← All source episodes Conversations with Tyler / episode intelligence
Elisa New on Poetry in America and Beyond
20 Jun 2018 19 published claims 2 attributable people
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
recommendation 5belief 4evaluation 4preference 3uncertainty 1commitment 1prediction 1
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
19 published records
“The book I would recommend is The Scarlet Letter, and it is well known, but not well read. I think The Scarlet Letter is as relevant today in the #MeToo era, 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 love both to revere those who may not deserve our reverence and to pull down anyone who is available. So I would recommend that one. To understand some of our diversity threats 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 where all the Americans are. In My 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 there was ethnic pandemonium [laughs] right there in the middle. 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.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I read all of Little Women to a fifth or sixth grader, who could certainly read herself.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I love Robert Frost. What I would direct your attention to is that he’s not a doddering old fart mumbling platitudes.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I don’t know. I’m having trouble with these valuation questions that American poets are overpriced .”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I hope we will regather to us, that we will cherish more the things about us that are just human.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“If we think about America, it’s the world’s wealthiest nation, most powerful nation.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“Are there poets doing harm to poetry? I think T. S. Eliot was too fastidious about such matters.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“Sondheim, I think, reached a peak for integrating lyrics and rhythm in a way no earlier American popular composer had done.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I don’t know what to say to you. I revere them. They are the most important poets for me.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“” 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 about.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“The literature of the period tended to exclude the experience of the outside world and to focus on the experiences most women had within the domestic realm. Do I think that right now we are in a period of feminization?”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I love “Buckets of Rain.” I don’t know if it’s his most poetic song.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“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, the sort of fun that some people look to in the Sunday crossword puzzle 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, it might be worth trying.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I think The Scarlet Letter is as relevant today in the #MeToo era, and has been for decades informative and enlightening for me as I’ve watched a social hunger for the toppling of the mighty, right?”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I’m not sure there’s any poet — including Billy Collins, whom I like very much, and whose work I admire very much — who can earn a living writing poetry.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“When I read Eliot next to the American modernists whom I prefer — I prefer Marianne Moore, I prefer William Carlos Williams, I prefer Hart Crane, I prefer Edna St.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler