Troveros orientales contemporáneos, nuevas escuchas y lecturas

Abstract

From the concept of the staging of poetry's voice we propose to revisit listening and reading the contemporary Uruguayan poetry, bringing in the voices of those called "troveros orientales" (the literal translation would be "oriental minstrels" due to the fact that Uruguay sits on the eastern or oriental side of the Uruguay river across from Argentina). They combined the oral format, rooted in the gauchos' tradition and the renewed staging of the voice in the oral poetry during the mid sixties, presenting challenges that shook deeply seated prejudices on both sides of the cultural spectrum: those of the cultured metropolis and its canonic academia and those arising from the conservative country tradition. In a cultural territory still firmly entrenched in the dichotomies country/city, high/low culture, new forms of poetry kept surging, creating a path of renovation in a genre always ahead of the aesthetic changes and ruptures, while being increasingly marginalized from the editorial market.