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9 Elegy of Refusal Erin Mouré’s Furious Poetry, I think, is the structuration (the action or condition of structuring, the rendering visible, audible) of memory that can undo the Law of the City, because it both precedes and transgresses the Law. Transgresses, for even poetry can’t avoid the Law. Even memory can’t. — Erin Mouré, “Poetry, Memory and the Polis” Where certain male philosophers and writers see death...women imagine, instead, the death of patriarchy. — Gail Scott, “A Feminist at the Carnival” Reading Lola Lemire Tostevin’s Cartouches as a text that is seriously mischievous in its defiance of Derrida as the master/father while seriously devoted to grieving the loss of Achilles Lemire introduces ways to think about the female elegy in the context of experimental poetics. The “prismatic publics” of such poetry, according to Kate Eichhorn and Heather Milne’s latest anthology on innovative poetry written by Canadian women, signify their intention to investigate language’s properties and political uses by noting how it may be bent or fractured, as light is bent through a prism: in short, “working out the problems in rather than simply with language ” (14; emphases in original). With this prismatic metaphor in mind, perhaps it is not so unusual to read Erin Mouré’s 1988 Governor General’s Award–winning Furious as the final text in this study, although it may seem 2 0 9 2 1 0 F u r i e s a n d F i l l e s d e l a Sa g e s s e to be an unlikely choice. But Furious, as Mouré’s breakout work of feminist defiance of the anaesthetic use of language, deserves attention for its rigorous feminist politics against the ubiquitous force of the patriarchal rhetoric of mourning. Among other actions, the text challenges the male body’s position as a traditional elegiac object/object of desire and emphasizes the dynamics of elegiac convention as a social structure in literature and language . Mouré’s interrogation of memory as a structure that is regulated by tradition and by language suggests, audaciously, that the structures of language devalue the structures of women’s memories and favour a rigid set of conventions that confirm the patriarchal status quo. Furious is a text that is haunted by elegiac convention but is equally appropriative of elegiac convention in order to demonstrate how such conventions might be dismantled , even on a provisional basis. If we read Furious as a text that refuses elegy in order to reinfuse elegy with the force of female memory, we must consider the ways in which Mouré uses the anxiety of language to showcase the ways that elegiac convention values the male body over the female body. A return to a model of mourning from the first chapter of this volume is useful here: Gillian Rose’s conception of mourning as a law that trades in “difficulties and injustices” (36) and cannot be separated from the inaugural and, in Mouré’s work, the social function of mourning. Filtering a righteous daughter figure as Fury—one that recalls Macpherson’s demanding daughters—through an anxiety that resembles Rose’s “perennial anxiety” (36) of mourning, Mouré’s strategy of “getting out of the ending” (Furious 101) promotes a politically disobedient melancholia that reinvigorates political life, or in this case, re-enlivens a genre that is still in the process of defining its political life in a national literary community. Mouré begins Furious with a poem that alludes to the rustic swain as elegiac protagonist, but immediately casts doubt upon how the image and its attendant conventions work in a feminist context. Without denying the historical and literary power of elegiac convention, Mouré reveals the elegy’s debt to and support of a patriarchal social system. In “Whose,” the opening poem of Furious, a first-person speaker declares herself (or himself : the gender is not specified) to be “sleeping perfectly” in a neglected garden, dressed in pajamas and lying among the flowers and vegetables. This deceptively whimsical image accrues a sense of vulnerability with the flora as the poem progresses; a carrot is not merely “rooted in the earth,” but is also “a pointed microphone listening for water.” The zinnias are “ragged” and the garden is surrounded by “slug-dust on the outer border.” This garden is addicted to the “drug of topsoil.” The image is neither of an idyllic nor a ruined garden, but one that has been pulled askew, productive...

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