Presence Decentered or Unfinalizable? Utibe Hanson's Unnoticed Presence of Things

Abstract

In this article, I interrogate the construction of presence in Utibe Hanson‘s award-winning debut collection, Unnoticed Presence of Things. This poetry volume impels a sort of scepticism about whether the notion of presence is materially unnoticed, politically rife, decentred, or interminable. Hence, I probe the context, image, text, and notions of the unnoticed presence inscribed in the volume, as Hanson seems to negate his noticed presence by the title, cover, and poems that make up his collection. A close reading of the poems drawn from the theoretical insights of Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, and Mikhail Bakhtin highlights the politics of presence and counters the logic of unnoticed presence linked to the unspecified or nothingness in Hanson‘s poetry. By engaging with deconstructive frames of Heidegger‘s subject and predication, Derrida‘s aporia and difference, and Bhaktin‘s unfinalizability, I produce a detailed decentring of presence and nothingness in relation to Hanson‘s poetic manifesto of unnoticed presence, recurring as the unspecified or nothingness, and variously constituted in the poems. This study, at some strategic points, identifies signs, deconstructs, and complicates the notion of nothingness as revealed in the poems. Following the deconstructive analysis of poems in this article, Hanson’s poetry appears to bear the dodgy phrase: unnoticed presence of things.