In this essay I will suggest that part of what makes the young Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson so remarkable is the fact that much of his work – in this age of “anything goes” post-postmodernism – is clearly modernist poetry, in both structure and effect. This structure will be that explained in my expanded version of Michael Riffaterre’s semiotic theory of poetry, which deals with modernist work. I will suggest that one of the distinctive features of the latter is that a modern poetic text is distinguished by two underlying “matricial” propositions, each of which generates a set of variant images having the same underlying semantic structure. This paradigmatic method of signifying is unique to poetry. Each matrix is reassembled by the reader from a comparison of the images of each set. The matrices are linked syntagmatically in a variety of relations such as negation or difference of scale. This bimatricial relation (subject-sign) has an intertextual counterpart (object-sign) of similar structure but different lexicon. The interpretant of these two complex signs has a sociolectic counterpart of similar lexicon but different structure. The semantic contrast thus established produces innovation, which is the other distinctive feature of modern poetry. It turns out that much of Hutchinson’s innovative work is structured in this way.

中文翻译：

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“小音乐”还是“粗音乐”？：现代主义诗人伊西翁·哈钦森

在这篇文章中，我将提出让年轻的牙买加诗人 Ishion Hutchinson 如此引人注目的部分原因是他的大部分作品——在这个“一切皆有可能”的后后现代主义时代——在结构和效果上都明显是现代主义诗歌. 这种结构将在我扩展版的 Michael Riffaterre 的诗歌符号学理论中得到解释，它涉及现代主义者工作。我认为后者的一个显着特征是现代诗歌文本由两个潜在的“矩阵”命题区分，每个命题都产生一组具有相同潜在语义结构的变体图像。这典范的表示的方法是诗歌所独有的。每个矩阵由读者根据每组图像的比较重新组装。矩阵以各种关系（例如取反或尺度差异）组合链接。这种双母关系（主语-符号）有一个结构相似但词汇不同的互文对应物（宾语-符号）。这两个复杂符号的解释器具有相似词汇但结构不同的社会经济学对应物。如此建立起来的语义对比产生了创新，这是现代诗歌的另一个显着特征。事实证明，哈钦森的许多创新工作都是以这种方式构建的。