performance and the poem 121constantly ‘rewriting in an unstable text’ (p. 113 ). Cast in this light,
the ambitions of My Life bear a certain resonance with Butler’s
own infl ection of performativity. Butler clarifi es in an interview
that ‘It is important to distinguish performance from performativ-
ity: the former presumes a subject, but the latter contests the very
notion of the subject’.^44 She adds also that ‘what I’m trying to do
is think about the performativity as that aspect of discourse that has
the capacity to produce what it names.’^45 This deconstructive impulse
features in My Life as ‘such displacements alter illusions, which is
all-to-the-good’ (p. 88 ).
PERFORMANCE, THE VOICE AND THE WORLD: KATE
FAGAN
One might ask the more general question of how the poem relates
to the world around it, or, put another way, how does the poem
perform in the world? A way of considering this infl ection is to
suggest how the poem may perform ‘phenomenologically’ or
establishes a perception of perception in the poetry.^46 Australian
poet Kate Fagan’s volume The Long Moment ( 2002 ) details an
encountering of the world into a form of perceptual rhythm. Her
poems detail a self-conscious awareness of perception and how
the poet’s chronicle of the movement of perception may often be
thwarted. Moreover, her interest in breath and musicality draws
us in a full circle to Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’. There is evidently
an awareness of the body in the world inscribed in her poetry.
This pressure to chronicle a subjective performance in Fagan’s
poetry is described in ‘Return to a New Physics’ as: ‘lyric interjects
/ demanding specifi c / impatient approval / quick like junk, /
memorial about position / and meaning’.^47 In an interview Fagan
focuses on the improvisatory element of her work, referring to her
long poem ‘The Waste of Tongues’ as ‘a long, serial work. I tend
to work in series that are sort of “improvisations” of thinking and
word, in a sense, not unlike musical improvisations. This one has,
I suppose, a social and political impetus to it’.^48 David McCooey
notes that Fagan’s poetry performs a ‘kind of metatextuality in
which complex notions of text, identity, and form are integrated