The lyrical speaker: Finding your own voice through poetry!

By Mary Marques RSS Thu, April 7, 2022

“La poesía es un espacio de libertad/ Poetry is a space of freedom”.

Carlos José Pérez Sámano, Mexican poet and writer

Poetry explores the language and its limitations. It’s a way to get closer to reality. The poet invents diverse forms of expressions. The words, phrases, and sentences weave visual images of communication. Poetry is an opportunity to connect with the various levels of consciousness and meaning. As a kaleidoscope, poetry gives the reader the freedom to explore through layers of interpretation.

Last year, the Mexican poet and writer Carlos José Pérez Sámano presented “Finding Our Voice: Poetry Workshop” to a local and international virtual audience that congregated, in this space, to learn about the structure, techniques and musicality of writing poetry. Sámano mentioned that a poem “breaks with the structure of the thought” and, at the same time, creates “white spaces” telling a story with the words; but underneath that message, there is a narration not being told. Like a puzzle, the reader’s challenge is to discover the layers of interpretation and meaning of the poem.

According to the Mexican writer, the lyrical speaker is the storyteller and not the poet. In order to decode the words into visual images, the reader must read the poem aloud. Its musicality will provide the lecturer another level of interpretation. Please see below the recording of this first virtual creative workshop transmitted last year during the hard months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a continuing collaboration, this year the Free Library, Acción Colombia, and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Temple University are working together to present the following two programs during the celebration of the XVI Poetry International Festival/Festival Internacional de Poesía (FIP) “Palabra en el Mundo in April and May:

¡Los esperamos!


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