Abstract: The human life is saturated with metaphors, of which the most creative ones undoubtedly come from poems. The prominent practices of contemporary poetic language, by which the article means the metaphorical and metonymical linguistic events, benefit a lot from the structuralistic principle of Signifier/Signified and choosing/grouping. By casting light on the case of Jian Zheng-zhen, the famous Taiwan middle generation poet, this article tries to certificate those ideas as follows. Metaphor is founded on identity and analogy while metonymy is constructed on the base of adjacency and proximity. Besides, that both of them follow “the principle of reciprocity”, coordinated in a way of exchanging, interpenetrating and interacting, and participate in every poetic event. In the tribe of contemporary poetic language, the poets always operate on these intensive pivots mentioned above, in order to organize every member of this tribe.

Key words: Metaphor, Metonymy, Principle of reciprocity, Intense