It is as if a threshold is crossed and readers can project their minds into the other world, find their way around there, and fill out the rich detail between the words of the text on the basis of real life experience and knowledge. It is precisely the position of readers in relation to the worlds created by, in my case, poems, that this article wishes to address.
Drawing on deictic shift theory DST and broader concepts of person deixis, I will demonstrate the range of reader positioning that appear to be favoured in a small corpus of contemporary poetry in English. These observations may have wider applications beyond the specific contemporary poetry used here and beyond poetry in English, but such applications await further investigation. Unlike the other two deictic systems of space and time, person deixis does not exhibit clearly the distinction between proximal and distal deixis whereby the linguistic items concerned indicate that the speaker is near to proximal or far from distal the referent concerned.
In face-to-face interaction, they seem to behave like the adverbs of place and time in indicating the most proximal referent to the speaker I and the distal you in the form of the addressee 1.
The alternative is to see the I-you dyad as deictic, but the third person pronouns as non-deictic because a change of speaker does not necessarily lead to a change in the referent of third person pronouns. But this ignores the fact that third person pronouns themselves do still shift in reference, depending on who is being discussed.
In addition, it is not clear that it is always the change of speaker itself that lends deictic items the referential power of other deictic forms.
