YouSaid · the spoken record

Elisa New

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48

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2018-06-20

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2018-06-20

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1

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1. “Teach Teach. Yes. Teach the young. Teach the young. And yes, that's the advice. Because it's really, because what teaching is, is learning to Converse with others. And it's to experience a topic as it grows richer and richer under the attentions of a community. That's what a classroom that really works is. It's a community. It's ever rewarding.”

   2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “I think I bring a belief in the capacity of any person sitting across from me to have a blast reading a poem. I really believe that human language, even encoded in some of the arcane ways poems encode language, is fascinating to other human beings. And somehow I persuade others to believe with me that they can have a blast reading a poem and that the development of understanding that can occur as you read 15 lines or 20 lines is just about as much fun as you can have and a cerebral kind of fun that the sort of Fun that some people look to in the Sunday crossword puzzle, right? Or the Wednesday cross, it's that kind of fun. And I think that visiting with me, if you've never tasted that kind of fun, might be worth trying.”

   2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “But we were reading a poem that rewarded quick wits, but actually also rewarded the capacity to kind of pause and say, hmm. And in the course of our conversation, he realized this was one of those poems where he was going to have to say, hmm. And I love that he slowed down.”

   2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “What a hoot. It was reading poetry with Shaquille O'Neill. I think the funniest thing for me was that they had to put me on this chair. They had to take this stool. I guess they're accustomed to doing this so that I didn't look like a teeny weeny weeny little person. He was sitting in a normal chair. wheeled me up a million. So my feet were when I interviewed him, were hanging about way, way, way, way, way, way, way above the ground, and he was just splayed on the ground. He's an immensely thoughtful and he's quick-witted but deep. And he was really ready, I'm just to read a poem with me. And he just, he was all over it. He was all over it. And I loved his gusto.”

   2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Whether they acknowledge it or not, when they're young, they really do pay attention to what we do and what we care about. And if we read, they read, and if we read to them, they'll read to their children. But kids love poetry. They love, and they love poetry. They can't understand. They don't only like rhyming poetry, although they like that. They like the puzzle in it. Here's two lines of Dickinson's I Love. We like March Her Shoes are purple. We like March, our shoes are purple. I guess What does that mean? Her shoes are purple. It's, I guess it refers to the first crocuses or to the soaking of the ground. You just ask a second grader Why is why are March's shoes purple? And they like to talk about it.”

   2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Just read to them until they tell you to stop. You read through with two of my children, I got all the way through little women. I read all of little women to fifth or sixth grader who could certainly read herself. She could have read little women, but that I was reading it to her chapter after chapter and reading her Emily Dickinson. And sometimes if we see one of those leaves, I might say Nature's first green is gold, the hardest hue to hold. They, I think children...”

   2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “At Whitman recommended this. He thought we should treat poems kind of casually. He said, loaf with me on the grass. That was the posture he recommended for reading poetry. Loaf with me on the grass. Relax into this language of another person. And so I think that being kind of casual about it, and you can always watch a pretty good TV show on public television.”

   2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “I think by one of those anthologies, by any poetry anthology and just Let your and don't try to start at the beginning and work your way through. Just open it up and see if something grabs you. And if something grabs you, read it once and read it again. Another technique I often recommend is if there's a poem that you think will interest you, print it, just it, just this one poem. Print, it's an old technology, but do it. It's better than reading it on your phone and put it in your pocket. Put it in your back pocket and just pull it out while you're standing in line somewhere or waiting for a bus or just pull it out and just let your eye kind of bounce around it. And I think that the letting a poem just sort of nudge and nuzzle up against your life and to treat it.”

   2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “I think it's great to memorize poems, but not all poems and in the case of Emily Dickinson, there are almost eighteen hundred poems, and I don't think I'm ever going to get to read them all attentively much less memorize them all. I like memorizing two to four lines of a poem and just walking around with that little fragment. And I have talismanic poems like Nature's First Green is gold, the hardest hue to hold. But when the first leaves come out, and here it was about 10 days ago, they are gold. And so I just say that. I salute the world with those words. And to have them inside my head and ready for me to extend and salute is a deeply pleasurable thing”

   2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “I do view it as a dead end, but what do I, and I argue that I certainly will learn something. Certainly we will learn something, but it is our humanity that poetry Most meaningfully serves it's our humanity, not our art of it's our unique intelligence that our language holds. And I hope we will regather to us that we will cherish the more the things that about us that are just human.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Melville is a great poet in battle pieces because he lets all the deforming and torquing energies of the war and of his psyche. He lets them fall as they may on the page. And so he's perhaps an example. I'm going to be in Chicago tomorrow filming with some first graders who are going to be reading bird poems, haiku in particular, written by Richard Wright. Now, Richard Wright, the writer of Native Sun and Black Boy, is not a person we would expect to have authored a bunch of beautiful poems about sparrows. Not a writer we might have expected to find. But he did”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “I think they really do, and this is a very banal way of saying it, they really do call on different skill sets. The sort of distillation and often asocial concentration that it takes to be a lyric poet is quite different from the crowded cacophonous, socially alert set of faculties one needs to write a great novel. I think, and I teach both, I teach poetry, and I teach the novel and was in fact talking yesterday with a graduate student about the differences. And it doesn't surprise me at all that People don't move easily between those Thomas Hardy, I think, wrote his greatest poetry after his wife had died. And he was in some way delivered into lyric loneliness. I think lyric loneliness is helpful by that event. Melville”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Buckets of rain, buckets of tears, got all those buckets coming out of my ears. Bob, I have been reading recently in the work of Stephen Sondheim and learning from Sondheim how to think about lyrics and poetry. And I'm not at the end of that period of study. I've felt for a long time that we made a mistake when we decided and we decided this a hundred years ago or so that poems were things we read on a page by ourselves silently rather than poems were things we read around a fire to each other or recited after school in a pageant or sang with music and gestures walking down the street for my friend Robert Pinsky will point out that for most of Of the history of poetry, there were music, there was music and gestures too. And so that poetic language should be part of the pageantry of a rock concert makes perfect sense to me.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “You know what I think, Tyler? I think we didn't go through World War I, so we can't say. When I don't get, I do understand the TS Eliot that incubated in Cambridge in 1913 because Cambridge in 2018 isn't that different. It's really the same. The same world, but I think the wasteland is the poet of a pretty privileged American who went to Europe and was really hoping that European civilization would hold together and instead it was blowing itself to smithereens and I when I read Elliot next to the American modernists whom I prefer I prefer Marion Moore I prefer William Carlos Williams I prefer Hart Crane I prefer Edna St. Vincent Millet I think well they didn't really do World War I either”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Cambridge didn't make him wise. It didn't help him at all. TS Eliot was always a person of too much privilege. And a person who made such bad choices. I mean, the combination of so much privilege and such bad choices gives us the magnificent accident of the wasteland, which is magnificent. Me a bit.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “I am not in the business of striking people off of reading lists or of striking people off of lists at all. For whatever reason great art is often fertilized by Bad character Hemingway wasn't a very nice guy either. But man, he really could write some killer sentences. And I learned from them. But I do think we get to all have taste. And some writers, T.S. Elliot, probably because of the years he spent in Cambridge. I don't find him very wise either.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “I'm not an Ezra pound fan. I as a Jewish American can't really get past his antisemitism and I'm not interested enough in the beautiful musical effects that he produces by taking Provence French and Homeric Greek and the American idiom and putting them together. He is for those who care about him the technician par excellence who understands the sounds of the sort of native sounds of language and how to put them together. But I find I like my poets to give me some wisdom. And I don't find him wise.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Say her homeliness would be wrong, would be the wrong word, but her okay, so here's the posture of a Gwendolyn Brook speaker. She's the woman looking out the window at the neighborhood. Clucking her tongue or breathing a sigh of relief that things haven't gotten worse or there is a mature knowledge in Gwendolyn Brooks of how communities and the individuals within them muddle along and that some people are bound to go to jail and other people will somehow take care of each other eating beans eking out what happiness they can Gwendolyn Brooks somehow makes us care about people in straightened social circumstances to whom different things, often things they don't deserve will happen”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Oh I love Robert Frost But what I would direct your attention to is that he's not a doddering old fart right mumbling platitudes he's a radical he's a radical poet who is teaching us again and again how much of our joy is mixed with pain how much of our work is and our joy in our work is charged with either integrated eroticism or repressed sexuality he's extraordinary at looking dispassionately at the at how hard it is to be in a Lifelong partnership. His husband's and wives are so often mismatched and maladapted one to another. And the natural world, I mean, he's a great inheritor of that Puritan tradition, even though he was born in California. He embraced a New England ethos which tells us it's good to acknowledge our pain.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “She writes about in May Antonia, which I taught a few weeks ago, she writes about the Midwest when it was being populated by Norwegians, Bohemians who were Austro-Hungarians when all of the people from middle and northern Europe were settling the Midwest and it was a, there was sort of ethnic pandemonium right there in the middle and that the Struggles that our disagreements and unease about difference have always been with us, are not regionally specific. There aren't really red states and blue states. They're just at this moment redder and bluer. I think we can all profit from reading Willa Cather.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “And I think the Scarlet Letter is as relevant today in the Me Too era and has been for decades informative and enlightening for me. A social hunger for the toppling of the mighty. We love to topple. We love both to revere those who may not deserve our reverence and to pull down anyone who is available. I would recommend that one. To understand some of our diversity frets in a way that might cool us down a little bit, I would recommend Willa Cather. Willa Cather, who writes about the American Midwest, which we don't think of We think of the Midwest as, you know, where all the Americans are.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “That's a very interesting question. That was a curveball. So thinking back to my wonderful mentor's work, the feminization of American culture where Anne Douglas offered a critique of a sentimentalization of female experience that excluded in her mind and ended up marginalizing whole other orders of experience like that so brilliantly exposited by Herman Melville so that the literature of the period tended to exclude the experience of the outside world and to focus on the experience of the experiences most women had within the domestic realm. I think that right now we are in a period of feminization once again things are happening so fast that I don't know I don't know we're certainly in one of those moments when we are reckoning in all sorts of ways that contradict each other with what it is to be men women or in between”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “You would probably be better at answering that question than I am. I know that when I turn on Netflix, I'm often curious about unfamiliar worlds. And yeah, I mean, think about the Nordic noir, the new emergence of these serial spy shows that take us into Oslo and Stockholm they're so fascinating so I but I don't think that answers your question”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Exaltation of a day like this in New England where the green of the grass and the blue of the sky announce to you that God's creation is the most eloquent of all creations. If that's what you're after, that kind of intensity, New England Puritanism is a really good religion for you. And I've just been paraphrasing Jonathan Edwards, who even though he was the writer who said that we were spiders hung over the fire who would sizzle on a, I think this Robert Lowell who said that we would sizzle on a brick, he said, you know, we're spiders hung over the fire also wrote these gorgeous lyrical essays on the natural world that drew from aesthetic experience. Increased piety. And so if you like intensity rather than moderation or serenity, if you like intensity, a Puritan's a good thing to be.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “That's a terrific question, and one that I spent a lot of time thinking about. Being a Puritan is a great way to live a psychologically very candid life. If what you want is actually not to be repressed at all, we think of the Puritans as very repressed, but instead you want to be marinating in and giving a lot of attention to all of your own insecurities and sense of I goofed that up, I messed that one up. Oh, that didn't work out very well. If you want to cultivate your inner life, it's really great to be a Puritan. If you want to live a kind of high octane life of extremes, you want to feel the”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “It's depopulating. It's expensive to live here, but I actually have no idea. And what you make me think of is the 1890s when New England was depopulating because the mills were shutting down and the textile industry was moving out of New England. So what's happening now”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Warwalt Whitman, although I don't recommend, I would never recommend reading Song of Myself in one sitting at all. I think a poem like Song of Myself these fifty-two parts is a poem for a lifetime and many, many occasions of casual browsing on the grass and not a poem that you just grind through.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “I did not wish it longer myself. Poe said that no poem should be longer than a hundred and eight lines. One hundred and eight lines, Poe calculated, was exactly the maximum amount that you could read in one sitting. And he thought that poetry should have that kind of experiential explosive pow effect and that anything longer than 108 lines couldn't have that. By that criterion, we wouldn't have Dante's.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “I think T.S. Eliot was too fastidious about such matters. I think poetry survived John Milton just fine. I would rather ask the question, ask not what poetry can do for you, ask what you can do for poetry, or ask what poetry can do for the world. Ask what we need poetry, William Carlos Williams, who did not like T.S. Eliot, reminded us that, what did he say? People die every day for want of what poetry, what poetry can offer, by which he meant a way of thinking about the wrenching complexities and compromises that we all make every day.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “On whaling ships, I think I should be. I mean, I think I can speak for myself here. I think I have stepped out of the academy by finding a way a format, a distribution channel, and accepting the limitations of 24 minutes in order to speak to doctors, lawyers, postal workers, delivery people. I have said we who have lived in the academy ought to get out a bit. And I can say for myself, I'm very happy to have gotten out in the world what I have learned is that one doesn't need very special equipment or even a lot of technical knowledge to read a poem, even a difficult poem. With deep understanding.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Is there in the arts? Has there ever been a healthy middle of the market? I mean, arts are not restaurants, right? Restaurants, there's the top, there's the bottom, and there's the middle. Artists have always depended on either patronage or somebody driven for love of something other than the art itself to get themselves distributed. I don't think one becomes a poet in order to earn a living. I'm not sure there's any poet, including Billy Collins or whom I like very much and whose work I admire very much, who can earn a living poetry happily for our culture, what many of the great poets in the culture do. Is they teach, which I think is a really important role for creative people.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “I wouldn't I'm not an economist, although married to one, I wouldn't trust the market, the moment's market on poetry. I think that there's a, and I would say this about many things, we are in the middle of a generational, of an interesting kind of generational shift where a younger generation that's grown up on Facebook and on a lot of sharing and a lot of sociality wants to hear about the personal lives of their peers. And I haven't figured it out. It doesn't seem to me that I have the right tools. I feel too old.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “I'm not going to be a good judge of that. Like many people, I have to figure out what filters I need in order to survive in the world. And I am not a social media devotee. But I'm all for. I am all for pushing poetry, trying poetry on all of these different platforms and in all forms of media”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Because we will be accustomed to thinking in the cut up way, in the medified way that he saw earlier than the rest of us. So, who knows? I don't get a lot by making lists myself of the best. I have a kind of craving for the new and the fresh, as well as for the old since the, and I guess I said some of this before, what we love about the greatest poets is that they, as Emerson says, they echo back our own thoughts with alienated majesty. It's the most familiar things, they say, that we are moved by the most.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Well, we might say kid. But for me, it's not, is it better or worse, but is it moving? Is the language refreshing itself? John Ashbury, whom we lost recently, it could be that John Ashbury 100 years from now is going to seem crystal clear to those generations. I don't think so. Well, he might seem crystal clear.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “It is it's so rich I you know I love I love the way it evolves the way my kids don't say whatever anymore whatever had such incredible potency epic when they started to say epic had such potency when hip hop artists say that's really ill so I love the fertility of slang I love the way mass culture and its technological limitations and then its new breadths does funny things to language you know the way I tell my students about this I say you know the way how in 30s movies the women are always just sweeping around going oh darling you know the thin in the thin man and partner there's this hi honey And if you watch a 30s movie and then you watch a 50s movie and you see the plasticity and the ingenuity that human beings put into, like we don't say to, you know, hey kid, we don't call anyone a kid anymore. It sounds really archaic and corny.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Well, isn't it that poetry is cumulative and canons are cumulative and those who are there first, they're never superseded unlike, say, for economists who would say Adam Smith is a really smart guy, but it's not like we go to Adam Smith to understand Bitcoin. I think most economists, they would say, no, that knowledge has been superseded. In literary knowledge, we continue to learn from our predecessors and also continue to feel awe before the persistence of certain phenomena that they saw that Iag, Shakespeare saw that Iago was a slippery-mouthed connivor of a kind. He still recognized. And so I think part of what we recognize ourselves, we recognize something enduringly human in these oldest of poets and then maybe we elevate them even more.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “I don't know what to say to you. I revere the most important poets for me. invent two ways of being a poet and two of the ways that so many poets who have followed them also acknowledge. So would there be Hart Crane, Alan Ginsburg, Carl Sandberg, C.D. Wright, C.K. Williams, would there be any of those Franco Hara without Walt Whitman? And they would be the first to say no, would there be, oh, Susan Howe, Mary and Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath would all indifferent ways, would we have them without Emily Dickinson? I don't know. So I'm not sure I can enter, is it that they, that we've lost it? I don't think that's it.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “From the South and the Irish fleeing famine and the whole stately procession, I think Whitman and unstately, bedraggled procession that begins to parade up and down Broadway with Barnum and Bailey's, there was no Bailey, with PT Barnum's circus opening in the Crystal Palace, you know, on the site of what would become Central Park. How could you not have a Democratic consciousness when so much diversity is just springing up around you at every second? And that for me is the most powerful part of Whitman. He was there, I mean, there's nothing that isn't powerful because I so adore him. He is, I think of Whitman as my rabbi. But he was there at the beginning of American cities. And he has this fresh and original understanding of how a city wants to be a locus of democracy.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Will Whitman was a walker in the city? Whitman came of age in Brooklyn at a moment when the modern urban metropolis that we can still see in the New York Cityscape today, you know, in all of those 19th century buildings that are still there, when that was happening. And so Whitman's consciousness is educated by the vast architectural sprawl of his city and then by all of the people who came flooding in to this city, including not only northern Europeans from England and from the Netherlands as Whitman's family did, but runaway slaves.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “Well, that was a long time ago when I called her a skeptical kierkeguardian. And I think I did, and maybe I still would, because everything's at stake, everything's at risk in every second. The poem is an experience that has never happened before in quite this way. And there is a leap, as Kierkegaard would have said, that every single Dickinson poem somehow constitutes and the, you asked me, Tyler, in the very beginning, about those dashes that seem also to act as like the little frames or brackets. This word and no other. So there's a, we might even say an existential quality to these poems. But what I said, what one says about a poet as great as Dickinson 30 years ago and what I would say today is somewhat different.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “Where the meanings are. And so what is it that justifies comparing light to sound to weight? Is that somehow that synesthetic expression is more adequate to how great language feels in that place wherever that is, where the meanings are. Helen is the most careful and thank heavens the longest lasting new critic who reminds us of all we gain by reading word by word.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “The exquisite craft of the individual poems, the extraordinary metaphors that just pay off and pay off and pay off, like there's a certain slant of light winter afternoons that oppresses like the heft of cathedral tunes. What kind of light is it that feels like music and that has weight? That is a feat of metaphoric daring do of a kind that one finds in every line of Emily Dickinson's. And she in the poem I've just been quoting, she says that this light, heavenly herd, it gives us we can feel no scar, but internal difference.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “Crashes into other thoughts homo eroticism, maybe I am of those who think Emily Dickinson was a lifelong virgin who lived in her head, you know, much of the erotic life is in our heads, no matter who we touch. And so fair enough, but getting too literal about it with Dickinson seems to me to subtract somehow.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “I like that while brain's being split open for sure that Dickinson is a poet of trauma and of, and when I say trauma, she's a poet who will say that the sound of the robins or the look of the daffodils mangles her, that she, you know, she sometimes without boundaries, without filters, without protections, and she tunes up sensory experience so, so high that, you know, I felt a funeral in my brain, she says, or there are a whole bunch of brain poems that take us to that place where we see an image that's unbearable, we feel a headache that is tearing us open. We have a thought that suddenly”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “They evolved for me. Sometimes they give the poetry an appropriately spasmodic gait. Sometimes they feel like stitches of pain or of effort. They remind us that the poem is being written, is being composed. Sometimes they remind me of the thread Dickinson used to stitch her little books together. There are critics who say that, who note that some of them point up and some of them point down and that they seem as much accent marks or musical kinds of notation. I love them and I actually am sort of agnostic or lax about them. I like them short as RW Franklin makes her dashes. I like them long, as Thomas Johnson does, and I like looking at them in the manuscripts.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Like, yes, that the calligraphy matters and that Dickinson was using the page almost as a dancer would create choreography. So those who believe that we can actually understand Dickinson by reading the standardized punctuation marks that say other editors have fixed to her, to these beautiful and original texts, those other scholars sometimes come in for scouring and scorching criticism by the Martha Smiths of the world.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Martha Smith, I had no idea you would be examining me, but I will do my best. Martha Smith is one of those critics who reminds us that it's really important to pay attention to the fact that Dickinson never actually published, except in the eccentric manuscripts we call fascicles, manuscripts that are collected at Harvard University and at Amherst University and Martha Smith is one of those critics who says that we should think of these manuscripts as visual texts as almost texts in the visual arts.”

    2018-06-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source