Planetary Noise. Erín Moure
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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