My Beloved Wager
essays by Erín Moure

And Poetry

My method? If anything, a kind of accretion. Sounds attract feelings and aches, and vice versa. Sounds and words attract each other. They attract, too, ideas and worries. And dreams. And they shudder a thread of remembrance that knits the self over and over again. It’s preposterous; it’s hard to keep up with, do justice to, keep track of. The world is imbued with language and linguistic possibility, with bad and good expression, with hopefulness, but with manipulation and trickery as well, with rationalizations and silences and gaps. All of these alter, slowly, the structures of thought in the head. Poetry laughs at all of this at the same time as it confronts it, because poetry is entirely useless and owes no debts. It’s a weightless possession that nevertheless bears the weight of responsibility and forgiveness. It’s an object that is first a noise, then a resonance of words that alters noise over and over in the head, breaking through the pallor of the image and the self.

I revise a lot, and listen and learn when revising. I try consciously to push words forward and make them tumble, to work through my own perceptual failures, to create a space and duration in the marks that are words where differences are possible, multifaceted articulation is possible. Even if this pushing breaks down the construct of the self — the seeing self, the self as un-self-conscious observer in the poem, as poetic voice, as stability steering the poem.

To me there’s a relationship between physical processes, presence, and voice that is articulated, constituted only in relation to other beings. I’m more interested in those links we have to each other, so well buried by the social constraints built into our speech and perception, and in the movement of those links, than in objects or conclusions at either end. If you damage or conceal the links (as we do in damaging the earth or in underfunding aids hospices and medication, for example), what are the consequences for the individual? I believe they are grave.

The structure of the poem? To me, absolute structure is motion. Being is always in excess of this structure; it endures while motion is already past. Shock of that. Here we are. The body requires motion for memory and to interpret context. Memory is one part of the construct of a present context, which is to say, of the plausible. The brain puts forward these plausibilities by selecting neural paths we have previously travelled. Concomitantly, the neural paths murmur to each other. The paths alter themselves in response not just to outside data, but also to this murmuring. Recontext, then, as new context. Never the same. In the midst of the murmur, we must be attentive and moving in order to receive outer stimuli, whether identifiable or unknown, familiar or strange.Attention is that burst of light. Burst of speed. Furious.

Poetry is a limitless genre. Its borders are only in ourselves and we can move them, in our lifetimes, if we dare to.

To read more essays by Erín Moure, be on the lookout for My Beloved Wager, to be released in September 2009.