This is perhaps my favorite piece of conceptual writing.
***
Over the weekend I found myself in the judges' room for a high school Speech & Debate final (true story!). I asked one of the English teachers there whether poetry was a hard sell to her students, thinking I suppose of the oft-stated consensus that of all the genres poetry's the most resistant, the least popular, the swath of the textbook one rushes past to get to the plotty parts. "Not at all," she said, whether because they thrive on its intensity or simply through their tech- & hip-hop-enabled comfort with compression and linguistic multifariousness. “The problem is novels. It’s very hard to convince them that reading anything lengthy is worthwhile.”
***
What the villagers call that empty space of weeds, that grove or knoll where my mother was baptized. Not __________, but ___________.
Not церква but коcтьол, kościół, the word in the banished tongue.
Shibboleth? [can’t hear you.]
Ear of corn? [can’t make out the word.]
She coughs. The body’s own water pools in the crevice of her clavicle. The wind ripples the lake so shallow now that no fish can winter there.
(I are my ownenemymemory)
[river]
[flick]
[flicker]
(The Unmemntioable, Erin Moure, House of Anansi, 2012)
In addition to writing some of the most singular books of poetry of the last decade (2002’s O Cidadán, 2009’s Expeditions of a Chimaera with Oana Avasilichioaei, 2010’s O Resplandor, among others), Moure has published translations of the equally uncategorizable Galician poet Chus Pato, as well as a brilliant translation/reimagination of O Guardador de Rebanhos by Fernando Pessoa, or by his heteronym Alberto Caeiro. Pessoa famously recalibrated the task of the poet as the creation of personae rather than poems, conjuring the myriad personalities who then undertook the labor of drafting the writings associated with his name.
Moure gives the adventure of Pessoan heteronymity a political and sociolinguistic spin; as the above passage suggests, her work crosses and recrosses geographic and linguistic boundaries as it details its author’s encounters with real and imagined figures and events. Pato figures tangentially as a correspondent, while more central is the elusive Elisa Sampedrin, an authorial alter ego who appeared previously in O Resplandor. Sampedrin reflects upon Moure as Moure reflects upon the dark history that sent her own mother from the Ukraine to Canada in the first half of the last century.
Naturally enough, both Moure’s champions and her detractors tend to frame her work in relation to the post-structuralist theory that has informed avant-garde writing for almost two generations now. One will encounter citations of Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Agamben in her writing, and the passage above with its fragmentation and erasures invites assimilation to the familiar gestures of language and post-language writing.
But the heteronym is both an anticipation of and a deviation from the vertiginous deconstructions of later theory. Pessoa’s writings offer us a vision of identity plural and dispersed, circulating through the linguistic productions of a system of personae. But through imaginative investment the counterfeit becomes real, accruing an undeniable particularity. In Moure’s work, as well, the destabilization of identities and unsettling of comfortable reading habits goes hand-in-hand with the production of new and exhilarating reading possibilities, generated out of the incessant layering of linguistic strata, and thereby new existential possibilities. As Johanna Skibsrud puts it in an unusually perceptive reading of Moure, “hers is not an interest in language as a fact in itself..equally her intention is not to arrive at a sense of greater senselessness. Moure’s poetry is instead interested precisely in the ‘explosivity across membranes’ that E.S. represents in The Unmemntioable.”
What Moure’s work seems to call out for (and what Skibsrud’s reading to some degree attains) is a criticism that can trace out its processes of destabilization and reconfiguration. In particular, her writing manifests a kind of self-consciousness often associated with the “metafictional,” but which is intensified and qualitatively altered through the medium of lyric, as well as via her text’s multilingual slippages. So much of contemporary writing is sick with knowingness; Moure’s signal achievement is to parry the inescapable reflexivity of her poetry with a countervailing urge to unknowing.
***
This fall, Wave Books will publish the collection Poems (1962-1997) by Robert Lax, which I edited. Among other pieces, the book contains the entirety of Lax’s 1962 collection New Poems, which I consider one of the underread gems of 20th-century American poetry. Here’s one poem from that collection:
never
never
never
never
never
never
never
never
never
never
never
never
never
How do you read a poem like this? How do you know when you’re finished with it?
One’s inner cynic might answer that it’s pretty easy to read, and even easier to be finished with. (Criticism often seems to launch from the premise that the poem is guilty until proven innocent, as though never being taken in is the highest virtue.)
“My kid could do that,” is the old and shamelessly philistine way of attacking art that dispenses with traditional conventions; variations on it persist in museums and journals to this day. To which Lax’s longtime friend Ad Reinhardt would respond, “Your kid must be a genius!” & he or she probably is.
***
Really, imagine it.
The loveliest bit of this story is the line that when everything in academia is automated, it’ll free faculty up “for other tasks.”
Light construction projects? Armed security? Fracking the campus subsurface?
