Abstract: This essay, following upon Kyoo Lee's case for "counterreading", argues for what I call "micropoetics": a close reading that takes into account every phoneme, morpheme, and word of a poetic text and reads that text "verbivocovisually", to use James Joyce's term. I take as my model Marcel Duchamp's concept of the infrathin — the smallest possible distinction, whether temporal or spatial, between A and B. Similarity and analogy, I argue, have been overstressed and produced the problematic political discourse of the present with its clichés and vapid generalizations. Infrathin reading, on the other hand, establishes difference and the uniqueness of a given text, as I show in the case of Gertrude Stein's "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene", where the seeming repetition of phrasing is actually a form of elaborate word play.

Key words: micropoetics, Infrathin, repetition, difference, Duchamp, Stein, De Campos, Baudelaire, counterreading, cliché