Dealing with Erìn Moure:

Dani: To quote John Berryman, Little Theatres makes me feel like "I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored." And I'm bored because I just don't get it. It's as simple as that. I obviously don't have the inner resources. I want to understand it. I want to be able to see the nuances between the works in Galician and the English translations, but I don't. I found the book very inaccessible.

I don't enjoy the feeling of reading a book, putting it down on the table, stepping back, and not being able to explain what I just read. Is that the fault of the reader or the writer? I'm not entirely sure. I'm no scholar, but no rube either. At the very least, the book has made me question whose responsibility it is that a book is understood once it's put out into the world.

My lack of inner resources aside, there are some lines in the book that make me dizzy (in the good way) with their seemly simple approach. And it's in these lines that I see glimpses of form and thought I recognize. Some snippets are even playful at first glance, although I'd wager that on the whole, the collection was not intended to be playful, but then again I'm only guessing.

Some of the poems require the reader to take a leap of faith to take to make them work, and they're definitely worth the jump. One of these instances is in "Homage to the Mineral of the Cabbage":

In the cabbage there is something of flight grounded,
something of the sky
Past the wings of the cabbage, which are folded
and folded over to ground it,
lie more wings, pensive with heaven.

I've read it over several times, and I can't say for certain what Moure is saying. Regardless, the words are lovely and there's something surreal and hopeful about the way they're put together. If this makes any sense, I understand the feeling, the sentiment.

In "Homage to the Basic Mineral of Borscht", it was the creative use of assonance that won me over "Colour of my colour. / Shy coquetry of my coeur." She definitely pulls the "art card" at the end, switching to French to make it work (I don't think you can do that in Scrabble), but it's a technique that works in this poem; however, I don't think the integration of foreign words succeeds as successfully in other places in the book.

In short, I think this type of collection that translators dream of - a heady mix of languages that cross more than few poetical and political borders. While I don't understand most of it, I have to appreciate that there must be some underlying plan or guide that I'm just not aware of. There just has to be . . . 

Shane: Just when I thought Moure couldn’t get any more unintelligible, she becomes a translator, victimizing other languages and becoming even more incomprehensible in the process. She did this with Fernando Pessoa in 2001 with Sheep’s Vigil By A Fervent Person, an altogether unreadable book. As is proper in Canadian Literature nowadays, she was given her due amounts of praise for that one - after all, the novelty factor is high, there aren’t that many translations of languages other than English to French or vice versa out there in a given year - and that praise, um, translated in the motivation to do yet another book.

Little Theatres is not a work of translation as much as cross-seeding with Galician. How unappetizing - Moure, Galician. My obfuscometer is reading off the charts, and indeed my expectations were met with this book. Moure baffles me as much as she offends my sense of what poetry should be. Her endless playfulness is to me mindless masturbation; her subtleties as tiresome as farsightedness; but really, it’s her damn opacity that bugs me most. SAY WHAT YOU MEAN, please; not everything has to have an iteration or a gnomic quality. And just what is it that Moure has to say, if anything?

The Anansi press package states that 

Erín Moure is one of the most consistently innovative, radically imaginative poets at work in Canada. With each book, Moure seeks to re-create ‘writing’ from the ground up.

So: it’s not so much what she says, it’s how she says it! This is bankrupt. I’d suggest that writing need not be created from the ground up, it can instead be harnessed; and besides, rewriting writing would take a Shakespeare, but even he thought that good ol’ English would do just fine. Substitute "innovation" with "annoying" and "radically imaginative" with "avant-garde reactionary" and the blurb would read just about right. But, I know, quibbling about cover copy is pointless, idiotic fun. Hardly "radically imaginative."

The formula in this book is simple: write almost minimalist English poetry with the texture of pre-solidified concrete. Then intersperse some Galician for colourful contrast. Repeat. It makes enough for a whole book! The poems have an air of Japanese form, of bad haiku, of mantra:

Shirred up, wet against the grain

silica might call out

     its finger to the chest

pressed me still: 

That day we passed between the two Toledos

anos annals années a-néantes espidas paido pidas

: rain’s hoof-marks

Horses shirred sleeping in wet fields

Egregious. One flourish of foreign language does not make a poem; it’s as if Moure ties to use these Galician lines as centerpieces but ends up relying on them as a crutch. Worse, though, are the poems that are anti-sensical, that give no impression, that are haphazard in their construction, are merely pastiches of unconnected images that have a little typographical idiosyncrasy thrown in as an additive to better hide the fact that there is absolutely nothing going on: 

That limitless strophe

          : month 

     Sage                        or wary

     Physically         song’s capacity

obriga cargada

     onérous

     these days.

Just what can this MEAN? Perhaps the point is that it is so vague, so imprecise, that it can mean whatever its reader wants it to mean, which is definitely a nod to Moure’s militantly postmodern aesthetics. Well, a good poem must mean more. It must be irresolutely itself, not slack putty. Some kind of sense must be made, in my opinion, even nonsense (which is much tougher to do.)

And then there are the absolute howlers, lines like "There is something unconscious in the cabbage." I walked around for a few days chuckling to myself about that one. In fact, the whole section about vegetables in the book is unintentionally funny. "Because of this, the revolutionary force of potatoes / is greater than that of gunpowder . . . " Worst of all is the prose section where Moure’s heteronym Elisa Sampedrin lets fly with random thoughts on what "Little Theatres" constitutes; Moure’s showing her strings here, the theory behind the art, and the result is one ugly look at mechanics. Turgid stuff.

I reviewed a general poetry manual recently (Timpane and Watts, Poetry for Dummies, 2001) and was aghast to learn that of the three poets Canada had on record there as being "world class," Erin Moure was one of them. Now Canadians suffering as a result of a grant-based system gone mad is one thing, but think of the children of Laos or Honduras, fingering their copies of Furious! We must scrub Moure’s name off that list before even more damage is done to our reputation in poetry abroad. And we can start at home by not giving her any more awards. She’s had her share, with Furious in 1988 and various other trinkets.

In conclusion, I have developed an allergy to Erin Moure, and so should you.

Alex: No allergies here! But still . . . to go straight from the Suburban Everyman to this. What a change of gears.

Where to begin?

I guess first off I have to put my two cents worth in on how a lot of it is written in Galician. I don't know Galician. To be honest, before now I didn't even know what Galician was. I had assumed it was a Spanish dialect. Then someone told me it's really Portuguese. I'm not sure where it's spoken.

The point being, a good chunk of Little Theatres is off-limits to me. I can't read it. It appears that the Galician poems have English translations on the facing pages, but that doesn't help much. I can't judge the quality of the translation, how literal or free it is, or if Moure is trying to do something special with it.

Now I don't want to seem like a poetic redneck here, scratching my head over all these durn furrin words. My only point is that, sitting on a jury, I don't see how I can judge a book of poetry like this. I'm curious to know how much time the judges on this year's GG jury spent brushing up on their Galician. I suspect they just took a pass. (I can only assume the "Diccionario/Dictionary" at the back was meant as some kind of joke. We're talking about reading poetry in a foreign language, people! You can't read foreign poetry through a dictionary, no matter how complete it is. A four-page word list is no help at all.)

I also have to note in passing the campaign Zach Wells is behind to recognize Goran Simic's From Sarajevo, With Sorrow after being rejected by the GGs because many (but not all) of the poems were translations. And then this makes the shortlist. Go figure.

But back to this book. At least the English part of it.

Yes, it's difficult. Experimental. It made me think of Anne Carson a bit. And of course poetry like this is always going to raise hackles. There's always going to be a suspicion that the Emperor (or Empress) isn't wearing any clothes. I try and resist that feeling. Pound's Cantos are difficult, and I enjoy them without being able to understand Provencal or Chinese. So I always try and see what's there.

I'm not sure it's quite as bad, or at least all as bad, as you make out, Shane. Do you think the vegetable poems are unintentionally funny? Anthem to Garlic? Homage to the Onion? Her tongue's in her cheek. And, believe it or not, the revolutionary force of potatoes has not been insignificant! In The Life Millennium's list of the 100 most important events of the past 1000 years the introduction of the potato to Europe (in 1537) ranks #39, behind the invention of gunpowder weapons (#7), but well ahead of dynamite (#63). Of course, whether or not this is what Moure is getting at in that poem is another question.

Like Carson, Moure doesn't seem to give a damn about the line. But, also like Carson, she does have an ear for the sound of words in very small packages (small theatres?). I did think there were some nice bits of sing-song nursery-rhyme stuff:

In the channels of water:
small blue rivulets of blue

     . . . . . 

Shall we go together to the field
seeking graves that are full of sound?

     . . . . . 

The water rose in the little river
and washed the big river away

     . . . . .

and the boots touch the earth
that's all they do
touch the earth
that's all they do

And I also liked the mysterious vegetable sublime Dani noticed. But is that enough? 

It's the most I can say. I couldn't see what was being built out of these scraps. I couldn't figure out what the "little theatres" stuff meant. Is it "militantly postmodern"? Is it militantly anything? I'm not sure. I certainly didn't think there was anything revolutionary about it, in terms of form or content. And maybe that's what let me down most of all.

Obviously Moure is trying to do something quite a bit different than Dempster or Compton. She's certainly a lot less accessible. 

And finally, in my opinion, less successful.

Shane: Alex, I'm considering what you're saying about the vegetables, etc. and I guess I took them seriously because this is such a pious little book, propounding the impenetrable theory of "Little Theatres." Intentional or unintentional, the end result is the same: silliness. If Moure intended humour, then I have to say it's a little ridiculous. The effect wasn't revolutionary, not seditious, just ridiculous.

Although she may be canny here. I suppose this was Moure's way of insulating herself from the criticism that she's too serious in her poetics, too sanctimonious in her theory, to have any fun. Yet the poems aren't funny. Even if read your way, they are, as you say, only tongue-in-cheek. It'd be great if Moure could evoke a guffaw or two, but her poetry's too straight-laced, too buttoned-down, to have any fun at all.

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