Planetary Noise. Erín Moure
it was because conventional geopolitical and psychosocial mappings of the spaces where she lived were quite literally deadly.
WSW (West South West) (1989) and Sheepish Beauty, Civilian Love (1992) followed Furious. These books link poetic structures and processes to bodily ones. In her 1996 essay, “Speaking the Unspeakable: Responding to Censorship,” Moure explains:
The view of the body most akin to mine is Spinoza’s, which I first encountered via Gilles Deleuze. Spinoza defines a body in two ways, which work in simultaneity: first as composed of particles, an infinite number of particles in motion or at rest, thus defined not by forms but by velocities; second, as a capacity for affecting or being affected by other bodies, so that part of a body’s it-ness is its relationality. To me, there’s a clear marker here for community—broadly speaking, all other beings we are in contact with—as an indispensable part of our definition of who we are as individuals. (My Beloved Wager 97)
These preoccupations with the relationship between individual and community informed her work in a trilogy of books: Search Procedures (1996), A Frame of The Book / The Frame of A Book (1999), and O Cidadán (2002). As Moure examines the many practices that create our world, from our most intimate interfaces at our cellular and neurological limits to our cultural and political exchanges, she introduces languages other than English—French, Galician, Portuguese, Spanish—into the poems. Lexicons derived from science and technology likewise alter the tension in Moure’s texts of this period, and she draws upon noise’s productive capacity in order to create new words. O Cidadán, the final and most complex book in the trilogy, addresses the relationship between self and others, which is to say, citizenship. O Cidadán is built from four forms: Georgettes (lesbian love poems); catalogues of harm; documents; and aleatory poems that include banners, calculations, photos, and film scripts. The culmination of a decade of work, the poems selected from O Cidadán form the axis of Planetary Noise, as they condense the formal and thematic reverberations and modulations that exist across Moure’s oeuvre.
Pillage Laud (1999, republished 2011) is in excess of the trilogy but related to it. It, too, probes the interface between lesbian textuality and (desiring) machine; in it, phrases were selected by hand (a lesbian sex-organ par excellence) from blocks of computer-generated sentences, and organized into poems assigned to a locale (conforming to N. Katherine Hayle’s definition of “hypertext”). These “hi-toned obscurantist lesbo smut” poems, as Moure has impishly called them (Wager 145), are an investigation of “poetic form, [of] what the brain can understand emotionally from the poem as a whole (the macro level) even when in individual sentences (the micro level) semantic value is missing—there’s no apparent sense” (145). Noise, here, functions as conduit for desire that reroutes attention and serves to “wrench open the circle of understanding” (148).
ATURUXOS CALADOS (Galician Cycle) & AN ABSOLUTE CLAMOROUS DIN (Ukrainian Cycle)
The last two of Moure’s poetic cycles represented in this volume, the Galician and the Ukrainian, are interconnected and represent over a decade of work from 2003 to 2015 and were both sparked at least in part by her Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person: A Transelation of Alberto Caeiro / Fernando Pessoa’s O Guardador de Rebanhos (2001). Pessoa’s use of heteronyms—or fully developed writing personas that have independent philosophies, biographies, and writing styles—began to influence Moure’s own work during this period. The word “persona” is related to the mask, to the public face, and to the Latin personare, a word that contains the idea of “soundings” in “-sonare.” Moure’s polynyms (heteronyms, part-heteronyms, and escaped heteronyms, including those indicated by the altered spelling of her own name) can be usefully considered as “sonic masks”—as language sounding through the writer’s body, resulting in characters with their own ideas and acts, separate from those of the author. In these cycles, theatre and noise poetics inform each other, and Moure, with her sonic masks, interrupts the turbulence of large-scale violence by deploying small-scale modes of listening.
When Italian Futurists F. T. Marinetti and Luigi Russolo celebrated the “art of noises,” as Russolo called it, they did so by incorporating the onomatopoeic sounds of trench warfare, among other mechanical elements, into their idea of war on culture and women. Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism” of 1909 announces that: “We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women … we will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice” (Documents of 20th Century Art 22). Russolo has a chapter in The Art of Noises celebrating sonic warfare called simply “The Noises of War” (49). These attitudes towards and approaches to war exemplify what Moure struggles against in these poetic cycles when she and Elisa Sampedrín (a Moure polynym) address the affective aftermath of twentieth-century genocides in Europe. The sonic masks provide only one among many techniques of listening that gently but tenaciously refuse the recklessness of the historical avant-garde and insist upon other noise poetics. Theatre and noise poetics join in Moure’s later works in a dramaturgy that does not represent but that casts noise as an ethical threshold, an invitation to expand one’s capacity to listen. In so doing, her theatre (or poetry as theatre) develops an art of memory based not so much on the intensity of the image, as are classical and medieval arts of memory, but on the porosity of external and internal borders and their amplification of sonic ambiguity. In this theatre, actors perform the work of listening and, as such, the traditional hierarchies of Western theatre begin to erode. Rather than looking to find and display artifacts of conflict for the audience, Moure’s theatre acknowledges that conflict is already a condition of life in late capitalism, and instead she uses stagings to shift attention to other life conditions, if only briefly.
In both her Galician and Ukrainian cycles, Moure nomadically traverses social-historical, linguistic, and subjective spaces between urban Calgary and Montreal, rural Alberta, Galicia in Spain, and the Austro-Hungarian imperial province of Galicia, the east of which is today part of Ukraine. Moure has a personal connection to each of these places. Her father’s grandfather emigrated from Spain’s Galicia, one of the reasons that Moure chose to learn the Galician language (Insecession 44). Her mother was born in Velikye Hlibovychi, at the time in Poland, though it was once in Austro-Hungarian Galicia and lies presently in Ukraine. Both these places faced fratricidal and genocidal atrocity in the twentieth century. “There is a side of Europe we do not know and never learned of and still do not learn of … I still seek an ancestral cadence. A cadence of being and thought and harmony with trees” (Insecession 44). In approaching translation and exploring subjectivity (as cadence) in her poems, Moure gleaned cues from Clarice Lispector’s use of aproximação and from the works of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms. For Moure, aproximação means “to give [something] room and listen” (My Beloved Wager 180). She places this translational mode in relation to Fernando Pessoa’s “amplification of identity” (Wager 180) to astonishing effect in her poems, stating that Pessoa does not fragment identity but “embraces it excessively in his heteronyms” (emphasis in original; Wager 181).
In the poems and texts of Little Theatres (2005), the initial book in the Galician series, we are introduced to Galician, a language of the extreme west of Europe, in a homage to water via the ingredients of her mother’s national soup from the east of Europe, borscht. We then meet Elisa Sampedrín, a theatre theorist and director. Quotes from Sampedrín reject the gargantuan theatres of war and their deafening noise in English, in favor of little nicks of time and space and tiny noises in a language that has never been used to declare war, and where “[t]he protagonist … is most often language itself” (37). Sampedrín insists that “even the grass has a voice in little theatres” (40). In saying this, she argues with the idea that Peter Brook put forward in The Empty Space (1968) of “holy theatre,” and leans toward Victor Shklovsky, who wrote in 1917: “And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life” (12). In this way, Sampedrín’s theatre refuses ritual, including the ritual of character in relation to conflict.
In O Cadoiro (2007), the second book in the Galician cycle, Moure travels with books by Derrida on the archive and