Читать книгу Planetary Noise - Erín Moure - Страница 7
ОглавлениеErín 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.
Moure was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in 1955. At the age of twenty-four, 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 York Street (1979), “february: turn toward spring” (10), environment is put before system when “the clutter / of words” is described 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 elements, into their idea of war on culture and women. Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism” of 1909 announces that: “We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women … we will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice” (Documents of 20th Century Art 22). Russolo has a chapter in The Art of Noises celebrating sonic warfare called simply “The Noises of War” (49). These attitudes towards and approaches to war exemplify what Moure struggles against in these poetic cycles when she and Elisa Sampedrín (a Moure polynym) address the affective aftermath of twentieth-century genocides in Europe. The sonic masks provide only one among many techniques of listening that gently but tenaciously refuse the recklessness of the historical avant-garde and insist upon other noise poetics. Theatre and noise poetics join in Moure’s later works in a dramaturgy that does not represent but that casts noise as an ethical threshold, an invitation to expand one’s capacity to listen. In so doing, her theatre (or poetry as theatre) develops an art of memory based not so much on the intensity of the image, as are classical and medieval arts of memory, but on the porosity of external and internal borders and their amplification of sonic ambiguity. In this theatre, actors perform the work of listening and, as such, the traditional hierarchies of Western theatre begin to erode. Rather than looking to find and display artifacts of conflict for the audience, Moure’s theatre acknowledges that conflict is already a condition of life in late capitalism, and instead she uses stagings to shift attention to other life conditions, if only briefly.
In both her Galician and Ukrainian cycles, Moure nomadically traverses social-historical, linguistic, and subjective spaces between urban Calgary and Montreal, rural Alberta, Galicia in Spain, and the Austro-Hungarian imperial province of Galicia, the east of which is today part of Ukraine. Moure has a personal connection to each of these places. Her father’s grandfather emigrated from Spain’s Galicia, one of the reasons that Moure chose to learn the Galician language (Insecession 44). Her mother was born in Velikye Hlibovychi, at the time in Poland, though it was once in Austro-Hungarian Galicia and lies presently in Ukraine. Both these places faced fratricidal and genocidal atrocity in the twentieth century. “There is a side of Europe we do not know and never learned of and still do not learn of … I still seek an ancestral cadence. A cadence of being and thought and harmony with trees” (Insecession 44). In approaching translation and exploring subjectivity (as cadence) in her poems, Moure gleaned cues from Clarice Lispector’s use of aproximação and from the works of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms. For Moure, aproximação means “to give [something] room and listen” (My Beloved Wager 180). She places this translational mode in relation to Fernando Pessoa’s “amplification of identity” (Wager 180) to astonishing effect in her poems, stating that Pessoa does not fragment identity but “embraces it excessively in his heteronyms” (emphasis in original; Wager 181).
In the poems and texts of Little Theatres (2005), the initial book in the Galician series, we are introduced to Galician, a language of the extreme west of Europe, in a homage to water via the ingredients of her mother’s national soup from the east of Europe, borscht. We then meet Elisa Sampedrín, a theatre theorist and director. Quotes from Sampedrín reject the gargantuan theatres of war and their deafening noise in English, in favor of little nicks of time and space and tiny noises in a language that has never been used to declare war, and where “[t]he protagonist … is most often language itself” (37). Sampedrín insists that “even the grass has a voice in little theatres” (40). In saying this, she argues with the idea that Peter Brook put forward in The Empty Space (1968) of “holy theatre,” and leans toward Victor Shklovsky, who wrote in 1917: “And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life” (12). In this way, Sampedrín’s theatre refuses ritual, including the ritual of character in relation to conflict.
In O Cadoiro (2007), the second book in the Galician cycle, Moure travels with books by Derrida on the archive and Foucault on the archaeology of knowledge as she tumbles into the medieval Iberian troubadour songbooks written in Galician-Portuguese. In her own poetic responses to these songbooks, Moure revels in the erotics of noise and noisy subjectivity, making claims for the radicality of lyric at a historical point when verse turned away from epic modes that lauded God or history to address instead a human individual, in a single person’s articulated voice. The book is Moure’s reply to those who would deride lyric, in particular some self-styled conceptualists who, unable to see the lyric as constructed, naturalize it in order to dismiss it, thus missing its transgressive power.
Just as Pillage Laud is a text in excess of the “Citizen Trilogy,” there is now an interlude between Moure’s Galician and Ukrainian cycles in the form of a clamorous collaboration of “resonant impostors” that unseats translation and any standard notion of its reliance on an original: Expeditions of a Chimæra (2009). This time a human collaborator, poet Oana Avasilichioaei, provides the occasion to deviate from the course. A book of pranks and reckless transits, of maps and the endless deferral of “arrival,” it entangles subjectivity and performance in a fast-moving demonstration of translational modes of “passing.” In so doing, it provides passage for Moure’s work between Galicia and Ukraine.
In O Resplandor (2010), the first book in the Ukrainian cycle, translation, reading, friendship, death, and grieving are staged in different tempos. This book derives its title from a Galician word for light emanating from an object, like a halo; for Moure, it is a trope for reading, and for poetry. The optical phenomenon Moure evokes is that of blue light and its effect on our diurnal and nocturnal cycles and our perception of the passing of time. Moure uses this passage of time in the body to queer reading practice itself, as if reading can stop time, and translation reverse it. Elisa Sampedrín, by now considered not just a heteronym (though Moure considers her a polynym, i.e. not only heterogeneous to Moure but polyphonic in her own regard) but a Galician in her own right, reappears in O Resplandor in the mœbius strip of a contradiction: she is bent on translating the poems of Nichita Stănescu from Romanian—a language she does not speak—into English, because she wants to read them. In so doing, Sampedrín jostles at every turn with the unwanted presence in the book of Moure, who is seeking to locate Sampedrín in a time and place that already do not exist. In the second part of O Resplandor, Moure overtly borrows lines directly from an early version of Oana Avasilichioaei’s translations of the Romanian poems of Paul Celan (published in 2015 in Avasilichioaei’s Limbinal) and rearranges them, as she worries the noise of grief into a text(ile) within which to wrap the maternal body.
The Unmemntioable (2012), for its part, articulates a linguistic noise beyond any “unspeakable”; it is the noise, rather, of an interdiction, of what would perhaps be speakable, but is not mentionable. As Moure, in fulfillment of a promise made to her mother to return her ashes to her birthplace, appears in her mother’s natal village in Ukraine, she comes face to face with two registers that trouble all process of memorialization: the legacy of the Holocaust, firstly, and then the legacies of the border changes and ethnic cleansings that by 1945 had brought to an end the multicultural communities in what had once been the east of the province of Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In The Unmemntioable, E.M. the dreamer, on leaving Ukraine, again seeks the pragmatic E.S., Elisa Sampedrín, who desires only to be left alone in Bucharest to conduct her research into experience. E.S., in a fit of annoyance at E.M.’s stalking of her, steals E.M.’s jottings—which turn out to dwell on the infinite, to the disgust of E.S.—and then decides, as a kind of revenge, to use E.M. as her experimental subject. Whereas in O Cidadán, Moure employed the threshold of noise to question Augustine of Hippo’s metaphysics of reading and the ideological limitations of his interpretations of “tolle lege” in the Confessions, in The Unmemntioable, Elisa Sampedrín worries the fabric of Ovid’s poetry in trying to write poetry for Erín Moure. At the end of the book, the two subjectivities merge at an abandoned Art Nouveau or Secessionist style casino (what better way to meld experience and the infinite) at the edge of the Black Sea in Constanța, Romania, and the book ends by offering a wish for courage, in Galician, coraxe. Experience, it turns out, lies outside the book.
In Kapusta (2015), a bilingual poem in the form of a play, the staging of memory of the Holocaust via the grandmother and mother—who spent the war not in Ukraine but in rural Alberta—allows the indescribable noisiness of the “unmemntioable” to be spoken by staging it literally and figuratively, involving the reader or spectator in the responsibility to resist genocides, and thus ending the interdiction.
POLYRESONANCES (Transborder Noise), POSTFACE, & Further Reading
Moure’s work and its complexities and echoes can be read in conversation with the work of other major figures in North American poetry, poetics, and translation theory in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Incorporating philosophical quotations in the poem itself, and drawing from the major theoretical debates regarding language and subjectivity, Moure’s work refuses easy distinctions between poetry and poetics, philosophical writing and poetic writing. I often read Moure’s work as queer theory; her explicit engagement with the likes of Monique Wittig, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and other queer theorists leads to Moure’s prescient work on queer affect theory, and the “queer art of failure.” O Cidadán (2002) was published before Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006) or Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (2011), yet engages with these topics in a rigorous and wide-ranging way. Moure’s work can also be read in conversation with the work of poets such as Phyllis Webb, Daphne Marlatt, Nicole Brossard, Lisa Robertson, Fred Wah, Roy Miki, M. NourbeSe Philip, Caroline Bergvall, Harryette Mullen, Bhanu Khapil, Rachel Blau Duplessis, Claudia Rankine, C.D. Wright, Andrés Ajens, Chus Pato, Oana Avasilichioaei, and Myung Mi Kim all of whom grapple with language and languages, and their relation to political and economic structures and to identity formation.
The final section of Planetary Noise is curated by Moure and offers the reader a window into her translations of other poets’ work. These poems are not inserted in the other sections with her own work, as is often done in North American practice, as for Moure, translation is an opening of poetic culture in English to the work of others, not an absorption of it. Moure discusses her approach to translation in her Postface. A reader may also wish to consult the series of essays on translation that Moure published in Jacket2 between 2012 and 2014—details are in the “Further Reading” list at the back of this volume, which includes a selected list of her own essays as well as essays on her work by others.
