We live in machines but are not machines. Restless forms imagine new presents, where past and future meet. As becoming-digital beings, we retain and engage the problem of embodiment, which needs a world, needs other forms, needs to die. Death is our stake: neither early nor late.
Poetry is music, and nothing but music. — Amiri Baraka
Poetry is heard; it is the heard thing. — Erín Moure
In this special episode of PoemTalk we discuss a poem by G. Maria Hindmarch, who was at the center of the emerging avant-garde and counterculture literary scene in the early 1960s and later. Maria attended the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, established productive connections with Black Mountain poets among many others; published three books; and made audio recordings as a feminist, materialist, and literary communitarian. The poem we discuss is currently still unpublished; it is titled “Kitsilano (1963–1969).” Karis Shearer, Deanna Fong, and Erín Moure joined Al Filreis in Montreal to make this audio and video recording.
Thanks to the careful work of PennSound staffer Luisa Healey, Erin Moure’s PennSound page now includes a segmented (by poem and discussion topic) audio recording of Erin’s 2007 reading at the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver. Here, for instance, is a six-minute segment on noise and access.
I’ve been asked to comment on Ron Silliman’s excellent talk “Your Monsters Are Our Monsters: The Problem of Borders and the Nearness of the American Avant-Garde.” In Silliman’s “L-shaped talk,” the shape itself merits consideration.
On February 20, 2012, Erín Moure traveled from Calgary, Alberta, to read at a Belladonna* event, part of the “HOT TEXTS” project. She read with Rachel Levitsky and Christian Hawkey, and was introduced by Emily Skillings. Skillings and Krystal Languell hosted the event, which took place at The Way Station in Prospect Heights Brooklyn. Episode #41 of the PennSound podcasts series, hosted and edited by Emily Harnett, features a twenty-minute excerpt from the reading after a three-minute introduction.
In preparation for this week’s commentary, I was flipping through TCR’s recent special issue on multilingualism, and I came across a very interesting essay on translation by Erín Moure. The essay is structured as a kind of journal or daybook recording the process of translating Québecois poet François Turcot’s Mon dinosaureinto English. Mouré describes translation not as “bearing across” (get it?!), but as “a poiesis,a making. Each small piece of the Turcot poem, in English, takes hours of building, forming syllables, seeing how they interact.”
Nicole Brossard is one of Québec’s leading poets, novelists, and literary theorists, and has published more than thirty books since 1965, including These Our Mothers, Lovhers, Mauve Desert and Baroque at Dawn. Brossard also co-founded La Barre du Jour and La Nouvelle Barre du Jour, two important literary journals in Québec.
To grasp this amazing book — this doubled and redoubled book — is indeed to hold a lucky hand. To read the words of Hogue and Gallais translating Virginie Lalucq and Jean-Luc Nancy is not just to devour a long poem. It is also to receive a device for reading poetry and for exploring the possibilities of lyric address, for opening spaces in and between two languages, French and English.
LISTEN TO THE SHOW Erín Moure is a poet, translator, and communications specialist living in Montreal. She was born and raised in Calgary, and later spent two decades working for the Canadian passenger rail service Via Rail Canada. Erín’s great-grandfather was born in the Galicia region of northwest Spain, and as an adult Erín began visiting Galicia regularly. She picked up the Galician language, and has since written poetry in Galician and translated the work of Galician poets including Chus Pato and Rosalia de Castro.
Erin Moure at the Kootenay School of Writing, 2007 — now segmented at PennSound
Thanks to the careful work of PennSound staffer Luisa Healey, Erin Moure’s PennSound page now includes a segmented (by poem and discussion topic) audio recording of Erin’s 2007 reading at the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver. Here, for instance, is a six-minute segment on noise and access.