Contemporary Poetry

performance and the poem 125

‘performance writing’. Bergvall poses that performance writing
does indeed explore relationships ‘text-based work entertains when
developed in conjunction with other media and discourses’.^58 But
she adds that the writing asks a question which is as much ‘open
to literary analysis, as one open to the broader investigation of the
kinds of formal and ideological strategies which writers and artists
develop textually in response or in reaction to their own time and
their own fi elds’.^59 Bergvall asks a series of rhetorical questions in
her early analysis of the term ‘performance writing’:

So, what is Performance Writing not?

Is Performance Writing not writing?

Is it writing which performs not writes?

Is it not performance which writes?

But then does writing not perform?

And when does writing not perform? And what kind of not

performance are we talking about? Is it not performance to

write or is it not writing to not perform?^60

Clearly all writing, as Bergvall rather gnomically points out, can be
taken at one level or another as a form of performance. Bergvall’s
own poetry wants to explode that false dichotomy between text
and the articulation of voice itself as performance. As Nicky Marsh
comments, Bergvall’s poetry addresses:

Not only the mutability of the realised performance but

also the centrality of the body, mouth and tongue to the

articulation of language. Such an approach questions the false

distinction between a text and voice-based poetics and the

assumed silence of the printed page.^61

Goan Atom, an ongoing work by Bergvall, explores such distinc-
tions between print and oral performance by emphasising the asso-
ciative patterning of words, phonemic resonance, sonic implosions,
resistances, fragments and aberrations within the text. At key
points Goan Atom interrogates constructions of female sexuality
and the performance of gender through an imploded and semanti-
cally unstable textuality: