Popular poetry is a cultural phenomena originated in the Northeastern Brazil. A social practice recognized through time and tradition that when seen as a language phenomena represents one field of human activity in which genres are materialized, either in oral and written forms. On this work popular poetry is treated in the relation speech-write from the standpoint of the linguistic continuum. The selected genres for this research are cordel, written genre of popular poetry, repente as a genre ontologically oral, therefore recognized by the name of cantoria because of its context of production and virtual contention, a digital emergent genre which is formed by textual elements of both the spoken and written ones, cordel and cantoria for this matter. The virtual contention exist as genre when is the virtual meeting between poets in the cyberspace to produce poetry takes place, as they use the same strategies of textualization of its counterparts, cordel and cantoria, on the other hand making use of a new technology: the internet. These three genres were analyzed from the stand point of their resemblances a priori, as to be distributed inside the linguistic continuum which occurs in the relation between spoken and written genres. Aspects such as speech and writing, the debate on hypertext, as well as the principle of transmutation of the existent genres to originate others with their own characteristics and the analysis of genres are the central points in this investigation work.
