My Amateur Standing

          
           The New Criticism
 
Cleanth Brooks (his name would mean nothing
to you unless you are  “literary” and Phdegreed)
passed out his final exam of 8 questions and said:
“Look,  write on 2 or 3 or 4 of these”;  and his
examinational nonchalance has stayed with me
           all these years and years.
 
With Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth  conjured an
approach to studying   literature called
           “The New Criticism.”
 
Previous scholarship focused on writer and age,
biography & history & much time given to the
environmental  literary atmosphere surrounding
the text:  zeitgeist & weltanschauung--big words
then,  big as "critical thinking" now. And not that
much focus on the text itself.
 
Brooks & Warren reversed that and directed
attention to the work at hand:  polysemiological
play of words, phrases,  images, metaphors,  contra
dictions &  paradox and double edged swords &
entendres  to see what emergent phenomena 
rises up when a group sits to study and wonder—
what? what the? what the hey?  

New New Criticism:

Focus on the focusers focusing--
the context of  contextualizers--
& textual harassing: the meanings
meaning-makers make while  making
meanings. The meaning of making itself.

A good game: converse action.
Good as old-time back porch jamming.
Hands on the Elephant
Over the Waterfall.
Kick the Bucket.
Spank Them Leather Britches. .
 
Come to class &  help make some
meanings & the whirl a better pace
 
(All you others: industrialists, your
goals, aims, & measurable outcomes:
don’t mind the noise. Kitchen cabinets
cupboards & cupcakes. Dinah strumming
on the old banjo  is all.  Keep laying that
pipe.)  
 
Converse Action
 
Going round and round happens to be my
brier patch. If sustained: it uncovers and
exposes the limits, the conventions, habits
and habitats, the biases and belief systems,
the irrationalities bossing rationalities, the
always inadequacies of representation, the
contradictions, paradoxes,  ignorance

And how impossible it is to pin the tail on
the donkey because  it’s not a matter of
fact, stats, data, polls, token topics and
subject matter.  It, I said. Donkey Kong
Relationship.