Finding Common Ground: Purposeful Disarticulation in the Poetry of Erin Mouré

Finding Common Ground:Purposeful Disarticulation in the Poetry of Erin Mouré Shirley McDonald (bio) “Where do we go when we die?” asks Billy. “I don’t know. Where are we now?” is the gypsy’s reply. Erin Mouré O Cidadán: poems This fragment of dialogue from The City of the Plains—the third volume of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy—exemplifies the various moments of playful intertextuality that one comes to expect from the poems of Erin Mouré. The lines mark McCarthy’s engagement with what Kant describes as dynamical philosophy (108–09) and, thus, find themselves well placed in the middle of Mouré’s poem, which is likewise engaged. Connections between McCarthy’s lines and Mouré’s poem depend not only on their common subject matter but upon the similarity between the title of McCarthy’s novel and a title hidden as a detail in the poem: St Augustine’s ecumenical work, The City of God. Mouré gestures toward McCarthy’s text merely by the dialogue fragment, and St Augustine’s, by identifying him first by name and then as “A” followed by a reference to “his City” (O Cidadán 68). Reverberations of a philosophical nature continue to resonate among Mouré’s poem, McCarthy’s novel, and [End Page 109] St Augustine’s work in their common concern with what is unknowable about the sublime and, yet, what is attractive. Mouré alludes to the power of The City of the Plains and The City of God to act as “heliotrope response device[s]”—implicitly, at least, in the title of the poem in which she refers to them: “document25 (heliotrope response device).” The poem itself is such a device as it draws its readers toward the unknowable as flowers of a “heliotrope” are drawn toward the sun (68). An obscure but significant aspect of heliotropism is growth. When Mouré uses the concept allegorically, she alludes to stimulus potentially rendered from poetry. As Kant states, “‘Poetry fortifies the mind: for it lets the mind feel its ability—free, spontaneous, and independent of natural determinism—to contemplate and judge phenomenal nature as having aspects that nature does not on its own offer in experience either to sense or to the understanding’” (quoted in Tiffany 76). Mouré’s hermeneutical poetics stimulate growth by inviting the reader to participate in a philosophical exercise that is playfully exuberant. Such effort often ends, however, in less than an adequate grasp of a poem’s meaning. For example, Mouré’s allusion to the myth of Dido, especially in her absence from the Augustinian city—“But what is a city of god with no Dido. / Dido=grace, too” (68) problematizes the reading, but to what avail? Is the poet’s reference to Dido meant only to invoke a kind of playfulness or is there something else? Despite O Cidadán: poem’s intellectual attraction—that heliotropic effect—deciphering its meaning proves to be an insuperable task. Indeed, the body of Mouré’s poetics readily offers little explicit meaning. Such is the enigmatic nature, as well, of the allusions to the sublime that register in her poems. There are recognizable signifiers, however, that operate as a pattern of ever-widening circles of expansion, a movement marked by the poet’s shifting subjectivity as she evolves from her self-inscription as a daughter to a lover to a national citizen to a philosopher exploring the world within its earthly grounding, adopting, as does Mouré, Heideggerian images of the sublime. “The readings we can give each other, and the world,” she writes, “are the world, the ‘sense / to come,’ and construct our ‘selves’ where ‘we art.’ As if reading itself is localization, situation, siting” (68). The process of expansion within Mouré’s poetry marks her re-signification of selfhood in new and ever-changing identities within the realms of “localization, situation, [and] siting.” As I seek to demonstrate, expansion marks the author’s identity and places her on common ground with other philosophers within the realms of cognitive poetics and language. I explore Mouré’s poetry through posthumanist, phenomenological, and ideological [End Page 110] modes of analysis to extrapolate on the author’s representations of life experiences...

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