Strange Letters: Reading and Writing in Recent Irish Poetry

Abstract

Whether as poets or as critics, we have been writing in very textual times: works by poets are now called ‘texts’ probably far more often than they are called ‘poems’.‘Poem’, from the Greek poiema (a thing made), tends to suggest the idea of a maker, the poet or author, whereas ‘text’, deriving from the Latin textus (a web or something woven), emphasises the way the literary work is woven into the fabric of its relations with language itself and all those historical, political and cultural forces operating within language. ‘Poem’ summons an originating authority; ‘text’ proposes an infinite dispersal or dissemination. ‘Poem’ speaks presence; ‘text’ inscribes absence. ’Absence’, therefore, the notification that a word is elegy to what it signifies, is one of the key words in post-structuralist discourse.

‘Are we letting go of the pen?’ Jacques Derrida, Dissemination