Reading Voices: Critical Perspectives in Contemporary Poetry Reading

The paper focuses on voice in relation to contemporary poetic language. The voice of a poet who reads aloud his own composition puts back into play multiple relationships and similarities regarding the process of creating that specific text, as well as the very process of poetic creation. The physical voice has always been tied to poetry, where it often acts as a fracture between syntax and prosody, making evident the variations between the published and the vocal version. Through its vocal execution a text is always re-evoked in a different way within a specific time and space, as well as provided with a new relationship with the subject who is listening and understanding it. By working on Claudio Rodríguez and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s vocal rendition of some specific poems, I am focusing on the relationship between voice – as a body gesture and the expression of a particular subjectivity – and authorship. Considering new interdisciplinary approaches stimulated by the study of voice in the arts and humanities, it is crucial to rethinking concepts such as “subject” and “author” as well as “authorship” or “authority”.