Further Reading 176
Erín Moure: Poetry as Planetary Noise
This is intertextuality where we are a very small part of the intertext in the planetary and inter-planetary ecology … Relativity, probability, chance—we are their subjects and they are ours. PHYLLIS WEBB1
Erín Moure is one of English North America’s most prolific and daring contemporary poets. Her work in and among languages has altered the conditions of possibility for poets of several generations—myself included. With her ear tilted close to the noise floor, Moure listens for patterns arising from contemporary Englishes and from “minor” languages such as Galician, and shifts language structures away from commerce so as to hear other possibilities, other tensions. In so doing, subjectivity, justice, and politics can be considered anew. Moure’s work is transnational in scope; her lines transit from one articulated locality to arrive at or include another. Her poems attend, in various registers, to bodily capacities and fragilities as much as to the operations of power. Moure’s poetry travels joyously through noise, and sometimes even as noise, via various channels and contexts, refusing absorption. For Moure, “Poetry is a limit case of language; it’s language brought to its limits (which are usually in our own heads) where its workings are strained and its sinews are visible, and where its relationship with bodies and time and space can crack open” (Montreal Review of Books). Facing a Moure poem as a reader, I appreciate the disquieting rhythms, sudden symmetries, outlandish puns, and general pleasure caused by roiling syntax and audacious neologisms. Even without knowing the majority of the languages that Moure draws on, I am compelled by the sounds and echoes that her poems amplify, and the patterns of letters and words that they make visible on the page.
Moure’s work is critically acclaimed, and her fourth book, Furious (1988), won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry—Canada’s most prestigious national poetry award at that time, an equivalent of an American Pulitzer Prize. As of 2016, Moure’s oeuvre includes seventeen collections of poetry (one collaborative), several chapbooks, a collection of essays, My Beloved Wager: Essays from a Writing Practice (2009), and a biopoetics, Insecession, that sonically relocates Chus Pato’s Secession. In addition, Moure has translated works of poetry, theatre, literary criticism, and creative non-fiction from four languages—French, Galician, Spanish, and Portuguese—into English. As with her own work, her translations and essays are trailblazing and often push the boundaries of form and test the ideological limits of these discursive practices. Her other accolades include the Pat Lowther Memorial Award for Domestic Fuel (1985), and the A.M. Klein Award for Poetry for WSW (West South West) (1989) and for Little Theatres (2005). Her poetry has been translated into several languages, and two of her books are translated in full, Little Theatres into Galician and French, and O Cadoiro into German.
Moure most often engineers book-length networks of poems. Since Search Procedures (1996), which initiated her first trilogy, her work has been organized into groupings of books that probe a series of inquiries from different angles. Moure’s interest in seriality is evinced as early as “Riel: In the Season of his Birth” from her first collection, Empire York Street (1979). Her early work shows her familiarity with Charles Olson’s 1950 essay “Projective Verse,” and as Heather Fitzgerald points out, “asthma is a defining … feature of her writing practice” (Fitzgerald, “Finesse into Mess” 115). The lung is one site that figures textural difference in Moure’s oeuvre, and the ear is another site where differential textures—of several languages, of environmental “noise,” and of heterogeneous voices—meet and mix. But the hands: “those organs of power and insistence, organs of tactility, le toucher … [o]rgans that write” (Moure, My Beloved Wager 92) are just as important and integrated into a poetics that refuses to erase difference, no matter the scale. For Moure, “the hand is also a sex organ” (My Beloved Wager 92) and the mouth is an organ of desire, of translation: a chamber of libidinous exchange between lungs and ears. Moure’s poetic inquiries into bodily capacities and connections internalize as well as extend the field of composition. In Moure’s work, the lines and trajectories in language emerge from a body in contact with its environment and cultural location(s). Moure herself points out:
It is critical to consider the body not as self-enclosed and complete but as a coding practice; to understand, as Donna Haraway does, that what constitutes an organism or a machine is in fact indeterminate. They are coded by culture, oh yes, but there are ways to have agency and code back … I call the reader’s attention in my work to missing words, repetitions, misspellings, and jarring representations—or not representations but designations: machine struggles and coalescences that construct selves that collide, molecularize, pine, adopt, enjoy and confront a wide range of emotions and desires. I have no easy answers; I don’t even look for ease. (My Beloved Wager 94–95)
Out of the disturbance of breath, of voice, Moure re(con)figures what counts as noise and what counts as signal. And she does this over and over again, calling fixed locations and sedimented identities and relations constantly into question, “coding back.”
Digital literary innovator Michael Joyce was the first to read Moure’s poetry as theoretically relevant to hypertextuality. In Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics (1996), Joyce uses passages from poems in Moure’s Furious and WSW (West South West) to clarify what hypertextuality is (180–181, 207). In other words, he treats her poetry as theoretical text—a very fruitful approach to Moure’s oeuvre, and one that begs to be taken up more often (and not just on the subject of hypertextuality). For Joyce, a hypertext means “reading and writing in an order you choose, where the choices you make change the nature of what you read or write” (Othermindedness 38). This is an ethos embraced by Moure from Furious (1988) onward. Moure’s use of noise—the part of communication that is deemed unwanted and unwelcome and yet is unavoidable—as both medium and ethical threshold in her poetry is very much related to the sorts of choices that frame Joyce’s description of hypertext. Moure is a philosopher of cognition and the politics of reading, and her poetic works are the mode of her interdisciplinary inquiries. For the critics who have dismissed her work as “difficult” and “unintelligible”—and there have been several of those over the years, both in the popular press and in academic circles—critic and poet Jamie Dopp has useful advice:
In reading Moure, then, it is important to be as receptive as possible to discomfort, to instability, to “the edge of confusion” that the poems invite the reader to inhabit. It is not always easy to be receptive. There is a tremendous disruptive energy in Moure’s later work; it has the in-your-face celebratory quality of Hélène Cixous’s Medusa laughing. (Dopp 269)
The “edge of confusion” is a threshold of particular importance in Moure’s poetry. Many readers recognize and celebrate that as a thinker and worker in language, Moure is tireless, and her practice deeply engages with reading and listening as ethical modes of encounter. Moure’s theories of citizenship and subjectivity have met with intense critical attention (Carrière, Dowling, Fitzpatrick, MacDonald, Moyes, Rudy, Skibsrud), and recent articles have also drawn connections between Moure’s poetics and queer affect theory (Moore, Williams and Marinkova).
Moure often responds to the work of other poets and philosophers as well as visual and theatre artists within her own texts, and it is not unusual to find suggestions for reading at the end of her own books. Some of her companions in letters include contemporary American poets C.D. Wright, Susan Howe, Myung Mi Kim, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Barbara Guest, Norma Cole; philosophers as diverse as Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Luce Irigaray, and Judith Butler; as well as edgy modernists such as Gertrude Stein, Fernando Pessoa, Federico García Lorca, Paul Celan, Samuel Beckett, Ingeborg Bachmann, Miklós Radnóti, Daniil Kharms, Heinrich Müller, and Jean-Luc Lagarce. Galician poet Chus Pato has been one of Moure’s most important interlocutors in the twenty-first century.
