Of course "New Criticism" is not the only mode in which thoroughness can take place.  However thoroughness occurs is lovely to me.  Rachel Blau De Plessis is not necessarily a New Critic, and her essays tend towards the splendidly thorough!  Amartya Sen (not a lit-crit for the most part, true), if anything, downplays the importance of language--and he too is soooooo thorough.  I suppose all I'm arguing for is the delight I experience when people take the effort to substantiate their claims, to do the difficult work of explanation/connection, as opposed to relying almost entirely on the "gesture."  I do not, as is likely implicitly clear,  have much enthusiasm for innovative criticism.  Yes, poem is a porous boundary, but I do not want what is more than less a poem to serve as replacement for academic/expository/argumentative prose.  Manifestos (with O'Hara and Warhol as exceptions (and likely others I have not read)), grin, ought to go jumping off the nearest cliff. Funnily, I love impressionism when it comes to paintings.  And I often find non-contemporary belles lettres charming. 

Gorannson has responded again, and it is kind and ungrouchy and I am grateful.

Johannes Goransson, in a Montevidayo blog comment-box, has written a dismissal of my distrust of metaphor; I've responded and hope I don't appear too annoyed (firm, sure; agressive, I hope not) in my trying to articulate why I find his response rather inadequate.  Relating to this: it seems some poets are really into dissing closely reading a text, and instead want to banish that kind of response and replace it with belles lettres; why oh why?  New Criticism does not have to be retrograde; on the contrary, it can communicate a ton, and it can allow a reader to really look at the text(s) in question, whereas belles lettres may end up saying far more about the responder than the work being responded to.  Too, belles lettres I think might be said to be predicated on authority (declarative syntax, minimal support with evidence for why a given claim is made) and I like essays which don't take authority for granted.

Will very soon read Jonah Winters' recent Octopus poems, as they appear to have something to do with Lesbians, who I feel are massively under-covered by contemporary American poetry, and in particular--"experimental" poetry worlds.