Vol. 17 No. 34 (2022): I sing because the moment exists and demands: the poetics of the voice in the pandemic period

In the last two years, the atypicality of the pandemic period has reconfigured human relationships. Our proximity to death became less strange, technologies became more present and the home office became a more familiar term, an inseparable accomplice, including in the manifestations of art in general. In this panorama, the reception of this moment by the poets of the voice was not unrelated. Thus, the question is: how did these relationships take place in the oral-based poetic production? In what way and at what levels has the social isolation imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic for at least two years impacted the relationships between artists, poets and more voice professionals (singers, singers, repentistas, cordelistas, aboiadores, teachers (as), etc) during this period? And in terms of their organization as a social group, have there been any significant changes? Of what nature? How did such relationships happen, for example, in the remote teaching room? How to understand the performance, in the Zumthonian way, in these circumstances of production and reception?

These themes are flexible for different epistemologies, although some reflective fields privilege them, such as the interdisciplinarity of the first generation of Cultural Studies as an academic institution, symbolized in the founding fathers: Raimond Williams, Edward P. Thompson, Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. In addition to the inter and transdisciplinary view, institutional marginality and the bridge between culture and its power relations are relevant to the proposed theme.

If the theme involves the poetics of the voice, this voice evokes its own presence even when it is absent, because it is not captured only through listening, but through all the components that constitute it: the linguistic elements, the tradition, the physical movements. and even its interference with the body in time and space. These circumstances are related to what Paul Zumthor understood as a sensory effect: when a word is pronounced, it demonstrates the capacity to fill, as a representation of the body that produces it in its not only biological, but historical, mythological and literary aspects.

It is in this perspective, therefore, that this dossier proposes: to accept research inserted in the great umbrella that welcomes the multiple faces of the poetics of voices, almost always made invisible by the traditional poetic canon, and impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic; edge voices, latent, presentified, repressed and silenced, including in the classroom; (de)sung voices, (re)invented by virtue of oral tradition; voices that, when echoing in the other, are refracted, resignified, denounced and transformed.