Theophylline: A Poetic Migration via the Modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo)

By: Erín Moure and Elisa Sampedrín

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Synopsis: What is breath for? What is archive? Why write a poem, instead of... something else? Theophylline is a work of poetry motivated by asthma, seeking poetry’s futurity in a queer and female heritage. Moure crosses a border to engage the poetry of three American modernists—Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, and Angelina Weld Grimké—as a translator might enter work to translate it. But what if that work is already in English? Moure listens to rhythms, punctuation, conditions of production and reception, and finds migration patterns, queeritude, mother mimory, wars, silence, constraints on breath, and social bias played out in terms of race and/or class. Moving from present to past to a future in the unwritten; querying borders, jarred by intrusions from alter ego Elisa Sampedrín, Theophylline finishes with poems informed by pandemic walks and human aging that include two translations: from Rosalía de Castro, pre-modernist poet who wrote in Galician calling on women to speak, and from César Vallejo, the twentieth century Peruvian whose poetics shattered the colonial (Spanish) tongue.