she published her first full-length book, Empire York Street (1979), which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Earlier, she attended the University of British Columbia in Vancouver as a Philosophy student, where the consequences of inhabiting a woman’s body as one from which to write became painfully clear during her second year, in 1975. As she explains:
I spent [time] in the mid-seventies living in a small room on York Avenue, attending UBC, supporting myself by working as a cook. “hazard of the occupation” was workshopped in Pat Lowther’s class, which I attended until her murder, at which point I quit school and turned to cooking. What isolation and unease I felt in those days before … I started to explore my relationship to language itself! (Svendsen 263)
Pat Lowther was a working-class poet just gaining national acclaim in Canada, a rare achievement for a woman then. Moure enrolled in Pat Lowther’s senior Creative Writing workshop (as a non-major) to have a woman mentor. But Lowther went missing a few weeks into the course, and was later found dead, murdered by her husband. This event reverberates subtly through Moure’s oeuvre; in establishing her own practice, she had to confront “how a woman wanting to write can be a territorial impossibility” (O Cidadán 79). The university soon replaced Lowther with a male instructor, who in his first class wrote poetry on the blackboard in Latin, a language that Moure, raised Catholic, had felt barred from learning in school because of her gender. All of this, to Moure, augmented the gender violence of the situation.
After leaving university, Moure worked as a cook for CN Rail (later VIA Rail, the Canadian passenger train service) on trains between Vancouver and Winnipeg. Two decades later, she left VIA as Senior Officer of Customer Relations and Employee Communications, based in Montreal. She then worked as a freelance translator, editor, and communications specialist. Both her lower middle class roots and her expertise in communications are of great and ongoing importance to her poetics. In communications theory, noise is an interference in a communications channel, or involves those signals that are peripheral to the communication goal. Moure’s poetic intervention takes noise as an object of attention, even desire: noise acts as a threshold of relationality. In O Cidadán, Moure clearly articulates this question as central to her poetic inquiry: “What if we listen to the noise and not the signal?” (102). From another poem in that collection, I draw the title for this volume:
When “my language” fails, only then can we detect signals that harken to a porosity of borders or lability of zones … (across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, not just the visual. as in planetary noise) … (O Cidadán 79)
Moure adds that “reading (bodies or others) is itself always a kind of weak signal communication, a process of tapping signals that scarcely rise off the natural noise floor” (79). Poetry may be hard to hear in the din of globalized commerce, but in directing our attention towards what is deemed “planetary noise,” to the “little theatres,” Moure suggests we are better able to assume our civic responsibility.
Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure is organized chronologically in seven sections that trace her poetic trajectories and shifting use of noise as a poetic medium and a tool of perception. The editing process has been collaborative: I proposed the theme and title and then we negotiated the contents, and our conversations affected decisions about inclusions. Moure curated “Polyresonances (Transborder Noise)” herself and contributed a postface on translation. Although this volume is organized with readers of poetry in mind, it will open productive ways of viewing Moure’s oeuvre for readers from any field, expert and novice alike.
EARLY SIGNALS (First Cycle)
While living in Vancouver, Canada, from 1975 to 1985, Moure published Empire, York Street (1979), Wanted Alive (1983), and Domestic Fuel (1985), as well as a chapbook, The Whisky Vigil (1981), which included her line drawings. In search of a community of writers, Moure joined the Vancouver Industrial Writers’ Union and did her early reading and writing in the restaurants and bars of Mount Pleasant and the Downtown Eastside—“Canada’s poorest postal code”—alongside Tom Wayman, Phil Hall, Zoë Landale, Kate Braid, Calvin Wharton, and other members.
Erín Moure: [I] read with those writers and we talked about that interface between poetry and the street a lot; I was always in favor of a more radical approach to poetry. Wayman’s claim was that working people needed to see themselves in poetry, though I found my own railway coworkers were interested in far more than that. Also, the emphasis on working class in that writing excluded gay or lesbian consciousness, which was something that I at some point around 1980 could no longer deny as part of my work.
Moure published her second full-length collection in 1983; the following year, she left for Montreal and began a new phase of her writing that would soon include transnational collaborations, polylingual explorations, and a commitment to queer feminist analysis within her poetry.
The feminist literary awakening in North America was made possible by the groundwork done in women’s collectives that, starting in the 1960s and ’70s, founded and ran women’s presses, bookstores, magazines and newsletters, as well as health clinics, women’s shelters, campaigns for women’s control over their own bodies, and anti-rape initiatives. This supporting network enabled inventiveness in the literary arena as well. Moure attended the Women and Words, Les femmes et les mots conference, held in Vancouver in 1983, one of the first feminist literary conferences in Canada. It was “a watershed event, [as] it represented the culmination of more than a decade of feminist activism on many fronts. It also inspired many more ongoing activities” (Butling and Rudy 2005, 24). For Moure, the event was as crucial for supplying key reading material as it was for sparking discussions with other women writers—Nicole Brossard, Claire Harris, France Théoret, Gail Scott, and many others—whose work demonstrated the poetic felicity of non-mimetic language.
Shortly after arriving in the city, Moure met translator Lucille Nelson at the Montreal branch of Les femmes et les mots, and they formed a two-person reading group to discuss Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology. Gradually, Moure began to devour philosophy and gender theory on her own: along with the philosophers mentioned earlier, works by Gayatri Spivak, Jean-François Lyotard, Rosi Braidotti, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Elizabeth Grosz were prominent in her reading at that time. Notably as well, Cixous brought the fiction of Clarice Lispector to Moure’s attention, which caused Moure to puzzle about its translation before she could read Portuguese.
This period of extensive reading led to the shift in Moure’s own writing that began to surface in her Governor General’s Award winning collection Furious (1988). The book opens with an epigraph from Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations—a postmodern novel about gender, class, and narration—and ends with a section called “The Acts,” in which Moure deconstructs the gender privilege operating in language structures, and its effect on poetry. Lesbian sexuality is figured as noise that disturbs even the structure of the line and the page: as “the howl” of grief and desire in “Rose” (37); as “the wings of the cicadas” (45); and as “the characteristic whelp or yelp / that says I’ve found something” in “Three Signs” (53). Twenty-six years later in Insecession, Moure suggests: “Poems activate more areas of the human cortex than do non-ambiguous speech, they bring excedent light and hormonal energy into the dark matter of the frontal cortex; when we read literature we equip our brains to deal with ‘ambiguous speech’” (150). Noise and eroticism are irrevocably joined in Moure’s poetry.
The poems selected for this section expose the major trajectories of Moure’s poetics from thermodynamics to cross-species interactions to the relationship between death, writing, allergy, and translation, to the anarchic eruption of humor. These poems echo and refract in later books; Moure treats her writing over the years as material “subject to abrasion, deformation, collapse and passages” (My Beloved Wager 95) and thus as material ripe for reconfiguration and regeneration. From the very first poem of Empire
