After teaching the graduate seminar on Monday evening, I stumbled onto “poetic misprision” because I went looking for words or phrases meaning something like “inventive misreading.” Poetic misprision is credited to Harold Bloom, who wrote about it as an interpretive-hermeneutic misstep, such that while reading (and otherwise making sense of) a literary text, the reader follows a fork in meaning’s path and forges way through and along a kind of misunderstanding. Within this context, the causes, delights, and generative takeaways linked to this phenomenon are fuzzy, or not emphasized, not in the few snippets I’ve read, though this could simply be a reflection of how shallowly I’ve waded in.

For class, we had read Prior and Shipka’s 2003 chapter, “Chronotopic Lamination: Tracing the Contours of Literate Activity,” and the wisp directing us all to consider inventive misreading owed to one seminar participant disclosing a blink impression that the title was “Chronotopic Lamentation.” Dialogue played this out for a few minutes, but it brought me back to whether or not we had a fitting term for those clicks of miscomprehension that carry on and that sometimes become inventive (moreso than mnemonics or than retold tales for a chuckle, which are other gainful takeaways). In other words, extending from chronotopic lamentation the misreading flutters, buzzes, and chances spinning an unexpected web of meanings. I consider the phrase in this specific case more the happenprovenance of the seminar participant, so rather than revisit those meanings, for now I will simply note them as more than we expected and return to the point about poetic misprision.

Misprision seems to translate more or less as “to take wrongly.” And this fits well enough with reading lamination as lamentation, but ‘taking wrongly’ still does not venture through the looking glass as fully as I would like. ‘To take wrongly’ could come with a hermeneut’s scold. But the misread word worlds…or can world into a meticulous if entirely unintended and accidental yarn. Poetic misprision doesn’t authorize the weaver to carry out boldly the unraveling of pulled strings. But what then would be an apt name for the phenomenon of accidental, generative misreading at the level of a word or phrase? I am laminating the fact that the best I can come up with is heuristic euprision, so something like ‘to take and run away with.’