Contemporary Poetry

118 contemporary poetry

lines. This process of inclusion is remarked upon in My Life: ‘I
could feed those extra words into the sentence already there, rather
than make a new one for them, make place in the given space, and
that would be the same thing, making more sense, which is all to
the good’ (p. 88 ). In her pivotal essay ‘The Rejection of Closure’
( 1985 ), Hejinian remarks upon the evolving possibility of what she
terms the ‘open text’:

Language is productive of activity in another sense, with

which anyone is familiar who experiences words as attrac-

tive, magnetic to meaning. This is one of the fi rst thing one

notices, for example, in works constructed from arbitrary

vocabularies generated by random or chance operations.^40

In this schema, subjectivity can be thought of as a process, or con-
tinual performance. Hejinian proposes subjectivity is less a fi xed
entity than ‘a mobile (and mobilized) reference point’.^41
My Life, while certainly not being a treatise to Butler’s work,
places into focus the performative element of gender construction.
Iterative actions become a hallmark of performing motherhood.
The speaker refl ects upon the ritual of birthdays:

At every birthday party that year, the mother of the birthday

child served ice cream and ‘surprise cake’, into whose slices

the ‘favours’ were baked. But nothing could interrupt those

given days. I was sipping Shirley Temples wearing my Mary

Janes. (p. 19 )

In this extract Hejinian playfully demonstrates how names when
used as nouns retain an element of their initial inscription. This
element of repetition and iteration is evident in the text’s construc-
tion: at one point we are told ‘I quote my mother’s mother’s moth-
er’s mother: “I must everyday correct some fault in my morality
of talents and remember how short a time I have to live” ’ (p. 37 ).
Each of My Life’s section opens with a leitmotif, or aphoristic frag-
ment, that is then recontextualised at various points throughout
the volume. A key fragment, ‘I wrote my name in every one of his
books’, demonstrates at one stage an entry into self-knowledge,