Poetry at The Residencia

Audio Books

The series Poetry at the Residencia offers as a living document the voices of the main Spanish contemporary poets that have presented their readings at the Residencia de Estudiantes since 1988. Each volume includes a CD, a transcript and notes about the life and work of the poets.

3. La voz de de Jaime Gil de Biedma

Jaime Gil de Biedma read his poetry on December 9th, 1988, though, as he himself pointed out, his relationship with this institution had begun many years earlier, through his friendship with Gabriel Celaya and Gustavo Durán and especially, with the director of the Residencia, Alberto Jiménez Fraud and his wife, Natalia Cossío, with whom he shared unforgettable months in Oxford and whom he dedicated warm reminisces. In this reading, the poet added many anecdotes and comments on his personal vision of poetic creation, read poems from his main books, selected by himself, which offer a closer look at the path of one of the great voices of Spanish poetry in the second half of the twentieth century.

4. La voz de José Ángel Valente

On April13th, 1989 José Ángel Valente read the first of several times at the Residencia. Valente paid a “living tribute” to the founder of the Residencia, his friend Alberto Jiménez Fraud, in the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death. He invited us not to a “simple reading” but to a “shared experience of the potential of poetic words, that, when they come and we receive them, invite us to enter into an extremely intimate territory, the place of no place, nowhere , in an empty and creating space at the same time. “

5. La voz de Álvaro Mutis

La voz de Álvaro Mutis collects the readings of the Colombian poet at the Residencia on April 24th, 1990 and October 22nd, 1992. Mutis established an authentic communication between the poet and his audience, a magical circle of deep meaning in literary work: «Yo he escrito solamente con el exclusivo propósito de que ese ámbito y ese paisaje sobreviva, fugazmente ya lo sé, un poco al olvido y al desgaste de la memoria, que es implacable».

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