“National Poetry Month” #9: Erín Moure

PILLAGE 2 (“High Prairie”)

     – from Pillage Laud by Erín Moure

for you who validated the earth with your ferocity
Wit – whom were you seizing?
To read was so comfortable a strip between
the version and your trick.

Every obligation quite burns.
Ferocity is belonging, and you understand this.

After we are certain plants &ndash: coalescent –
the wheel’s umpire shakes.
To read was the ribbon of girls;

an adept invigorate before the coronal suture
Would oil burst?

She who has performed the fault of ground
is the urge of ground. A tracked coast.

A willow.
To sing is so chaste an invention.

prairie pioneer cattle beds feeling field

We felt it was time to sample a little from the computer-generated lesbian sex poems of Pillage Laud by Erín Moure. Enjoy!

Canadian poet and essayist Erín Moure has written 17 books of poetry, including BookThug-published Pillage Laud, and 13 volumes of poetry translated from French, Spanish, Galician and Portuguese into English, by poets such as Nicole Brossard, Andrés Ajens, Louise Dupré, Rosalía de Castro, Chus Pato and Fernando Pessoa. Her translations of White Piano by Nicole Brossard (with Robert Majzels) and Galician Songs by Rosalía de Castro just appeared (2013). Her work has received the Governor General’s Award, Pat Lowther Memorial, A.M. Klein, and has been a three-time finalist for the Griffin Prize. She recently finished Kapusta, a sequel to The Unmemntioable (Anansi, 2012) and further investigation into subjectivity and wartime in Ukraine and Alberta, and is now completing Insecession, an autobiography and poetics that echoes Chus Pato’s Secession, which will published together with Secession as one book by BookThug in 2014. Moure is based in Montreal.