise en scene? Because

poets know more about the poem’s 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 poem’s final word, something which might be

considered a projection of the “poem-epitaph” as a concept, after Artaud’s

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

poem’s 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.

14

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 author’s voice. The inner ear of the

reader finds in writing a good guide to the text’s 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 poem’s

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 poem’s

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

xxvii “Autobiografía lírica” (conferencia, 1956) de Juana de Ibarbourou, cuyo texto agradezco al envío vía correo electrónico del investigador Andrés Echeverría.

15

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.

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 poet’s “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

Pereda’s 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 Pereda’s 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 don’t know, to re-invent it again in my voice […] The experience is direct, improvised, and I cannot repeat it. I found

xxviii Pereda, Fernando, “Entrada a la poesía / En la voz del autor”, Grabado en S.O.D.R.E., Ed. por AS, Montevideo, 1967.

16

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 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

texts’s poetical attributes:

“[Marosa di Giorgio’s] 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, Marosa’s 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 Marosa’s 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

xxix Berenguer, Amanda, “Renovar la poesía”, entrevista de Jorge Ruffinelli, Semanario Marcha, Montevideo 30.6.1973, en El monstruo incesante / expedición de caza, Arca, Montevideo, 1990xxx Berenguer, A., en Dicciones, Ayuí, Montevideo, 1973. La introducción del disco, así como un par de sus “dicciones”, pueden escucharse en: http://audiomaquina.blogspot.com/2010/08/luis-bravo-y-amanda-berenguer.htmlxxxi Foffani, E., “Poesía, erotismo y santidad. La flor de Lis”, La Nación, 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 Poesía en Voz Alta, UNAM, Casa del Lago, México, 2007 ; XIX Festival Internacional de Poesía de Medellín, Colombia, 2009; Conference at VI Congreso Nacional y V Internacional de A.P.L.U “Fronteras en cuestión”, Montevideo, 2010. Published in Revista [Sic] Nº1 of A.P.L.U., April 2011 and in Periódico de Poesía, UNAM, Mexico, October 2011. Conference in Ohio State University (Coordinated by Professor Abril Trigo), September 2012; Conference at Notre Dame University (Coordinated by Professor María Rosa Olviera-Williams, October, 2012.The author points out that this essay is part of an ongoing research.

17

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. Today’s 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. Poetry’s

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 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:

18