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