SOURCE: An interview in Waves, Vol. 14, No. 4, Spring, 1986, pp. 36-44.

[In the following interview, Mouré discusses the Canadian content of her works, the images she employs, her love for language, and the influence of contemporary literary theory on her work.]

[Billings]: Let's start way back. You're from the west, from Calgary, lived in Vancouver for several years, and now you're in Montreal. You're not a prairie poet in the mode of, say Leona Gom, Glen Sorestad, Andrew Suknaski, or Lorna Crozier. Why not?

[Mouré]: I don't know (laughs). I think that the prairie as a place is very present in my mind, but I don't live there. So those aren't images I see all the time. Therefore they affect me in a different way.

But you did live there for several years and in Empire, York Street there are elements of what is commonly known as "prairie poetry." You were close to that mode then but moved away from it very quickly. The Riel poems, the use of landscape …

When I wrote some of those early poems—I was still living in Alberta, in Edmonton. But I left Alberta when I was eighteen. The poets you mention spent a lot of their formative years there. I think the late teens and early twenties are really formative years in terms of place, and I wasn't on the prairies then.

Where did you go when you were eighteen?

To Vancouver.

What about, say, Gom, who went from the Peace River area to the coast, and continues to write about the Peace River area?

I guess it's not something that stuck with me physically in the same way as it did with her. Also in my poems—maybe it was different in the Riel poem—but in most of my poems I use landscape in a different way.

Different way from …?

I don't use the images necessarily as a picture, to situate people in a picture.

Yes, that's what I'm talking about. From your work I don't get those pictures of prairie life.

I think that's a formal difference. People walking around in a landscape—that kind of poetry doesn't interest me that much. There has to be something more than just a picture.

Still, Empire, York Street is more a "western" book or "landscape" book than subsequent ones.

I think it's partly a factor of where I was when I wrote a lot of that book, and what I knew about. There are some things that aren't western—the Randall Jarrell and Rudolph Hess poems. There's a lot of Vancouver, though. And then, in Domestic Fuel, in the fish poems, in "Including Myself," in "West," there are landscape images that are western and are important to the events in the poem, to how the poem sits in your head.

When Empire, York Street came out, you were living in the west and a new voice, and were identified with the west.

Yes, Canadians have a tendency sometimes toward regionalism as an explanation for diversity. I mean, people come from a place, okay, but let's go on from there. You have to.

Some don't go on.

Yeah. As a French artist said to me once, quoting Georges Brassens—"I pity the poor people who were born somewhere." To me this whole thing about regionalism can be blinding to other possibilities of language and words and poetry. Some writers and critics identify regionalism as important in itself. I mean, I love the west, but everybody comes from a region, a place, absorbs those influences, and carries them on. They affect your sensibility and you remember and integrate them in various ways into your life and work. I feel at home enough with the landscape and place I come from—there's nothing that psychically bothers me enough about it to write "about" it. It is just "included" without a fuss.

Tell me about "West," the poem in Domestic Fuel.

It is very specifically saying that the west won't go away just because you move. Some images stay as a pride and way of seeing. In the east people think if you're from the west you are a certain kind of person and if you stay east long enough it'll go away and you'll be all right. "West" says the place you come from is in you anyway. There's a poem in my new manuscript that has the same kind of thing. In it, the "I" is talking to somebody from Vancouver who asks her if she misses the mountains and she says she doesn't; she is them. In other words, she has integrated them into her. She says, "They're in me now." They aren't a postcard decoration!

"West" and some other poems in that book—"Gills," for example—stand out because they're closer to what you did earlier on. But they do inject that element of recollection that makes them more than pictures.

I wrote a few poems about fish, I think there are four in that book. They "use" rather than "are" recollection. None of these things happened literally. "Fish" is not just a content—"I remember when we went fishing and this happened"—but the fish itself is a way to talk about some psychic pain. Fish are, if you like, a metaphor or paradigm for pain that's difficult to express. Using the fish as a paradigm enables me to externalize something that is internal. Because fish move in a different element than we do…. They breathe where we would suffocate and drown. Breathing is something critical to speech, language, and poetry. To ways of speaking.

Do your allergies partly create your concern with breath?

Partly. In general, you don't recognize the assumptions you have about the world, unless something different happens to you. You can only describe "it" if there are some things that are "not it" to distinguish. If you never have any problems with breathing, it doesn't occur to you to think about it.

What else led you to the kinds of theories you discuss in the article [called "I'll Start Out By Talking," in the Winter 1985–1986 issue of Poetry Canada Review]? The development that shows in your books, the leaps from each to the next, tells me you've thought a lot about language.

I've been thinking about words more or less since I started writing because when you're writing you're using language and speech and words. I think about what that means and how it works. How you can say things.

A lot of poets don't do that. They just sit down and write and the whole process is not something they really think about. They just do it. Some will never be able to intelligently discuss how they write. It is unusual for a young poet to write a 4000 word article on how she writes.

I wrote that piece as a talk, to begin with (for the Upper Canada Writers Workshop) and I was talking not necessarily about how "I" write, but about my concern for words and language and the voices of women, and how we as writers can approach language in ways that free us from the stereotypes and concepts inherent in the language itself. It talks about memory and desire, which are both mediated by language, and which are our access to the past and future. And about narrative, which is often used unthinkingly in a conditioned way by beginning writers. I think that writing, reading, and talking interact, and without this interaction one can't push one's poetry out of the conventions that are left unspoken in the mind. You don't know they're there until you find something that's "other" than them. That kind of cartesian dualism—the separation of mind and body—I don't believe in, but it's been through dialogue, and in being unable to describe their world, to situate themselves as subject, that feminists have noticed structures in language that make them "other."

As I say in the article, there's no need for a concept such as forgetfulness unless you have memory. If memory doesn't exist, then forgetfulness doesn't either. And if we don't talk about where we fit in, where we're going in poetry, and push at the edges of narrative and language, then we don't realize what categories we're stuck in. A lot of people find talking to be threatening. A lot of people find reading to be threatening. They only want to read the way they've been taught to read. They don't want to read anything that's outside of their experience because they're afraid it'll invalidate their experience. The closure in language acts on them to maintain itself. But for me—these kinds of things interest me and always have. How language works, or can work and what we can say. I believe that learning itself is a dialogical process; there has to be an interchange between people or no learning takes place. Or else something else happens: people learn how to conform and there's no learning. Learning involves dialogue and choice. So that talking about writing is one way I can learn new things. I can come across something about language I would never have come across without sitting down and talking to someone about this "it" that is language we're working with.

As I became older I began to realize that the kind of dialogue that I thought went on among all poets, doesn't. The implicit approval among poets that we should be talking isn't there in English Canada to a large degree. We are strangers to each other. People get together and talk about who is going to win the Governor General's Award, and I can't believe sometimes I'm sitting in [a] group of poets—people who love language, and I know they do—and that's the topic…. I let PCR publish the article because I think poets should do more of that kind of thing—opening up dialogue. Freedom is something you have to use; if you don't use it, you give it up to somebody else. And that's why people say only academics do criticism. Or only academics write about poetics. By our silence we give away our power. If we choose not to speak, they are going to say what poetics is, and they're not going to ask us.

That's partly why interviews and articles like this are needed. Let's get back to Montreal. Why Montreal, then? It seems you're comfortable there.

In Vancouver I felt for a while that I'd reached a stage in my writing; then my employer sent me to Montreal to work on a project for two months, and it was a matter of doing that or being laid off. So what do you take? I went to Montreal and had postcards of the Vancouver skyline in my office and cursed the fact I wasn't on the west coast for a month or so. But then I started to get interested in the place and meet some people. And suddenly it became a very interesting place to be. But all that is something that happens there. There, often, when poets get together after a reading, they talk about issues that are raised by certain people's writing and, you know, where you can go with this, what writing can do. That dialogical process goes on.

Are you saying Toronto talks awards and Montreal poetry?

In both the French community and in the bilingual community of Women and Words, I never hear anybody speculating about who is going to win what award or who got what when. Except maybe after the fact, to congratulate the person.

So, you're in Toronto now, and I can ask you. Ken Adachi in the Star thinks Domestic Fuel should win the GG this year. What do you think when you see a critic—any critic—say that?

I think it is very flattering that they have a nice opinion of my book, but it's not a big issue. The awards have nothing to do with the act of writing.

You work with computers at your job. What do you think of them? More favourably than of awards, I'm sure.

I've a Macintosh at home, too. It's great. It's like people lived in caves before they lived in houses—once you have one, you can't go back to the cave. The wonderful thing is that it helps me work full time at a job and not go insane, and write, and not go insane. It takes a quarter of the time to do typing.

Does it affect your method of composition?

It does because you don't have to retype everything every time. I rarely make changes on the screen, though. I enter the draft, make a hard copy, and then I scribble on it the same way I would if I had typed it. I've always started poems on the typewriter anyhow—well, I have a couple of images in my head, let's see if they will talk to me. Then I'll print a copy and revise. Sometimes I'll go to another room or a restaurant to revise, or just sit next to my computer (I did that with my typewriter as well). Then I'll enter the changes and print another hard copy. So it just saves me from going through the mechanical work. It's true that sometimes when you do that mechanical work, you learn new things about the way something's working, and when that's the case I just type all of it into the computer again. It's like any other tool, when you're working, the tool vanishes and becomes part of your body. I'm working with language, and the tool—it's not in the front of my mind. I'm busy talking to my audience, whoever they are, and listening to the sound of what I am making. I'm the same way at work. When I'm writing on the PC, the machine disappears. My colleagues look at me and can't believe how intensely I'm looking at the screen. But I don't see the screen. I see the employee that I'm talking to, and trying to light a fire under for whatever reason.

"There are hours & hours of small / collapses / like this one, coming out of the house / with a jacket & toque on, late fall, the cigarette cutting / the mouth's edge, open, / open up, bedevil memory" ("Like This One", Domestic Fuel). I really like that. In all your talk of composition or words or language, there's an exuberance. And it is all through the work as well. It is one of the progressions I was talking about earlier. I can see it more and more. But as often as not that exuberance is used to describe "hour after hour of small collapses," painful things. "The Whisky Vigil" sequence, a lot of the poems in the last two books. How do you see the world?

I'm basically an optimist. I'm very naïve.

You don't appear to be in the work.

Yeah, well in my personal life, in my day-to-day living I always expect people to have the best of intentions. I'm sometimes fooled, and when I'm fooled then I think it was just that once. Despite all evidence to the contrary, sometimes, I still think people are okay. You can still say, "Good morning, how are you?" to the person you can't get along with or does not share your view of things. I guess it's years of working with the public. Joe Public there I couldn't give a personal shit about, but I wanted to do everything I could to make them comfortable on the train. So sometimes I end up being really diplomatic when what's happening is that I'm being backed into a corner and I don't see it. That's "naïve".

And the exuberance being used with painful things? Sometimes it comes to a point that I'm seeing only language and vitality.

Mmmmm. You're reading someone who's on the side of life. I think there are painful things about ourselves personally, about the way we relate to other people, about the way we give up our own power and freedom so that people like Reagan end up with it—using it for us without asking us—things like that. Even if you're being exuberant about the world, the pain and difficulty come across anyway. I think what you call the "exuberance" is the optimism I was talking about—by optimism I mean I'm on the side of life.

"So much is not happiness, not / a possible world, not visible" ("Five Highways," Domestic Fuel).

Yeah, that's the sort of thing I'm saying. In that poem the person talking about their hands is making their psychic relation to the world visible—and that the narrator (me in this case, though the event is invented) in the poem, stupidly, is looking and can't see it.

A bit earlier we were saying that composition happens in certain ways. What about deconstructionism? Have you read the theorists, say, Olson, Kroetsch, Davey, nichol, etc?

I haven't read language theorists apart from Barthes and the feminists, who come after the "deconstructionist" folk. And I've read older stuff like Wittgenstein, Whort…. Kroetsch, Davey, and nichol are practitioners, not theorists, of deconstructionism, I think.

Where did your—how shall I say this—your "non-linear" approach develop?

It is partly my mind. It is partly realizing that we live inside constructs we don't really know we live inside, until we find out "something else," some other "it". I read Barthes' Writing Degree Zero and The Pleasure of the Text in I think 1980, and then Barthes on Barthes. I haven't done a lot of reading on language—'Father, forgive me for I have sinned'—but reading Barthes was a revelation and a pleasure to me. It was a different kind of reading than reading a newspaper or the House of Commons debates or a book by Alice Munro. I realize I like this kind of reading better! Reading Vallejo and Webb, Wah, Dewdney, Spicer, Appollinaire, Marlatt, nichol, Audrey Thomas (Blown Figures), France Theoret's Bloody Mary, anything by Nicole Brossard (I've just read her in translation), as well as Rilke, Seferis, Ritsos, Mary Daly, Paulo Freire, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich made me see that there were people who write the way I think, at least sometimes. When I first read Spare Parts by Gail Scott, the sentence that came into my mind was, "This book writes the way I think."

And what about film? The Tanner film you mention in the article we talked about earlier.

Dans la Ville Blanche, yeah. Some cinema helps. Looking at the way Fassbinder, von Trotta, Pool, or Wim Wenders—before he ruined himself with Paris, Texas—just watching the way narrative is used in their films, or reading people like Peter Handke—The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, that was a film, too, by Wim Wenders—films like that where things aren't put together into the story of some people in a landscape, forcing narrative into a box. Like, order means something, too, so why should you always use linear order? Time isn't linear, anyhow. That idea is just one of our constructs.

The "lunge" in the first poem in Domestic Fuel conjures an image of a direct, point A to point B lunge; but that's not really what happens. It's a clumsy lunge.

Yeah, it's a lunge that knocks everything over. It's a perfect lunge.

The word "clumsy" appears several times in Domestic Fuel; you even come right out and say, at one point, that you want to be clumsy. Don McKay, in Birding, Or Desire, uses the word "awkward" a lot.

If you don't deconstruct images or deconstruct ways of speech, then you can't really be alert to your tools, your resources, language, the images that come to you. And then you risk just reproducing the status quo, staying locked inside a cultural, conceptual, and contextual frame that is structured in and by the language. To some people the status quo might be just fine. But for me it is not just fine, thank you. I'd like to say, "no." I'd like to say, "No, the world is not fine. It's incredibly obtuse." And it excludes me. I guess that's my world view. I'm sort of Swiftian rather than Popian. You know how Swift thought the world was screwed up but some individuals were fine. And Pope thought individuals were incredibly trivial, but the human race was all right. When you asked me before about my world view, I thought of Gulliver's Travels. Gulliver in Lilliput harnessed down by this race of little people. For some people, that's how they live. They've given up their power over themselves.

Do you mean the stereotype of the townhouse in the suburbs, or generally?

Everybody, in and out of the suburbs. Like, why are the corporations still polluting? Why are there so many unemployed people? There's more unemployed people than there are people in the army. If they all wanted to rise up together, what would the army do? Shoot them? Bomb them? It seems people don't want to make a choice; and individuals don't want to make choices so a lot of collective choices aren't made. Why are we living in a world where these weird things are happening? Why are people putting up with it? I think it's critical that poets explore what is both the trap and the way out: words/language.

Tell me about your politics.

I started out with a sense of social justice, that things weren't fair, and the capitalist system only works if the mechanisms of production are renewed—factories rebuilt, machines changed. That only happens in capitalism if some people can make a lot of money. When some people make a lot of money, some other people are working for nothing. I just couldn't see how this was fair. For a long, time, too, I was living within the construct of patriarchy without realizing I was doing it, without realizing there's something else. Which is partly how patriarchy, as a mind-set, perpetuates itself, by having women say: "If I feel strange, it is just me." It's with talk that one realizes a larger group of people, women, have the same sensation. This whole concept of the individual that the western world promotes all the time—entrepreneurship, and all those things that have to do with individuals—reinforces that construct, and tries to invalidate the dialogue that will change things.

When you begin to understand your relation as a woman with the world and language, you see more clearly as well the parallels with racism and homophobia. The fear of what is "other." The insistence on the "purely personal"—"I'm not biased"—with no effort to dismantle and alter the systems that perpetuate stasis, perpetuate racism, sexism, homophobia. One of those systems is buried in our language.

I can see elements of all this in your work. Sometimes in a whole poem, sometimes just a sudden image.

It's part of the process. The politics that we have have to be part of our everyday actions and they do enter into your vision as you write a poem. Everybody's poems. Even the poems of those who aren't thinking of these things. The message that comes out of most poems is, "I accept the status quo. I accept the status quo. I accept the status quo. I accept the status quo."

In Domestic Fuel, page after page says, "I don't. I don't."

Good. I want to say, too, that as I started to talk to women, and read various women's writing, I started to see that a pattern that excludes me is structured in the language. I started to find leaks in my own mind-set that led me out of it. Once those leaks occur, you can never go back. You can't go back and say there isn't patriarchy…. It's like riding a bicycle. You can't go back to falling over. Your body will not let you do it.

You're obviously learning more and more. What's the new manuscript going to show us about it all?

I'm working now with breaking up the surface of sense a little bit more. Some of the things I'm interested in—when you read a phrase, the phrase makes sense, you can visualize it, but you can't figure out what it is doing there. There are different ways of reading. You can't read a poem the way you read a newspaper. I'm just interested in forcing people to stop trying to read the newspaper when they are reading the poem. So I'm breaking up the surface of sense, and end up with a different kind of surface. I'm looking at letting sound and rhythm and repetition of words carry things a bit, instead of sense. Part of it is striking out at people who ask what a poem means. I want people to read a poem once in a while and realize it is in the room. Meaning is a construct, anyhow. The professors won't be able to use any of their tricks on the poem. Yet, all the phrases make sense as visual images. I'm not going into concrete poetry or sound poetry at all; I'm not going into nonsense verse. But breaking up the surface of sense means to try to break up the "story" a bit, and use that new surface as a reflex for emotional depth and power. I'm finding it is possible to let different things come through, when you don't have that strict surface that blocks a lot. You don't know when you're using it that it is not permitting things. This "direction" had its start in looking at the way Cesar Vallejo works—I read his work in 1983—and then in looking at various women writers whose work changes the surface. I'm encouraged by everything I'm reading to go in this direction, and encouraged by the people I'm able to talk with now.