The
Beauty of Furs: A Site Glossary
Later you realize it is a poem about being
born, the smell of the fur is your mother birthing you & your hair is wet
not slicked back but from the wetness of womb, the fur coat the hugest fur of
your mother the cunt of your mother from which you have emerged & you cower
in this smell. The fur coat the sex of women reduced to decoration, & the
womb the place of birth becomes the church in which you are standing, the womb
reduced to decoration, where women are decoration, where the failure of
decoration is the humiliation of women, to wear these coats, these emblems of
their own bodies, in church on Sunday, children beside them. The church now the
place of birth & rebirth, they say redemption,
everyone knows what this signifies & the mother is trying to pay attention,
all the mothers, my mother, & we are children, I am children, a child with
wet hair cowlick slicked down perfect, no humiliation, the site still charged
with the smell of the river, the coat smell of the river, smell of the birth
canal, caught in the drown-set is to be stopped from being born, is to be
clenched in the water unable to breathe or see the night sky, the coyohts calling me upward, as if in
these circumstances, so small beside my mother, I could be born now, but
cannot, can I, because we are inside this hugest womb which has already denied
us, in which we are decoration, in which men wear dresses & do the cooking,
& the slicked hair is not the wet hair of birth but the hair of decoration,
as if I could be born now, I am born, my snout warm smelling the wet earth of
my mother’s fur (WSW (West South West))
I’m
amazed and thrilled to finally see a copy of Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure, edited by poet and
critic Shannon Maguire (Middletown CT: Wesleyan, 2017). Planetary Noise manages the seemingly impossible task of
articulating and selecting from Moure’s sixteen trade poetry collections, as
well as from a collaborative work and a selection of translations, to create a
remarkably coherent whole. Editor Shannon Maguire has done an incredibly
thorough job of putting together an impressive volume of Moure’s work, along
with an equally impressive critical introduction to the context of Moure and
her expansive, playful and voluminous writing/translation practice(s), including
an array of details that add enormous amounts of information to Moure’s ongoing work. Moure’s early engagements with the ‘work poets’ of Vancouver—including Tom
Wayman, Zoë Landale, Kate Braid, Phil Hall, Calvin Wharton and others—for
example, is well known, but did you also know that she was briefly a student of
Pat Lowther? Her introduction illuminates, as well as shines. As Maguire’s essay,
“Erín Moure: Poetry as Planetary Noise,” opens:
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.
Not
that this is the first ‘selected poems’ volume Moure’s work has seen; there was
The Green Word: Selected Poems 1973-1992
(Toronto ON: Oxford University Press, 1994), a volume produced as part of their
short-lived series of selected poems. The
Green Word had its appeals, but in the end, the forum was far too thin to
contain the multitudes of Moure’s writing, and simply felt random in its
selection, and even comprehension. One of the real gifts of Planetary Noise is in how Maguire seems
to understand the multiple arcs of Moure’s writing, evidenced by how she arranges
the sections, understanding how, with the publication of her WSW (West South West) in 1989, Moure’s
books began to group; it was another decade or so before readers began to
understand how Moure was beginning to compose trilogies of poetry titles, but
the comprehension of her work opens the realization of how her books really
began to interact with each other in serious and sustained ways. Maguire groups
the collection as: “EARLY SIGNALS (First
Cycle): Empire, York Street
(1979), Wanted Alive (1983), Domestic Fuel (1985) and Furious (1988); “CIVIC SIGNALS (A Noise Cycle)”: WSW (West South West) (1989) and Sheepish Beauty, Civilian Love (1992); “NOISE RISES (Citizen Trilogy + Pillage Laud)”: Search Procedures (1996), A Frame of The Book / The Frame of A Book
(1999), O Cidadán (2002) and Pillage Laud (1999, 2011); “ATURUXOS
CALADOS (Galician Cycle)”: Little Theatres (2005) and O Cadioro (2007); “RESONANT IMPOSTERS”:
Oana Avasilichioaei and Erín Moure’s Expeditions
of a Chimæra (2009); “AN ABSOLUTE CLAMOROUS DIN (Ukrainian Cycle)”: OResplandor (2010), The Unmemntioable
(2012) and Kapusta (2015); and
“POLYRESONANCES (Transborder Noise)”;
from Incession (an echolation of Chus Pato’s Secession, 2014) and “Works of
Other Poets in Moure Translation,” including Chus Pato (Galicia), Andrés Ajens
(Chile), Wilson Bueno (Brazil), Nicole Brossard (Québec), Emma Villazón
(Bolivia), Rosalía de Castro (Galicia) and Fernando Pessoa (Portugal).
_
I ll never master the art of poetry. I
have these words: sadness and tears!
I m not going to put them into lines for
you. Or ask for death. Or tell you
I suffer endlessly, courting
you.
Sadness and tears!
[807] #864
Dom Johanne Meendiz de Breteyros (O Cadioro)
Apart
from simply getting some out-of-print work back into the world, far too many
volumes of ‘selected poems’ add little to nothing to the conversation of the
author and their work, and can simply be skipped over if you’ve all the books the
new volume selects from (I suspect this is why so many volumes include “new
poems”). Volumes of selected poems without introductions to provide even the
bare minimum elements of context are even less compelling (something I’ve been
complaining about for years). I mention all of this to really make the point
that Planetary Noise is no mere ‘selected
poems’ in the traditional way (the introduction alone, for example, is worthy
of stand-alone publication), and the real gift of this volume is in what
Maguire and Moure have shaped together: how both editor and author have collaborated
to produce a volume that can enrich even the deepest reader of Moure’s work. As
well as the introduction, the nearly two hundred page volume even includes a detailed
bibliography and further reading list. I don’t think it would be difficult to
suggest that this is one of the most impressive volumes of ‘selected poems’ I’ve
seen to date. Moure’s work is one of deep listening, and Maguire manages to
hear it all. As Moure writes in the essay “Emit,” included as a beautiful
post-script:
If poetry is a gesture that opens, and opens to
listening, then how a poet listens is more important than who a poet “is.”
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