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