In Adrienne Rich's poem "Dedications", the final section of the title sequence of her 1991 book "An Atlas of the Difficult World", each of the twelve sentences begins with the phrase "I know you are reading this poem" and then a scene in which the context of someone's encounter with the poem is described. In the course of our discussion of the poem in class today, one student observed that the phrase is "a philosophical truism": when you read it, it describes what you are doing. Another noted that "this" points to that moment of reading, and a third added that the present continuous verb "are reading" does so as well. Andrew Shields, #111Words, 13 May 2025)