Contemporary Poetry

performance and the poem 123

the poet as a form of ‘leaning into attention’ (p. 87 ). Moreover, in
‘Sentience’ a sense of needing to impart or express sentiment is
given in painful terms: ‘insides rendered outer’ (p. 88 ).
Key to understanding the term ‘performance’ in Fagan’s poetry
is the interrelationship between text and music in her work, par-
ticularly in ‘Sentience’ where considerable attention is given to
the articulation of a poetic voice. Fagan takes great pleasure in
the sonic qualities of how her text performs linguistically. In this
context Roland Barthes’s essay ‘The Grain of the Voice’ ( 1972 )
offers a consideration of an understanding of music and its per-
formance in poetry.^53 Barthes adopts Julia Kristeva’s terms ‘phe-
notext’ and ‘genotext’ as part of this understanding of musical
performance. The genotext, in Kristeva’s account, lends itself to
melodic devices. It is an ecstatic drive closely allied to the semiotic,
while the phenotext suggests the communicative level of language

• structures which underpin grammatical rules and conventions.^54
  In ‘The Grain of the Voice’, Barthes transposes Kristeva’s confi gu-
  ration to ‘pheno-song’ and the ‘geno-song’, the former becoming
  the impulse towards articulation, expression and performance and
  the latter delighting in the jouissance of linguistic materiality. As
  Barthes elucidates, the geno-song has ‘nothing to do with commu-
  nication’; instead it is:

That apex (or that depth) of production where the melody

really works at the language – not at what it says, but the

voluptuousness of its sound-signifi ers, of its letters – where

melody explores how the language works and identifi es with

that work. It is, in a very simple word but, which must be

taken seriously, the diction of the language.^55

Barthes places a particular emphasis on the display of the geno-
song in the recital as a form of writing, and the recital through its
heightened performance of the geno-song becomes in turn a text.
‘The Waste of Tongues’ impresses upon us the visceral and
erotic relationship between words and the body. The speaker
muses that ‘A word-balcony – begins to curl / at my mind’s tongue,
tectorial seduction / of a lexeme, in licked syllable against another’
(p. 95 ), and in ‘Sentience’ we are told of ‘what seduction a tongue