Our colleague, Ernest Old, expounds
To first year ‘kids’ upon
Metadiegetic discourse
In Dickens and in Donne.
He thinks he’ll make a Chair before
He’s thirty-eight or so;
His latest work is due out soon
On Methuen Video.
Archaic bourgeois structures must
Dictate a bourgeois text:
That methodology once grasped,
It’s hermeneutics next.
He’s a brand-new desk-computer
For poems he takes to bits.
‘The author’s dead,’ you understand;
In his place our Ernest sits.
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