Poetry in Motion: Irene Marques + The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet

Irene Marques on The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet:

Perhaps I am an old soul. That is what an emergency Dr. recently implied when I came in suffering from an intense crisis of vertigo—an affliction that has been affecting me for a while now—and whose cause we have not yet fully identified (there is also a story about my use of the word “affliction” at the emergency to describe my condition and the Dr’s difficulty understanding it, but I won’t get into it here). Tests are being done. Medicine and the hope we put in it are at work, trying to do, accomplish things. Behind this hope and this doing, there are humans with good intentions. This well-intentioned doing is fundamental for our human survival and for the creation of livable societies. Any doing with good intentions is a must: it is the required condition without which the human (and surely, the more-than-human) species cannot survive. We need community and care and good will to create a world that can BE.

This preamble is to say (it is already a way of saying what my poetry is about) that I consider poetry a profound act of communication, a medium to remind ourselves of the important things in life: of love, of seeing that which often goes unseen, of saying (writing, listening) with the utmost care, about the self, about the “other”, the known and unknown. And most importantly, saying with the intention of truly honouring our words. Saying with an eye that sees (wants to see) life (hope, possibility, rebirth, redirection) everywhere, even in the sorrowful spaces of our current world, where ugly wars are being fought (Gaza, Sudan, The Congo, Ukraine…). Saying is a prelude to the act. Clarifying our intentions in words, through a careful thought-out, caring language, as bell hooks reminds us in All About Love, is necessary to then act out those words, those intentions. To say (to write) is to see (understand) and then act accordingly as Kenneth Burke might put it. Language is (should be) a code of honour, a code towards cognition, enlightenment. In an age of AI and influencers, where rhetoric can be so tricky, where lies, exaggeration appear as truths, confusing our human mind and soul, it is essential to nourish the honest word.

In The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet, this intention of hounouring the word, of using language ethically is the paramount concern. Most of the poems from this collection, including the ones I read here (“When You Write a Letter”, “Verbs”, “The Economics of Linguistic Exchange” and “For the Love of Words”) centre around this premise. In a world where presidential candidates and their appointed VP’s lie and admit that they will lie if they have to, to put across their point—their point being about winning and power at all costs—it seems to me that we must, perhaps more than ever, remind ourselves of the power of words to either do constructive things or to create chaos, suffering, hatred, misunderstand. We must be reminded constantly that language is to be paid attention to.

In general, my writing, and this collection is no different, tends to be philosophical, inquisitive and lyrical in tone. I would also add that it shies away from what I see as the predominant literary ethic and aesthetic in Canada and North America, which privileges Anglo-Saxon modes of writing (despite our claims of “diversity”). Many of the poems of this collection also tell stories, stories related to familial, cultural inheritances, universal stories of oppression and have didactic and deeply reflective undertones. As I write in the “Note to the Reader” at the beginning of the collection, “What I seek, ask for, and work obsessively to tap into, is a native tongue, a vernacular that bypasses the traps of a supposed rationality and objectivity forged in a ‘body politic’ consumed by self-interests that reduce our ontological experience.”

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Irene Marques is a bilingual multi-genre writer (English and Portuguese) and Lecturer at Toronto Metropolitan University in the department of English. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature, Masters in French Literature and Comparative Literature (University of Toronto) and a Bachelor of Social Work (Ryerson University, now TMU). Her published creative works include, among others, four collections of poetry in English, The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet being the last one (Mawenzi House, 2024) and the novels Daria (Inanna Publications, 2021) and Uma Casa no Mundo (Imprensa Nacional/Portugal, 2021), which won Prémio Imprensa Nacional/Ferreira de Castro. He academic publications include the manuscript Transnational Discourses on Class, Gender and Cultural Identity (Purdue University Press, 2011) and numerous articles in international journals or scholarly collectives. She was born and raised in Portugal and moved to Canada at the age of 20. Learn more at irenemarques.net

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The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet is available now, here or from your favourite indie bookstore.

For more Poetry in Motion, click here.