SOURCE: "Speaking in Tongues: The Poetry of Erin Mouré," in Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 43, Spring, 1991, pp. 133-43.

[Glickman is a Canadian poet, educator, and critic whose works include Henry Moore's Sheep, and Other Poems (1990). In the following essay, she provides an overview of Moure's work.]

        To get back to that purity. My friend, hand, voice a stutter at
        the edge of. What is. Real trees with real birds in the branches,
        wet tamarack, the birds' feathers glossed up & beaks singing.
        The throats birds have, throats of thrushes, oh soft spotted brown
        chest repeating bird-ness
 
        Oh name of the bird
 
        Thrush
 
        Do I have you beside me, me who is so small, the seeds I have
        gnawed ache inside of me forever, do I have you beside me, bird.
        Take the cup of wine away from me, so I won't fill it again. Take
        away the telephone number of the friend I am hurting
 
        Grief everywhere, now; the hand prevents me, I fall into a dream
            of, the soft
        throat smaller than my hand, flit, spotted,
        out of which, the warble
                                        ["Thrushes"]

I'd like to start off my discussion of Erin Mouré's poetry with a look at "Thrushes." Although a short piece, it is densely packed, and in its simultaneous subversiveness and traditionalism provides a good example of the lyric intelligence of its writer.

The title gives us the information we need to understand the fragmentary opening—in itself a powerful statement of intention, but abstract if deprived of the contextual reference to thrushes as, in some way, representative of "that purity." The fragmentation of the line turns out to be mimetic, since the poem's voice is "a stutter at the edge of. What is." But, at the same time, the fragmentation is unduly deferential, the hesitations marked by full stops are overly scrupulous, since the voice does, can, complete its statement. What kind of edge? "The edge of. What is." What is? "Real trees with real birds in the branches." And, with this image, the voice engages with the world, stops stuttering, and becomes passionate, like the thrushes themselves, "repeating bird-ness." But this idea, the idea of an essence beyond the particular details of individual thrushes, puts an end to the speaker's competence; language becoming redundant, she can only sigh "Oh name of the bird" and, after a pause, "Thrush."

So the fourth movement of the poem turns away from the birds and towards the speaker, revealing the motivation behind the poem's opening desideratum. What was implied by negation (not pure/not bird) is now stated out-right: the speaker is in pain, giving pain to others, drinking. At the same time, she experiences herself as "small," vulnerable, and hurt by the world: "the seeds I have gnawed ache inside of me forever." This metaphor signals the speaker's recognition that something in her is birdlike; in its own way, her broken speech speaks her name as clearly as the thrush's warble articulates its own identity. Her desire to reclaim purity and, with it, attain unbroken song, leads her to ask for help from the bird, which is a symbol of that purity. First she asks for reassurance that the bird will stay beside her (a rhetorical question to which no answer is expected, marked, therefore, by a period and not a question mark). Then she demands more active intervention (equally improbable if taken literally as an appeal to a bird): "Take the cup of wine away" and "Take away the telephone"; that is, take away both the means by which I am hurting myself, and that by which I am hurting others.

The poem breaks here, and then, in its final segment, overflows the box in which the verse paragraphs have been confined. Mouré abandons the pretence of prose in her last three lines: the first sweeps across the whole width of printed page, and the last two are progressively shorter, making for a conventional scheme of closure. The poem gestures towards openness by withholding final punctuation in this, as in the earlier paragraphs. Here, however, the openness is not inconclusive but ongoing; the poem ends suspended in song, the "warble" the voice has been struggling for all along. Not song, in fact, but "singing." That is, the poem ends by attaining, if only in a dream, that which it had declared impossible.

Mouré's return to conventional lyric form in the poem's last moments is a concession to the familiarity of the poem's conceit: a solitary speaker measures the failure of human voice and action against "the achieve of, the mastery" of a bird. To quote Gerard Manley Hopkins in this context seems almost inevitable; for him, too, birdsong "ring[s] right out our sordid turbid time, / Being pure!" One of his early Welsh sonnets explicates the meaning of the bird symbol point by point:

                  "The Caged Skylark"
 
        As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage
          Man's mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house,
                dwells—
          That bird beyond the remembering his free fells;
        This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life's age.
 
        Though aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage,
          Both sing sometímes the sweetest, sweetest spells,
          Yet both droop deadly sómetimes in their cells
        Or wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage.
 
        Not that the sweet-fowl, song-fowl, needs no rest—
        Why, hear him, hear him babble and drop down to his nest,
          But his own nest, wild nest, no prison.
 
        Man's spirit will be flesh-bound when found at best,
        But uncumberèd: meadow-down is not distressed
          For a rainbow footing it nor he for his bónes rísen
         [The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1967]

Hopkins sets up his simile in the first quatrain, but by the second the distinction between "that bird" and "this" is already breaking down. What they have in common—a confinement against which both sometimes rage, in spite of which both sometimes sing, because of which both sometimes grieve—is explored fully, before the metaphor of the cage is abandoned at the sonnet's turn. In the sestet, Hopkins turns his attention from the caged skylark to an exultantly free bird, and from man "day-labouring-out life's age" to man redeemed, "his bónes rísen." Though couched in terms of the Christian Resurrection, Hopkins's vision is not all that different from that of Mouré. Both poets combine imagery of flight and song to celebrate the ideal union of body and soul. For both, "Man's spirit will be flesh-bound when found at best"; that is, transcendence takes place in, not out of, the body. And in both, the pure expression of delighted being is conceived as a language incomprehensible to humans: "babble" (Hopkins) and "warble" (Mouré). This new language has much in common with the Pentecostal phenomenon of "speaking in tongues," described in the Bible as being inspired by the Holy Ghost (Acts 2.3-4), the divine spirit usually depicted in Christian iconography as a bird.

Trying to write an essay on the poetry of Erin Mouré brought me back to Hopkins for reasons that may, by now, be obvious. Like Hopkins, Mouré has a profoundly religious response to the world. This is acknowledged overtly in imagery and language drawn from the church; in "Thrushes," for example, we hear the echo of Jesus's words at Gethsemane, "let this cup pass from me" (Matt. 26.39), and many poems have such titles as "Epiphany" and "Jubilare" (both from Empire, York Street), "Beatitude" and "Sanctus" (both from Wanted Alive), "Angelus Domini," and "Speaking in Tongues" (both from Domestic Fuel). Her world is one in which "Jesus rises up among the soccer players" ("A Sporting Life," Domestic,) and the Virgin Mary steps "off the front porch / into the plum tree" ("Adoration," Domestic).

Of course Mouré's project is not in the least evangelical; she has recourse to Christian typology because it insists on the spiritual dimension of experience, and thus valorizes her own quest for transfiguration. This language and imagery puts her into a tradition of poets—Hopkins included—who find intolerable the gap between the spirit's aspirations and its opportunities. What she shares with Hopkins in particular is a kind of reverent sensuality that can pray—"Bless us & these thy gifts, my arms ache, / heavy with the weight / of being flesh, & desiring" ("Amore," Domestic)—even as she concedes that "So much is not happiness, not / a possible world, not visible" ("Five Highways," Domestic). Where she differs from Hopkins is precisely in how she defines possible worlds; for Mouré, Christianity, with its promises of happiness in some apocalyptic hereafter, is not a solution to anything. Rather, it is an emotionally meaningful way of speaking about the desire for solutions. Like English, it is her native sign system. It is one of the languages that makes possible "The expression of longing / in & among / the collapse of social systems" ("Cherish," Domestic).

"Cherish" is about feminism as another of these sustaining languages. It presents a dark, stuffy room where, after coffee and food, a group of women overcome fear, and fear of loneliness, to "tell their whole stories." Paradoxically, in acknowledging loneliness and expressing it, they discover that "The longing for it / purely / makes us full." The word "purely" in this context relates to the purity sought in "Thrushes": it means more than just innocence—it evokes an integrity of the whole person in action. "Cherish" celebrates a moment of achieving it in a sacramental way, among a loving community of women.

For Mouré, feminism, like Christianity, is a way of understanding the relationship of self and others, and of redeeming the self through a communal celebration of individual values. For her there is no divorce of the spiritual and the political. And therefore, as her aesthetic becomes more sophisticated, she tends to appropriate the imagery and language of her Catholic girlhood to speak of her adult commitment to feminism. She is not alone in seeking a connection between her affiliations; the predominance of women in many mystical sects has been a subject of great interest to recent feminist critics. For example, Elaine Showalter notes that: "In ecstatic religions … women, more frequently than men, speak in tongues, a phenomenon attributed by anthropologists to their relative inarticulateness in formal religious discourse."

The French psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray develops a similar observation into a detailed analysis of subjecthood and power in European culture, and concludes that mysticism has been, historically, one of the few prestigious occupations open to women. She describes mystical experience as

the only place in the history of the West in which woman speaks and acts so publicly. What is more, it is for/by woman that man dares to enter the place, to descend into it, condescend to it, even if he gets burned in the attempt. It is in order to speak woman, write to women, act as preacher and confessor to women, that man usually has gone to such excesses. [Speculum of the Other Woman, 1985]

Her argument is that, because women have been defined as "not-men," because woman is the other excluded from, and repressed by Western ideology, mysticism can be a source of power as well as a refuge; it makes the marginal position of women an asset rather than a liability. Free from the claims of subjecthood, the mystic repudiates temporal power. In the radical privacy of herself, she asserts the oneness of self and others. It is here, alone, that she is allowed to experience jouissance, that ecstasy which dissolves the Cartesian split between mind and body, and provides healing as well as bliss.

Irigaray's description of the mystic's quest is worth quoting at length to demonstrate the way in which it elucidates what is going on in Mouré's poem "Thrushes." More generally, it helps to explain why the issue of language—of the failure of common speech and the need to discover a new way of speaking—has become so central to this poet's work. Irigaray describes the mystic as one who has experienced the divine touch, and has been transformed by it. The mystic devotes her life to regaining this union; nonetheless,

she cannot specify exactly what she wants. Words begin to fail her. She senses something remains to be said that resists all speech, that can at best be stammered out. All the words are weak, worn out, unfit to translate anything sensibly. For it is no longer a matter of longing for some determinable attribute, some mode of essence, some face of presence. What is expected is neither a this nor a that, not a here any more than a there. No being, no places are designated. So the best plan is to abstain from all discourse, to keep quiet, or else utter only a sound so inarticulate that it barely forms a song. While all the while keeping an attentive ear open for any hint or tremor coming back. [Speculum of the Other Woman, 1985]

In "Thrushes," too, the speaker can only stammer ("stutter"). Desire can find no satisfaction since there is no "presence"—the longed-for friend is only a voice at the end of the phone. So speech is relinquished, and the goal becomes expression without discursive content, the song that is a speaking in tongues rather than speech in the common tongue.

Of course, there is a self-defeating solipsism to this point of view; will one hurt the friend less by withdrawal from communication than one did by angry words? Is the "dream" of pure song less escapist, ultimately, than the cup of wine was? More importantly, if there is "Grief everywhere, now," can "that purity," conceived of as utterly private, really exist? After all, the mystic so idealized by Irigaray is only allowed to perfect her discipline because it is no threat to society; her potentially subversive energy has been contained in a milieu where it cannot affect the sources of her oppression. In feminist terms, the mystic, abject before the Logos, is still circumscribed by male discourse. The mystic is still a subject within, and subject to, patriarchal institutions and ideology, even if she momentarily ignores them.

Mouré sometimes seems to suggests that this jouissance, this babbling in bird tongues, is sufficient to redeem the individual. Certainly she celebrates moments of transcendence, such as that in "Certain Words, A Garden," where, "empty of ancestors" and free from "the talk / of pistols," the individual connects with her own being as something separate from history (Wanted). To quote further from the poem:

      your life alone has reached you, captive, stubborn:
      in its arms at last
      your terror rises
      with red wings & a lonely heartbeat, & your voice
      opens up a whole garden

"It is my own bones, creeping" concludes in similar fashion, but more defiantly:

      In my country, the politicians talk
      of referenda. They do not believe, & while they are not believing
 
      the bones will break loose,
      triumphant, singing like birds
                                        (Empire)

In one extraordinary poem, "Vision Of A Woman Hit By A Bird" the metaphor becomes actualized when the speaker is struck in the throat by a bird. The mark where it hit is invisible, but she wears it "as if the bird had nested in [her]," and thereafter feels alienated from her companions, "their maleness & femininity," since "their dress is a strangeness without purity" (Domestic).

More often, however, Mouré presents the individual as a victim of history, and not as an ecstatic outsider. In her first book, Empire, York Street, she explores the ways people are marginalized and deprived of speech by the world in which they live. It is the divorce of language and political reality that disturbs her most of all. In "coda for innocent persons," for example, she declares that

      power is not in your hands, is
      a word. it sings above your head, each day
      differently, as if you wanted
      to name it, the Cherished

And in "Epiphany," she prays, grimly, "Blessed are the meek, they shall inherit / syllables, a handful." This is a book preoccupied with the question of allegiances; figures such as Rudolph Hess and Louis Reil are evoked as the author tries to negotiate a position of sanity, still clinging to the hope that "the world is rescue, & possible." This statement of conviction from the poem "Jubilare" is consistent with the empirical view of language expressed throughout the book; language, quite simply, is power. For this reason, the author refuses to capitalize the pronoun I; she refuses to assent to hierarchy even tacitly.

In her next book, Wanted Alive, Mouré abandons this token democratization of printing conventions, but she still favours unconventional syntax and punctuation. The new language struggles visibly, in her work, to escape from the confines of the old, even as it exists only through, and by means of, the old. The operating metaphor in this text is "subliminal code" (the title of both the book's concluding section and of the first poem in that section). This is a complex and highly individual conceit, bringing together points of analogy between the body's biochemistry, the way language works, and the operation of the railway in Canada. (For many years, Mouré has earned her living at Via Rail.) The traffic of words is implicitly compared to neurochemical reactions at the cellular level, exchanging bits of information sometimes lethally, sometimes with a saving grace. The train travels the expanse of the country in much the same way, letting cargo and passengers on and off at various stations, often benignly, but occasionally with fatal results. Mouré also alludes to nuclear radiation, described in American magazines as "The common field of human endeavour," but potentially, as we know, the means by which the planet may be destroyed ("Radiare," Wanted). All these codes are two-faced, and therefore dangerous. Here is the voice of MTX, an anticancer drug that fools the body back into life by mimicking DNA:

                      i am coming to break
      your code, are you ready
      to embrace me?
      from the traffic of blood, the alien
      cells with blunt faces teeming,
      their confused generation stopped;
      from the traffic of words, feel
      my acid kiss, rescue me!
                                ("MTX," Wanted)

So, while Empire, York Street places the individual outside language, Wanted Alive tries to explore the way the common language works insidiously inside the individual, often subverting her attempts to think clearly and act freely.

These first two books are bridged by a chapbook called The Whiskey Vigil, which recounts the breakup of a marriage of alcoholics. Like the relationship depicted in Mouré's first book, this marriage is analyzed in terms of desire and power; it is implicitly a microcosm of the interactions of men and women throughout history. The world's savagery forces its bewildered citizens to withdraw into personal relationships, which, ultimately, reproduce political injustice. Disappointed in love, they then retreat further into isolation, drunkenness, or even madness.

Wanted Alive incorporates some of the poems from The Whiskey Vigil, but goes further in recognizing people's complicity in their victimization by society: here we have such figures as "the woman hurt all her life / by money" ("Lenore"), the woman committed to "detox" ("Shoot-Out"), and the grotesque stripper known as "The Whale" ("Strip/La Baleine"). But it is not until her third book, Domestic Fuel, that Mouré can articulate how it is that these wounded individuals participate in a shared injustice, a shared marginality, and, therefore, a shared problem of language.

Domestic Fuel tries to deconstruct language and rebuild it to allow the individual to speak her particular truth and still be understood. In an interview in Rubicon conducted just prior to the publication of Domestic Fuel, Mouré provides some insight into what she is doing in that book. She reminds us that words "are just signs for something," and deplores the fact that "people get so used to conventions that they think they're facts, and they're not facts." For this reason, she says:

I think male writers are at a disadvantage right now because they can take for granted a language that is already invented for them; it already belongs to them. The written history and literature of human beings has referred to "he" and "him"! Women writing feel the unease and strangeness in our language more readily because they are out of it…. [W]omen are beginning to write a new language, their own language, using the common word-signs of the old; women have to discover new correlatives of desire, or ways of expressing them. [Peter O'Brien, "An Interview with Erin Mouré," Rubicon, No. 3 (Summer 1984)]

These ideas are consistent with Mouré's poetic strategy from the start, but not until Domestic Fuel was she able to bring her reverence for mystical transcendence, her rage at the abuse of political power, and her frustration with the corruption of language, together in a coherent, feminist analysis of society.

The tension involved in trying to speak one's own tongue through, and in spite of the inherited language, to discover one's own faith through, and in spite of inherited values, is represented in Mouré's work by strategic incoherence. Transgressions of syntax and punctuation, repetition, fragmentation, obsessive amplification and parataxis, the rejection of formal closure—all these devices may be found in "Thrushes," and are typical of her work in general. I don't mean to imply that this kind of formal experimentation is exclusively feminist: although she attributes the discovery of a new language—"Using the words of the old [language] but in a new way" ("An Interview")—to women, Mouré would agree, I'm sure, that this has always been the purpose of poetry. But the particular urgency feminist poets such as Mouré bring to this enterprise derives from an awareness of how much of woman's experience has been unspoken, is not encoded or, alternatively, has been encoded only negatively, as the absence or contrary of whatever is believed to be masculine and valuable. To break this "subliminal code" becomes double important: as a poet, one owes it to the language, and as a woman, one owes it to history. Ultimately, as a womanpoet, one needs to break the code for oneself, and if this means that one must stutter before learning to sing, so be it. To conclude where I began, with Hopkins, in yet another bird poem:

        Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
          Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
          Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
        Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
         [The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1967]