STRUCTURALIST POETICS

Jonathan Culler, 1975

“Here poetic language reveals its true

‘structure’, which is not a form but a state,

a degree of presence & intensity.”

Linguists have analyzed a set

of verbal means, called deictics,

that point to the time, place, or circumstance

in which a speaker is speaking. These

include words like this, that, there,

here; verb tenses, along with adverbs of time,

now, soon, then, next, yesterday, tomorrow;

& pronouns, particularly I & you. In a poem,

deictics “are not determined by

an actual situation of utterance.” But instead

they function in helping readers

to “construct a meditative persona” &

for that persona to register “a degree of

(imagined) presence & intensity.” In

these ways it is said, “poems are

not actual linguistic acts” but

“imitations” of linguistic acts.

The “lyric present,” results from uses

of the simple present that in speech

are usually taken up by the progressive form.

I wander thro’ each charter’d street. I fall

upon the thorns of life. I sit in one of the dives

on Fifty-second Street. “In some obscure way

we feel it as past-like . . . neither does it seem

an action performed just once . . . it remains,

it abides.” I give you my sprig of lilac.

I reach my heart out toward the springtime lands.

I come to pluck your berries. I sound

my barbaric yawp. I fix on the wainscot

a distressful stare. I go to encounter

the reality of experience.

Peter J. Grieco is a retired English professor and former school bus driver. His poems are widely published in small magazines on-line and in print. His blog "At the Musarium and Other Writings" [https://pjgrieco.wordpress.com/] archives much of this work. His chapbook collection of ekphrastic verse, "The Bind Man's Meal," is out from Finishing Line Press.