THIS ESSAY BEGAN as a talk at the Women’s Innovative Poetry and Cross-Genre Festival held at Greenwich University in London in July 2010, in which Caroline Bergvall herself participated. The occasion contributed to my consciousness of the need to address questions of embodiment: I began with the problem of how to speak about Bergvall after having seen and listened to her perform in the flesh. I was not only articu-lating my own trepidation at talking about a writer and artist who speaks so eloquently through and about her own work. I ws also raising the more general problem of how to relate theory, concept, and system to embodied instantiation.

Bergvall’s foregrounding of the body offers a novel approach to this problem, which is central to a set of developments in poetry and literary and cultural theory that I term iterative poetics. I use the term iterative poetics to describe the trend towards the use of pre-existing material in poetry, and the tendency in a broad range of feminist, cultural, and literary theory to treat gender, text, and culture not as original or derivative but as the product of repeated acts. Forms of iterative poetics appear in early twentieth-cen-tury avant-garde poetry and the iterative practices of contemporary poetry, including sampling, performance, versioning, plagiarism, copying, translation, and reitera-tions across multiple media. Iterative models of identity have emerged over the last century partly in response to the challenges to individuality, agency, authority, cultural identity, and difference posed by new techno logies of reproducibility and globalization. These iterative models include Gertrude Stein’s emphasis on entity over identity, Der-rida, Butler, and Bhabha’s emphasis on identity as produced through repeated but alter-able performances, and Bakhtin’s understanding of the possibilities for the “re-accentu-ation” of existing discursive material, given the historically contingent and individually embodied relation of speech acts to systems of discourse.

Iterative poetics represents not just a theoretical framework for understanding Bergvall’s work but an approach that, as her work emphasizes, unsettles the very rela-tion of theory to practice, concept to instantiation, language to flesh. Bergvall deploys iteration as a practice involving writing, performance, translation, archiving, and con-ceptual structure from early works such as Strange Passages (1993) to more recent and widely discussed pieces such as “Via,” “About Face” (2005), and the major project that includes Middling English (2010) and Meddle English (2011).