My Beloved Wager: Essays from a Writing Practice

by Erín Moure

My Beloved Wager gathers essays by noted poet and translator Erín Moure, and records a quarter century of writing practice emerging from a city of exhilarating poetic and translatory possibility: Montreal. In her essays and linguistic-sculptural interventions on what poetry makes possible, Moure reveals why she has placed her bets on poetry as a way of life. In these works, the richness of poetry is laid bare as Moure challenges us to think more deeply about who we are as speakers, readers, writers, and citizens of the world.

Genres: Poetry, Essays, Writing, Nonfiction

352 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2009

About the author

Erín Moure is a transborder poet and translator of poetry and poetics. In Canada, the USA, and the UK (variously), she has published seventeen books of poetry, and several books of prose including a memoir and a book of short takes on translation. Her most recent book is Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure (ed. Shannon Maguire, Wesleyan 2017). She is the translator or co-translator of seventeen books of poetry and three books of non-fiction (biopoetics) from French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese into English. Her translation of Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea (Nightboat, 2017) was a finalist for a 2018 Best Translated Book Award. She holds two honorary doctorates for her contributions to poetry and translation, from Brandon University in Canada and the Universidade de Vigo in Spain. She lives in Montreal.

Reviews

[Anna Leventhal · Rating 4 out of 5]

(I originally wrote this for the Montreal Review of Books.)

Erin Moure is known as a “difficult” poet; her tendency to “push words forward and make them tumble” rarely lulls and comforts the reader, nor does it reassure her that everything is as it’s always been and ever shall be. In her new collection of (mostly) prose writing, My Beloved Wager, Moure gives us a map of her process as a poet, theorist, philosopher, and general heavyweight intellect. This book, in its density, its facility with poststructuralist theory, its intellectual essais, is no less difficult or demanding than her poetry, no more soothing. But what’s required to access and follow Moure’s process is not a PhD in poetics or literary theory but simply patience, a willingness to re-read paragraphs slowly, or backwards, or upside-down. Theory, after all, like poetry, like stories, deals with the basic elements of human and social life: the body, relationships between people and the world, the structures that surround us and through which we move. Moure takes us through the dense theory of aesthetics at the margins of society, the impossibility and importance of translation, and the danger of censorship to the soul as well as the body.
It’s not neuroscience.
Or, in another sense, it is, if we understand language, as Moure does, as proceeding from the actual atoms and molecules that form and shape our consciousness. Poetry is a scientific process as much as a cultural and artistic one.
But the cultural and social element can’t be ignored. For Moure, poetry is radical, in both senses of the word: revolutionary, forward-thinking, challenging the status quo; and radical, of the roots, as it deals with communication on the most basic, original level. And this book is radical, its politics are radical, though naturally it makes more sense to refer to its driving force as poetics rather than politics. So, then, a radical poetics, articulated and explored through questions of citizenship, censorship, identity, borders, and body. And, as such, a poetics committed to the transformation of daily life.
One of the collection’s most importance assertions is on treating writing as a practice rather than a product – a verb in place of a noun. We do not see analyses of the meaning of poems here, neither Moure’s own nor that of the poets she introduces and displays. Instead, we are invited to think about what poetry does, and how and what it is. As readers, we are often trained to approach reading as a kind of decoding of images and metaphors and word choices, as though every work is simply a conversion of another, clearer, less “poetic” idea. Moure’s tactics against this mode are, at the very least, exhilarating.
The pieces in this book are varied in theme and tone, but they build on each other and carry ideas forward. We see the author in a series of different frames: coping (wryly, humourously) with corporate co-opting of poetry, discovering contemporary Toronto through the work of an early modernist Portuguese poet, and cooking a pan of quails, attempting to “[participate] with them in the fragility of another act related to song, that of eating.” Through all her forays into the thick materiality of language and theory, Moure remains remarkably present, as a writer, a woman, a feminist, a lesbian. (At one point she describes her work, only somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as “hi-toned obscurantist lesbo smut.”) These essays insist upon a philosophy of the poet as sunk deeply in the real, while remaining ethically and practically bound to the realm of the possible.
The wager of the book’s title is a bet on the possibilities offered by reading, by books; the opportunity at every page-turn to have a world created anew, to be changed by language. To read this book is to set stakes on one writer’s conviction in the importance of poetry, of words and the gestures toward communication that they frame.
It’s a pretty solid bet.

[Alyosha · Rating 4 out of 5]

At times it felt too much like a collection of previously published essays than a text of any sort (multiple essays speaking on the translation of the same work in almost the same terms all in a row?).
But the overarching (or underlying) thematics of Moure and her work shines through in some phenomenally introguing essays here. I would love to sit down and have a chat with her on poetry and language, over a coffee (or perhaps on coffee over some poetry and language).