performance and the poem 127y fi rms Con-Con
[.. .]
Her e commaes
such Air Errs Heir HairEnter DOLLY
Entered enters
Enters entered
Enter entre
en train en trail
en trav Ail Aïe
La bour La bour La bour
Wears god on a strap
Shares mickey with all your friendsThe opening of this short extract posits importance on a gendered
and erotic language, which veers from English to a combination of
English and French and neologisms. One can hear the pleasure of
a strong or ‘forte’ love becoming ‘found’, and then transforming
to a fi eld of possible concubine or ‘ConCubiles’. A French tongue
intrudes into the word favourite. The associational phonic pat-
tering is heightened by the combination of ‘Air’, ‘Errs’, ‘Heir’,
‘Hair’. These linguistic resistances in the text force the reader to
consider its performance both phonically and graphemically on
the page; how minute shifts of pronunciation can change a context
for understanding. ‘DOLLY’ can be read as a girly toy, but also as
the fi rst cloned animal, a sheep, in 1996. This propels a grammati-
cal exploration of ‘cloned’ sounds and words, as ‘enter’ ‘mutates’
to ‘entre’, and points to the intrusion of new words ‘en train’ or
in the middle of a proposition. Bergvall then ‘translates’ homo-
phonically ‘travaille’ to ‘labour’, which is set out as ‘La bour’ or,
colloquially, the bourgeoisie in French. Goan Atom’s performance
writing invites and necessitates the reader’s response to complete
a circuit of interpretation. The fi nal line of this excerpt highlights
this gaming or ‘mickey’ that is shared between friends. Performing
not only in a participatory way, Bergvall’s poetry also creates an
assemblage of political and gendered contexts for interpreting the