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Out of habit, we identify the “modernist” poetic text as “materialized,” and the “postmodernist” poetic text as “dematerialized,” ephemeral, a “simulacrum.” The extent, however, to which “materiality” (taken as sensous, extraverbal reality, something more than the functional-instrumental, “transparent” use-value of a word) is integral to much postmodernist poetry, poetics, and art practice might be seen as reason to interrogate this habit of thought.