as a “black noise / that typewriter makes // outside,” situated between the writer and the birds. Insects—who appear dead between double frames but are about to wake up after winter hibernation—adjoin the writing body in the struggle and confusion of spring:
between double panes, dead
insects. wasp, wire-legged
spider, beetle, luminous flies
all on their shoulders in dusty
sill
when the true thaw begins,
& the equinox they will awake,
struggle for air.
flip again onto damaged legs to devour
dirt from the ledge, patch crackt
glass w/ mucous & wait (10)
The image of these damaged but productive insects echoes in “Snow Door” from Furious (1988):
Dead flies between the panes, winter flies that come to life when they warm up, but go stupid from the freezing, & can’t remember flight exactly, not exact enough, they topple on their backs & spin & buzz. Having forgotten everything except that they used to fly (19)
More obliquely, in “The Jewel” from WSW, sleep, frost, and darkness seem to promise a new form of perception or consciousness for the writing body:
The thyme in the mouth risen gorging the head full of sleep, I
wake up, am waking, my body alone naked house silent
around the wall, bed, drug of sleep, oh my drug
my hands warm tongue soft sheet in the mouth taste of thyme & silver
frost, on the window, light enters, the jewel light enters &
the darkness, begins (18)
The material of these poems echoes and resonates, and is reshaped, reframed and recalled in each phase of Moure’s oeuvre. In her early work, noise represents the productive blindspot that leads to transformation and changes in perception. Noise is figured as the mechanical sound of the typewriter, as the “terrific noise of light wakening” (“Bird,” Wanted Alive 1983, 15), and as “the noise of the book” (“Philosophy of Language,” Domestic Fuel 1985, 54). Listening for the echoes, a reader is asked to continually relocate her perceptions in relation to the movements of the poems. This relocation is a source of readerly pleasure.
CIVIC SIGNALS (A NOISE CYCLE) & NOISE RISES (Citizen Trilogy + Pillage Laud)
With the success of Furious, Moure entered a fifteen-year period of intense output and stunning breakthroughs. Between the years 1989 and 2002, Moure published six collections as well as her acclaimed altered translation of Pessoa, Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person, and a co-translation (with Robert Majzels) of Nicole Brossard’s Installations. Over the same period, queer activist networks were remapped in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, queer theory gained traction in the academy and the Canadian “censorship wars” saw the seizure of gay and lesbian reading materials by Canadian authorities at the US/Canada border. If Moure responded to these conditions by devising poetic methods to risk the limit of understanding, it was because conventional geopolitical and psychosocial mappings of the spaces where she lived were quite literally deadly.
WSW (West South West) (1989) and Sheepish Beauty, Civilian Love (1992) followed Furious. These books link poetic structures and processes to bodily ones. In her 1996 essay, “Speaking the Unspeakable: Responding to Censorship,” Moure explains:
The view of the body most akin to mine is Spinoza’s, which I first encountered via Gilles Deleuze. Spinoza defines a body in two ways, which work in simultaneity: first as composed of particles, an infinite number of particles in motion or at rest, thus defined not by forms but by velocities; second, as a capacity for affecting or being affected by other bodies, so that part of a body’s it-ness is its relationality. To me, there’s a clear marker here for community—broadly speaking, all other beings we are in contact with—as an indispensable part of our definition of who we are as individuals. (My Beloved Wager 97)
These preoccupations with the relationship between individual and community informed her work in a trilogy of books: Search Procedures (1996), A Frame of The Book / The Frame of A Book (1999), and O Cidadán (2002). As Moure examines the many practices that create our world, from our most intimate interfaces at our cellular and neurological limits to our cultural and political exchanges, she introduces languages other than English—French, Galician, Portuguese, Spanish—into the poems. Lexicons derived from science and technology likewise alter the tension in Moure’s texts of this period, and she draws upon noise’s productive capacity in order to create new words. O Cidadán, the final and most complex book in the trilogy, addresses the relationship between self and others, which is to say, citizenship. O Cidadán is built from four forms: Georgettes (lesbian love poems); catalogues of harm; documents; and aleatory poems that include banners, calculations, photos, and film scripts. The culmination of a decade of work, the poems selected from O Cidadán form the axis of Planetary Noise, as they condense the formal and thematic reverberations and modulations that exist across Moure’s oeuvre.
Pillage Laud (1999, republished 2011) is in excess of the trilogy but related to it. It, too, probes the interface between lesbian textuality and (desiring) machine; in it, phrases were selected by hand (a lesbian sex-organ par excellence) from blocks of computer-generated sentences, and organized into poems assigned to a locale (conforming to N. Katherine Hayle’s definition of “hypertext”). These “hi-toned obscurantist lesbo smut” poems, as Moure has impishly called them (Wager 145), are an investigation of “poetic form, [of] what the brain can understand emotionally from the poem as a whole (the macro level) even when in individual sentences (the micro level) semantic value is missing—there’s no apparent sense” (145). Noise, here, functions as conduit for desire that reroutes attention and serves to “wrench open the circle of understanding” (148).
ATURUXOS CALADOS (Galician Cycle) & AN ABSOLUTE CLAMOROUS DIN (Ukrainian Cycle)
The last two of Moure’s poetic cycles represented in this volume, the Galician and the Ukrainian, are interconnected and represent over a decade of work from 2003 to 2015 and were both sparked at least in part by her Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person: A Transelation of Alberto Caeiro / Fernando Pessoa’s O Guardador de Rebanhos (2001). Pessoa’s use of heteronyms—or fully developed writing personas that have independent philosophies, biographies, and writing styles—began to influence Moure’s own work during this period. The word “persona” is related to the mask, to the public face, and to the Latin personare, a word that contains the idea of “soundings” in “-sonare.” Moure’s polynyms (heteronyms, part-heteronyms, and escaped heteronyms, including those indicated by the altered spelling of her own name) can be usefully considered as “sonic masks”—as language sounding through the writer’s body, resulting in characters with their own ideas and acts, separate from those of the author. In these cycles, theatre and noise poetics inform each other, and Moure, with her sonic masks, interrupts the turbulence of large-scale violence by deploying small-scale modes of listening.
When Italian Futurists F. T. Marinetti and Luigi Russolo celebrated the “art of noises,” as Russolo called it, they did so by incorporating the onomatopoeic sounds of trench warfare, among other mechanical
