. . "For the poet, the question in Lacanian terms becomes whether the poem is Imaginary or Symbolic: is it a (distorting) mirror of the aesthetic self or is it yet another series of signs that socially and politically construct and re-construct us as desiring beings, sliding between the self-defeating modes of metaphor and metonymy? (For the poet in the act of writing it might come down to an instincti" . .