The Insufficient Form: Critical Drifts on Sound and Expansion in Argentine Poetry

Abstract

This article is meant to approach the concept of expansion and its zones of theoretical influence –object of discussion of the present critique–. These are not new questions, much less problems circumscribed to the phenomenon of poetry itself. Paradoxically, these are attempts at conceptualization in which poetry tends to disappear as an object of critical interest. Behind the narrative, the audiovisual or sound piece, the artistic installation, the performance, the electronic works or the digital literature, a poem seems to be too simple in its objectives and in the composition of its materialities: a text, a microphone, an amplifier, or not even that, taking into account that we could be faced with the experience of listening to a voice in an empty space. So, first of all, we recapitulate some discussions that seem central to us in relation to the idea of expansion in contemporary art. This allows us to update, towards the end of this text, some questions about poetry and its heterogeneous present, deceptively simple and difficult to grasp. More than anything, a certain susceptibility that has to be read and analyzed from the text or the book; or sometimes, when other supports and media intervene, through the idea of the expansive and the non-specific, among other categories that are frequently heard in recent years.