[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at arcades.in conversations withth tyler.com [Music] I'm here today with Alisa new up in
Brookline she is a professor of poetry at Harvard University and now producer director host and star of the new PBS series poetry in America Alisa very nice to be with you great to be here Tyler thanks so much to get into poetry let me start with the question of what it is you all argue or disagree about so let's
start with different interpretations of Emily Dickinson so I'm going to give you a few people who have written about Emily Dickinson you help us see like what is contested in the world of Emily Dickinson scholarship and what's really at stake okay okay okay take Martha Nel Smith how would you describe her
approach to Dickinson what does she bring out Martha Nel Smith I had no idea you would be examining me but I will do my best Martha Nell 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 fical manuscripts that are collected at Harvard University and at ammer University and marnel 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 a calligrapher like yes that the calligraphy matters or and and that
Dickinson was using the page almost as a dancer would 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 Maran L Smiths of the world so when I look at an Emily Dickinson poem and I see all those dashes what do the dashes mean because other poets typically don't use them in your view they evolve for me sometimes they give the Poetry an
appropriately spasmodic gate sometimes they they they feel like stitches of pain or of effort they remind us that the poem is being written is being composed some times 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 I like them short as uh RW Franklin makes her dashes I like them long as Thomas Johnson does and I like looking at them
in the manuscripts so let's say now I read Camille poglia who's been a guest in the series she'll tell me Dickinson is all about homoeroticism sedom masochistic surrealism and brains being split open is that correct and where does she differ from too I like that well brains being split open for sure
that Dickinson is a poet of trauma and of and 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's sometimes without boundaries without filters without protections and she Tunes up sensory experience so so
high that um you know I felt a funeral in my brain she says or I mean 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 crashes into into other thoughts homoeroticism uh
maybe I I am of those who thinks 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 to literal about it with Dickinson seems to me to subtract somehow and your colleague Helen vendler
what would she stress in Dickinson the Exquisite craft of the individual poems the 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 it has weight that
is a feet of metaphoric Daring Do of a kind that one finds in every line of Emily Dickinson's and she in the in the poem I've just been quoting she says that this light Heavenly her it gives us we can feel no scar but internal difference where the meanings are and so shill what is it
that justifies comparing light to sound to wait is that somehow that sythetic 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 the longest lasting new critic who reminds us of all we gain by
reading word by word and in your own work you've stressed seeing Dickinson as a kind of skeptical kir guardian of decentering everything what is it that you've brought to this debate that you would stress now that well that was a long time ago when I called her a skeptical kirka guardian and I think 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 a leap as kard would have would have said that every single Dickinson poem somehow
constitutes and the you asked me Tyler in the very beginning about those those dashes that seem also to act as like the little frames or brackets they say this word and no other so there's a we might even say an existential quality to these poems but 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 if we read Walt whitmann his language is greatly different from that of Emily Dickinson and the feel of his work is much more democratic how is it that the overall political econom theological field of Whitman connects with the way he uses
language what what's the innovation in Whitman in that regard well Whitman was a walker in the city Whitman came of age in 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 educ 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
from the south and the Irish uh 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 not bar there was no Bailey with PT Barnum 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 at every second and that for me is the most powerful part of Whitman he was there I mean there's there's nothing that isn't powerful because I so adore him he is I I think
of Whitman as my Rabbi um but he was there at the beginning of of American cities and and he has this fresh and original understanding of how a city wants to be a a locust of democracy let me Express a concern and see if you can talk me out of it and I'm going to use the word best
which I know many literary critics do not like but I believe in the concept nonetheless so in my view the two best American poets are Emily Dickinson and Walt whitmann and they were both a long long time ago they were quite early in the the literary history of this nation is that a statement about the fame
generating process a statement about somehow their era was better at generating the best poets because we had a much smaller population or am I simply wrong in thinking they're the best American poets I don't I don't know what to say to you I Revere them those they are the most important poets for me they
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 art Hart Crane Alan Ginsburg Carl Samberg CD Wright CK Williams would would there be any of those uh Frank oara without Walt Whitman and they would be the first to say no would there
be oh uh Susan Hal Mar Moore Elizabeth Bishop Sylvia pla would all in different ways would we have them without Emily Dickinson I I don't I don't know so I'm not sure I can enter is it that they that we've lost it I I don't think that's it say I turn to European history again using the best word but it's
plausible to think Homer and Dante are the two best European poets ever in some regards and they too are quite early in a particular stage of History what is it about poetry that seems to generate so many people as at least plausible bests who come at the very beginnings of eras
well isn't it that it's that poetry is cumulative and cannons are cumulative and those who who are there first they're never super seeded 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 I think most econ they would
say no that knowledge has been superseded in literary knowledge we continue to to learn from our predecessors and also continue to feel awe before the Persistence of certain phenomena that they saw that EOG Shakespeare saw that e was a slippery mouthed conniver of a kind we still recognize 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 even more is it possible that American English isn't Rich enough so I find if I go to Ireland or especially to Trinidad I envy the language they have there they're both
speaking English if you think of America today there's texting now a long history of Television our language is great for quick Communication number one in the world for science now's social media 19th century American English has longer sentences it's arguably more like British English isn't the problem just
the language we grow up with around us isn't somehow good enough to sustain First Rate poets it is it's so rich I you know I love I love the way it 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 I I love the fertility of slang I love the way mass culture and its technological limitations and then its new breath 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 part there's this hi honey and I if you if you listen if you watch a 30s movie and then you watch a 50s movie and you see the the plasticity and the Ingenuity that human beings put into like we don't say to you know hey kid we don't we don't call
anyone a kid anymore it sounds really archaic and corny or unless it's a kid let well we might say kid or but for me it's the it's not is it better or worse but is it moving is it is it is the language refreshing itself John ashberry whom we lost recently it it could be that John
ashberry a 100 years from now is going to seem crystal clear to those Generations I don't think so well he he might seem crystal clear because we will be a accustomed to thinking in the cutup way in the medified way that he saw earlier than the rest of us and and he so who who knows I don't get a
lot by making lists myself of of the best I have a a kind of craving for the new and the fresh as as well as for the old since the and I I guess I said some of this before what we love about the greatest poets is that they as as Emerson says they you know they they Echo back our own Thoughts with alienated Majesty it's
the most familiar things they say that we are moved by the most which is more interesting Instagram poetry or Facebook poetry I'm not going to be a 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 devote but I'm all four I am all for pushing poetry trying poetry on all of these different platforms and in all forms of media rupy cower from Canada she has 2 million Instagram followers a year ago her book was number two for the whole year she sold more copies than Hillary Clinton did she was
77 weeks on the New York Times bestseller lists she probably is not in many poetry anthologies most of her poems are a few lines long what are we supposed to think of this is she the world's leading poet right now rap music aside 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 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 it feels I feel too old do you worry about the dominant economic role of the poetry anthology for generating royalties so if you're a poet as you know it's hard to sell a lot of book
copies if you're not say on Instagram with a lot of followers so you get a poem in one of the anthologies that's a fairly centralized Market do we have a funny Market structure for poetry where there's one part far too centralized run by anthologies driven by classroom use and then another part that's a kind of
malthusian equilibrium everyone writing poetry on the internet hardly anyone earning anything and then you have a few poets sort of driven by their celebrity status who earn a lot of money but it's a kind of feast or famine situation there's not like a healthy middle of the market 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 who can earn a living writing writing poetry happily for our culture what many of the Great poets in the uh in in the culture do is they
teach which I think is a really important role for Creative people no Wallace Stevens worked for an insurance company William Carlos Williams was a doctor Dana Joya uh was in the food business right or too many poets today in the academy are too many poets in the too removed from the worries of everyday
life too tenur uh do you agree or not should they be out on whing I think I should be I mean I I think I can speak for myself here I think I have stepped out of the academy by finding a way a 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'm I can say for myself I'm 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 what do you think of the notion of poets who do harm so TS Elliott for instance he claimed Milton who whom he thought was a great poet but did more harm to 18th century poetry than either Dryden or Pope are are there
poets today great though they may be who are in a sense doing harm to poetry and how should we think about that I think TSL it 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 or
ask ask what poetry can do for the world ask what ask why we need poetry it William Carlos Williams who did not like TS Elliot reminded us that that P what did he say people die every day for want of what poetry what poetry can offer by by which he meant a way of thinking about the wrenching complexities and
compromises that we all make every day was Samuel Johnson right that no person ever wished Milton's Paradise Lost to be longer than it was I did not wish it longer myself PO said that no poem should be longer than 108 lines 108 lines po calculated was exactly the the maximum amount that you
could read in one sitting and he thought that poetry should have that kind of experiential EXP exposive pal effect and that anything longer than 108 lines couldn't have that by that but by that Criterion we wouldn't have Dante's or Walt Whitman or Walt Whitman although I don't recommend I would never recommend
reading Song of Myself in one sitting at all I think you I I think a poem like Song of Myself these 52 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 we'll get back to poetry but let's try a few
questions about America and as always feel free to pass anything you don't want to cover uh we're up here in New England it's wonderful it's a beautiful day if New England is so wonderful why is it depopulating I didn't know that it is yeah it's depopulating it's expensive to live here I but I have no 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 the textile industry was moving out of New England so what's happening what's happening now people are moving to the South basically there seems to be a strong preference
for sun for all age groups and this to me is surprising I like it here why would anyone ever have wanted to be a Puritan that's a terrific question and one that I spent a 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 um we think of the Puritans as very repressed but instead you want to be marinating in and giving a lot of attention to all 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 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 what you are 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 L who said that we
would Sizzle on a brick he said you know where 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 is a good thing to
be be if we think about America it's the world's wealthiest Nation most powerful Nation it has a disproportionate share of the top universities including of course Harvard is this going to mean that in essence most things American are overrated more people read English so if
you're an American Author American poet people will study you they will write about you and compare it to say you know naruda and mistol from Chile or writers poets from other parts of the world American artists maybe they're all overrated overpriced do you agree I don't know you're I'm having trouble
with these valuation questions that American poets are overpriced American movies American artworks there's simply more money chasing after them and more attention because we're America you would probably be better at answering that question than I am I know that I don't that when I turn on Netflix I'm
often curious about unfamiliar worlds and yeah I mean think about like the the Nordic Noir the the new emergence of these serial spy shows that take us into Oslo and and Stockholm they're so fascinating so I um but I don't think that answers your question question related to your Mentor or one of your
mentors an Douglas as you know the mid to late 19th century was at the time seen as an era of a kind of extreme feminization I don't think we today would would view it in those terms but they did do you see any parallels between that time and the world today that's a very that's a very interesting
question that was a curveball so thinking back to my wonderful mentors work the feminization of American culture where where an 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 the literature of the period tended to exclude the experience of the outside world and to focus on the experience of the experience es most women had within the domestic realm do I think that right now we are in a period of feminization once again things are
happening so fast that I 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 what's a book you would recommend for people to read about America that would help them understand
this country that's maybe not so wellknown well the book I would recommend is The Scarlet Letter and it is wellknown but not well read yes and I I think the Scarlet Letter is is as relevant today in the me too era or and has been for decades informative and enlightening for me as I've watched a
social hunger for the toppling of the mighty right we we love to topple the might we 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 divers Frets in a way that might cool us cool
us down a little bit I would recommend will a Cather will a 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 right um she writes about in a in my anonia which I I taught a few weeks ago she writes about the Midwest when it was
being populated by Norwegians Bohemians who were you know austro hungarians when all of the people from middle and Northern Europe were settling the Midwest and it was a there was there was sort of ethnic pandemonium right there in the middle and that the struggles that 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 will AA let me toss that the names of a few poets and tell us either why they're important to you
or what you would direct our attention toward or give us some kind of tip or ins or I get I hope I get to say I don't know sure but this one Robert Frost oh I I love Robert Frost but what I would direct your attention to is that he's not a daughtering old fart right mumbling platitudes he's a
radical he's a radical poet who is who's 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 his husbands and wives are so often mismatched and maladapted one to another and and the natural world I mean he's a he's a great inheritor of that Puritan tradition even though he was born in California he came he embraced a a New England ethos which tells us it's good to acknowledge our
pain switching to Topeka Kansas gwendaline Brooks to say her homeliness would be would be wrong would be the wrong word but her but her IM okay so here's here's the posture of a a gwendelyn brook speaker she's the woman looking out the window at the neighborhood and clucking her tongue or breathing a
sigh of relief that things haven't gotten worse or there there is a mature knowledge in gwendelyn 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 eeking out
what happiness they can gwendaline Brooks somehow makes us care about people in straightened social circumstances to whom different things often things they don't deserve will happen here's a much tougher one I think Ezra pound I'm not an Ezra pound fan I as a Jewish American can't really get past his
anti-Semitism and and I'm not interested enough in the beautiful musical effects that he produces by taking proval French and homic Greek and the American idiom and putting them together he is for those who care about him the technician par excellance who who understands the sounds of the the sort
of native sounds of language and how to how to put them together but I find I like my poets to give me some wisdom and I don't find him wise in general how should we think about poets from the past who held highly objectionable views TS Elliott maybe was less anti-semitic than pound but not really unsafe ground
either Picasso was a communist seems to have treated women very very badly is there a general approach is it Case by case I am not in the business of striking people off of reading lists or or of striking people off of lists at all I for whatever reason great art is often fertilized
by bad character Hemingway wasn't a very nice guy either and but man he really could write some killer sentences and I I learn from them but I do think we get to all have taste and some writers TS Elliott probably because of the years he spent in Cambridge I don't find him very wise either uh because of Cambridge
Cambridge didn't make him wise it sure it didn't help him at all he he TS Elliot was always a person of too much privilege uh and a person who made such bad choices I mean he the the combination of so much privilege and such bad choices gives us the the Magnificent accident of of the Wasteland
which is magnificent it bores me a bit I loved it as a teenager but when I try to read it again I'm not that interested well 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 Elliot that that incubated in Cambridge in 1913 because
Cambridge in in 2018 isn't that different it's really the same the same world but I 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 Smither and I when when I read
Elliott next to the American modernists whom I prefer I prefer Maran Moore I prefer William Carlos Williams I prefer hard crane I prefer Edna St Vincent Malay I think well they didn't really do World War one either now Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize in literature as you know do you consider him a poet yes I do
what's his most poetic song I love buckets of rain I don't know if it's his most poetic song the one you comes to mind 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 Steven sonheim and learning
from sonheim how to think about lyrics and poetry and I'm and I'm not at the end of that period of study I've 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 rather than po
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 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 Visions of Johanna would be my Dylan nomination by the way and Son time I think reached a peak for integrating lyrics and rhythm in a way no earlier American popular composer had done he thinks about it so hard and so sounds
like you've studied it more than I have and you're ahead of me there people who are novelists and Poets so some Thomas Hardy was great at both Melville it seems he fell short as a poet Edith Warton he's a great poet I think Melville is a great poet you mean battle pieces or I mean battle pieces I clar
clarel is a little bit like paradise not but Edith Wharton probably not a great poet right you know in one of your articles you argued Ralph Waldo Emerson precisely because he was successful as a philosopher he had a kind of universalism to his thought and that may have held him back from being great as a
poet why don't we have more people who are both wonderful novelists and wonderful poets I think they really do and this is a very banal way of saying it they they really do call on different skill sets the the the sort of distillation and often asocial concentration that it takes to
be a lyric poet is quite different from the crowded caffin socially alert set of faculties one needs to to write a great novel I think and I teach both I teach poetry and I and I teach the novel and was in fact talking yesterday with a graduate student about the about the differences and it doesn't surprise me at all that
that people don't move EAS eily between those Thomas Hardy I think wrote his greatest poetry after his wife had died and and he was he was in some way delivered into lyric loneliness I think lyric loneliness is helpful by that event Melville Melville is a great poet in battle pieces because he lets all the
deforming and tor working energies of the war and of his psyche he lets them fall as they may on the page and so he's he's perhaps an example I am I'm going to be in Chicago tomorrow filming with some first graders who are going to be reading bird poems hi coup in particular written by Richard Wright now Richard
Wright the 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 not a writer we might have expected to find hiu but he did do you think we'll learn anything from applying artificial intelligence and machine
learning to poetry or do you view that as a dead end I do view it as a dead end but what what do I and and I argue that I certainly we'll learn something certainly we will learn something but it is a our Humanity that poetry most meaningfully serves it's our Humanity not our art of it's it's our unique
intelligence that that our our language holds and I I I hope we will reather to us that we will cherish the more our the things that about us that are that are just human as you may know Emily Dickinson once wrote that she would read backwards the poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning uh maybe to defamiliarize
yourselfself with them in some way should we memorize poems or does this take away their daring and surprise like there are some Bob Dylan songs you don't want to listen to too many times are poems the same I think it's great to memorize poems but not all poems and surprise you know in in the case of
Emily Dickinson they're almost 1800 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 PO and just walking around with that little fragment and I have talismanic poems like like uh n 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 with with those words and to have them inside my head and ready for me to extend in salute is a deeply pleasurable thing let's say I'm
a programmer I work in Silicon Valley and I've never really read poetry I might have even dropped out of college but I'm very smart how should I start in on learning something about poetry in a way that will perhaps work for me what's your advice I think bu one of those
anthologies bu any any poetry anthology ology and just let your uh 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 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 at Whitman recommend did this you know he he thought we should treat poems kind of casually he said loaf with me on the grass that's that's that was the posture
he recommended for reading poetry loaf with me on the grass relax into this language of another of another person and I so so I think that being kind of casual about it and you can always watch a pretty good TV show on public television in Amica if you want some inspiration which you can buy on Amazon
by the way now let's say you're a parent you love poetry you have children they don't know much poetry yet you understand coercion is often counterproductive how do you seduce them into poetry you just read to them when they're little you just you just don't stop you just read to them until they
tell you to stop you read through with with two of my children I got all the way through Little Women I read all of Little Women to A 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 whether they acknowledge it or not when they're young they really do pay attention to what we do and what we care 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 don't they can't understand they don't only like raming poetry although they like that they like the puzzle in it we there's two here's two lines of Dickinson's I love we like March her shoes are
purple we like March her shoes are purple he 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 and you just ask a second grader why is why are March's shoes purple and they like to talk about it do you have a Shaquille O'Neal story or impression
that you're able to share with us what a hoot it was reading poetry with Shaquille O'Neal I think the the 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 he
was sitting in a normal chair they wheeled me up a million so my feet were when I interviewed him were hanging about you know 18 were way way above the ground and he was just sped on the ground he's an immensely thoughtful and he's 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 but we were reading a poem that didn't that rewarded quick wits but actually also rewarded right the Capac it to kind of pause and say h and in the course of our conversation he realized this was one of
those poems where he was going to have to say hm and I love that he he slowed down and I'll close with two questions very directly about you to invoke the economist's concept of comparative advantage and please be immodest but how would you describe our character eyes what you bring to poetry that maybe
other people don't quite as well I think I bring a belief in the capacity of any person sitting sitting across from me to have a blast reading a poem I really believe that human language even encoded in some of the Arcane Wes 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 the 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 a cerebral kind of fun that the the sort of fun that some people
look to in the Sunday crossword puzzle right that that or the Wednesday cross that it's that kind of fun and I think that visiting with me if you've never tasted that kind of fun is might be worth trying last question you meet an 18-year-old and this person wants in some way to be a future version of you
Elisa new and asks you for advice what advice do you give them teach teach 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 of
a community and that's what a classroom that really works is it's a it's a community it's ever rewarding great final answer thank you Alisa new and again for our listeners her PBS show is poetry in America uh on TV of course but also available for purchase on iTunes Amazon and other
places thank you for the conversation thank you so much Tyler thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the show