116 contemporary poetry
we’d been assured / was their rallying, their I belong to Glasgow
/ their Cwm Rhondda’ (p. 36 ). The performance of music is used
as a vehicle to draw attention to distinctions of affi liation. This
humiliating awareness draws the speaker to acknowledge that this
mistake echoes historical cultural ignorance: ‘I knew the shame the
letter feels / when it makes its address but its stamps fall short’ (p.
36 ). Paterson surreally uses the analogy of musical failure as a way
of evoking an earlier bombing of the island ‘that infrasonic boom
/ that verdant hush that spread like a bad word’ (p. 36 ). Again
Paterson plays with the constriction that formal structure grants
as well its opportunities for expansiveness. In a sweeping pan, he
suggests that the resultant error made every bat in Kota Kinabalu
fl y ‘headlong into the nearest tree’ while the street dogs went ‘lulu’
and grotesquely the ‘audience bled appreciatively / from their ears’
(p. 37 ). Although the closed form of the terza rima may be far from
Olson’s sense of a projective verse, Paterson examines ideas of per-
formance within the interstices of structure. Terza rima becomes a
score for a retrospective accounting of the jazz musician’s failings
and sense of colonial culpability.
PERFORMATIVITY: LYN HEJINIAN
Surveying elements of twentieth-century poetic practice, critic
Charles Altieri proposes that:
There is no distinctive knowledge of the self; there are only
contingent moments of more or less charged awareness of the
psyche focused on the self, rather than on other aspects of the
world... Therefore there is no privileged knowledge distinc-
tive to the fi rst person. Knowledge of the self must be fi ltered
through sensations produced by the performance of self.^37Altieri’s commentary on subjectivity in contemporary poetic prac-
tice – as mediated and enacted through performance – resonates
with theoretical propositions of the 1980 s examining gender con-
struction. Judith Butler argues that gender is neither a pre-existent
nor an innate category, but reliant upon the imitative performance