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I don't want what is already made but what is tortuously in the making.
-Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva
(qtd. in Erin Moure, O Cidadán 83)
In their call for papers for this special issue of Canadian Literature on poetics, Clint Burnham and Christine Stewart ask a key question: "Should one make political claims at all for formally-motivated poetry?" We intend to argue that when poetry is motivated by an awareness that form is not neutral, it always already demonstrates an overt and engaged relation to the making of the world by human agents. We can and should make poUtical claims for such poetry. But how? To consider this question, we will focus on one of the key political issues of our time - the nature of citizenship - in relationship to recent work by Erin Moure. In our view, Moure's challenges to notions of authorship and the book enable her to enact citizenship otherwise. To make this claim, we will focus, not only on Moure's essays on citizenship1 in her recently collected My Beloved Wager: Essays from a Writing Practice (2009), but also on her theory of reading, which we see as developing in two pieces she wrote in response to the work of artist Lani Maestro,2 and in two recent books of poetry: O Cidadán (2002) and Expeditions of a Chimcera (2009), written in collaboration with Oana Avasilichioaei.3 As Moure's work in these several modes demonstrates, thinking about citizenship requires us to think about readers, writers, and books. Just as her recent work challenges conventional notions of authorship and the book, so too does it challenge us to think about citizenship in a different mode.
In "Redefining Citizenship by Poetic Means," Moure makes the overtly political claim that "citizenship is a mode of enactment, not belonging" (164) arguing that how we act as readers affects how we act as citizens. She sees both modes of enactment as intimately tied to what we make of borders. Do we stay put? Move across borders? Force others into or out of (our?) space(s)? Facilitate free movements? Do we see the world as given and unchangeable or as something, in Clarice Lispector's words, "tortuously in the making"? If our reading practices involve the ways we engage with the...