from Eight Little Theatres of the Cornices, by Elisa Sampedrín 89
“Theatre needs hope” quote from Elisa Sampedrín 94
from The First Story of Latin (os araos) 95
from Late Snow of May—poemas de auga 97
O Cadoiro (2007)
“I ll never master the art of poetry. I” 98
“The world s not a home I can swear allegiance to” 99
“Mother, keep me from going to San Seruando, because” 100
“If I see the ocean, it flows” 101
“I m not pleading any thread of love” 102
“That day I lost your ring” 103
devenue le sujet spectral : L´YRIC POETR´Y 104
“I m going to walk to the mountain. As if” 106
AN ABSOLUTE CLAMOROUS DIN (Ukrainian Cycle) 113
Splay with a Stone 116
from Crónica One 117
Doubled Elegy, Ethical 120
“break simply with grief’s cane” 121
The Unmemntioable (2012)
“Doors screen wet …” 130
Heroides 131
“The Photographer of emigrants.” 132
“What is that Erín Moure writing…” 133
“In her spires of ink…” 134
“It occurs to me that I must write E.M.’s poems…” 135
Ars Amatori 136
Consolatio ad L’vivium 137
“Experience appears in this world…” 138
Kapusta (2015)
from Act 2, Scenes 2 and 3 “Something is trying to crawl…” 139
Surgery Lessñn 142
POLYRESONANCES (Transborder Noise) 147
from Insecession (an echolation of Chus Pato’s Secession, 2014)
The House Which Is Not Extension but Dispositio Itself 149
Works of Other Poets in Moure Translation
Chus Pato (Galicia), from “We Wish We Were Birds …” 151
Andrés Ajens (Chile), “so lair storm, inti myi semblable.” 153
Wilson Bueno (Brazil), “one dusk après une autre” 154
Nicole Brossard (Québec), “Suggestions Heavy-Hearted” 155
Emma Villazón (Bolivia), “Wavering Before The Water” 156
Chus Pato (Galicia), from “While I’m Writing” 157
Rosalía de Castro (Galicia), “Today or tomorrow…” 158
Fernando Pessoa (Portugal), “XI Some Woman Out There Has a Piano” 160
EMIT Postface by Erín Moure 163
Acknowledgments and Credits 169
Further Reading 176
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