Within poetry time cannot be given the slip. Not just because time is not one but endures as an array of differing possibilities and modalities, but also because time has the unceasing built into the continuity of its returns. (Return, here, has to be in the plural – returns – in order to mark the openings and ineliminable movements comprising time.) How is the plurality and the insistent nature of time to be signalled? Rather than signal it as though there could have been an act of differentiation in which the required distance from the object was envisaged as a possibility, the work of time has to be noted. In addition, time can be taken as comprising the work, and thus as being at work; work figuring as both place and activity. What, then, of any one work? How is that work to escape the trap of exemplarity in which it is proffered as no more than the instance of a universal; a universal which, in the end, would crush whatever particularity the instance may ever have had?

Any answer has to begin with a twofold recognition. The first is that time will have already been inscribed into the work of poetry; poems are timed. The second is that any attention to the detail of that work would have to take time into consideration. Here, what is of concern is the work of time within – and as – poetry. Time works by slipping the hold of fixity and the naturalisation of continuity, while simultaneously allowing for the intrusion of measure; the latter being that form of measure maintaining the borders of poetry. What this complex set-up entails is that the structure of signification at work within the distinction between signifier and signified is checked by the operation of the language of time and thus timed language; one is already the other. The former – the language of time – may be those references to time that poetry may make, while the later – timed language – may be the work of time in poetry. The language of time may only ever refer to the work of time in passing. Moreover, within poetry, while present in words, time also sounds. Sounds – their absence and presence – are time at work.