As an example, from Vladimir Nabokov*, Pale Fire, page 33, the poem "Pale Fire" says:

And how delighted when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land! (lines 9-12)

The note to "that crystal land" on page 74 by the annotator, Charles Kinbote, begins:

"Perhaps an allusion to Zembla, my dear country. After this, in the disjointed, half-obliterated draft which I am not at all sure I have deciphered correctly:

Ah. I must not forget to say something
That my friend told me of a certain king.

Alas, he would have said a great deal more if a domestic anti-Karlist had not controlled every line he communicated to her. . . ." [The "anti-Karlist" is the poet's wife. In a later note (on pages 227-28), Kinbote admits that "the two lines given in that note are distorted and tainted by wishful thinking."]

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for example, from Jonathan Coe*, The House of Sleep, page 271:

    Those studios remain close to my heart in other ways, too, for it was at Twickenham, only a few years ago, that I first met my lovely (fifth) wife Marsha, who was filming there at the time. Now a distinguished actress, of course, Marsha is delightfully candid about her earlier career, and has never made any secret of the fact that she started out in the business by starring, under my own direction, in a series of sex movies.⁴ What many people don't know about her, though, is that she is also a deeply religious woman, and a devout Catholic. Among the most prized possessions in our library are several books recommended to her during an audience with Pope Paul VI, who said that they were among the most inspiring and influential works he had ever read.⁵

⁴ Much praised, recently, by Denis Thatcher, who said that they had given him 'six of the most enjoyable hours of my life.' His wife Margaret later joked that he was 'stiff for hours afterwards.' [This note is actually meant to refer to this earlier passage on pages 270-71: "This [country] club, the flagship of my chain I might add, has already played host to some distinguished visitors, and boasts among its attractions no fewer than two rather challenging eighteen-hole golf courses."]
⁵ Their titles, for the record, were Wet Knickers, Pussy Talk and Cream on My Face.

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for example, from Gilbert Sorrentino*, Mulligan Stew, page 317:

. . . Since there is general agreement that an infinite series can be summed,⁸⁹ we must admit the possibility of contravariant crossover in such summation. In the well-known puzzle concerning the two cyclists⁹⁰ who race toward each other at identical speeds while a fly⁹¹ moves between them from handlebar to handlebar⁹², we have presented to us a classic problem in infinite series equations. . . .

⁸⁹ Miraculous machines help minimize the problems.
⁹⁰ They'll probably rent their antique-filled villa during the summer months.
⁹¹ Green enamel with yellow smily face.
⁹² And finally to an evening at the ballet in Moscow.

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In the nineteenth century, a self-annotating text could sometimes be unintentionally comic. In Very Bad Poetry, Kathryn Petras and Ross Petras present an excerpt from "The Homeward-Bound Passenger Ship" by the mid-nineteenth-century, and appropriately named, English poet Edward Edwin Foot. In it, a footnote at the end of the line "The captain scans the ruffled zone" helpfully describes the last phrase as "A figurative expression, intended by the Author to signify the horizon," and a note to the word "See" in the line "See, if you can, their lifeless forms!—" annotates the word as "Imagine."

The editors also provide a complete untitled short poem by Foot, which they say "deserves special notice for the ratio of poem text to footnote text" and also for the footnotes' startling ability to fail to clarify the poem in any way:

Altho' we¹ mourn for one now gone,
And he—that grey-hair'd Palmerston,²
     We will give God the praise,—
For he, beyond the age of man,³
Eleven years had over-ran
     Within two equal days.

¹ The nation.
² The Right Honourable Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston, K.G., G.C.B., etc. (the then Premier of the British Government), died at "Brockett Hall," Herts., at a quarter to eleven o'clock in the forenoon of Wednesday, 18th October, 1865, aged eighty-one years (all but two days), having been born on the 20th October, 1784, The above lines were written on the occasion of his death.
³ Scriptural limitation.

(from Kathryn Petras* and Ross Petras, editors, Very Bad Poetry, page 39)

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