Contemporary Poetry

performance and the poem 119

and worry of being perceived as feminine. The key clause is fol-
lowed by ‘Was my handwriting dainty, or afraid? It was a pretty
plaything. She trimmed fi rst her nails and then the split ends
of her hair’ (p. 44 ). This awareness of the feminising of a young
girl indicates an awareness that Butler ascribes to performativity.
Hejinian’s tactic of constantly recontextualising key clauses indi-
cates the evolution of different performances of gendered condi-
tions. For example, we have the admission of needing to inhabit
a male space: ‘But these words are meant to awaken in you such
desire that... I wrote my name in every one of his books’ (p. 93 ).
Moreover, the emergence of selfhood through the act of writing is
presented as a micro-narrative, claiming ownership amidst other
narratives:

One summer I worked as a babysitter and lived with a family

and its babies at the beach, (this was the same summer that

I read father’s copy of Anna Karenina and thus made it my

own, so that later that fall it was logical that I should write my

name in every one of his books). (pp. 111 – 12 )

My Life claims that ‘As such a person on paper, I am androgy-
nous’ (p. 105 ). In her essays Hejinian remains sceptical of a
so-called women’s writing, or language as examined by French
feminist theorists such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. She
responds that: ‘the narrow defi nition of desire, the identifi cation of
desire solely with sexuality and the literalness of the genital model
for a woman’s language that some of these writers insist on may be
problematic’. Hejinian continues, asserting that ‘The desire that is
stirred by language is located most interestingly within language
itself.’^42 A compulsion for change is made evident in My Life as
a proposition of a ‘new’ composition. Midway in the volume a
speaker comments that:

I suppose I had always hoped that, through an act of will and

the effort of practice, I might be someone else, might alter

my personality and even my appearance, that I might create

myself, but instead I found myself trapped in the very charac-

ter which made such a thought possible and such a wish mine.