Contemporary Poetry

100 contemporary poetry

the written page. The graphemic possibilities inscribed in Olson’s
work are developed by contemporary critic and poet Michael
Davidson.^2 Davidson examines the modern poet’s foregrounding
of the materiality of language and suggests how the poetic text can
be read as a site for phantasmagorical writings and the layering of
previous inscriptions. In describing the multiple strata of writing,
Davidson draws on the infl ection of palimpsest which becomes
in his own coining ‘palimtext’. The palimtext in his account is an
attempt at describing:

Modern writing’s intertextual and material character, its

graphic rendering of multiple layers of signifi cation. The

term also suggests the need for a historicist perspective in

which textual layers refer not only to previous texts but to the

discursive frame of the present in which they are seen.^3

We can interpret performance in poetry as dependent not only
upon an audience, but upon the reader as a co-producer of
meaning. This element of co-production is key for Lyn Hejinian as
a utopian possibility:

For a writer, it is language that carries thought, perception,

and meaning. And it does so through a largely metonymic

process, through the discovery and invention of associations

and connections. Though it may seem merely technical, the

notion of linkage – of forging connections – has in my mind,

a concomitant political and social dimension. Communities of

phrases spark the communities of ideas in which communities

of persons live and work.^4

As we will see, the challenges faced by the reader of contemporary
poetry as co-producer of meaning become central to how a poem is
performed and subsequently interpreted.