Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…They evolve for me. Sometimes they give the poetry an appropriately spasmodic gait [laughs]. 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 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. [laughs] I actually am agnostic or lax about them. I like them short as R. W. Franklin makes her dashes. I like them long as Thomas Johnson does, and I like looking at them in the manuscripts. Let’s say now I read Camille Paglia, who’s been a guest in the series. She’ll tell me Dickinson is all about homoeroticism, sadomasochistic surrealism, and brains being split open. Is that correct, and where does she differ from your view? [laughs] I like that, too! Brains being split open, for sure — that Dickinson is a poet of trauma. 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 [laughs] she’s sometimes without boundaries, without filters, without protections, and she tunes up sensory experience so, so high that “I felt a Funeral in my Brain,” she says. 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 other thoughts. Homoeroticism, maybe. I am of those who think Emily Dickinson was a lifelong virgin who lived in her head. Much of the erotic life is in our heads, no matter who we touch. Fair enough, but getting too literal about it with Dickinson seems to me to subtract somehow.…

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