Another Brilliant Poetry Professor Discovery on YouTube!!

I ended up pulling an all-nighter watching poetry lectures on YouTube last night. Mainly, I spent the night engaged in such bliss because of modifying my search terms in YouTube. In the past, I have entered "poet documentary, long" or "poetry lecture, long" or the specific name of a poet",long" (20+ minutes), the best return on this having been the wonderful discovery of U Toronto's Nick Mount, whose lectures are honestly sublime (writing a bit about the overuse of this word for a future blog post). I almost decided not to embed the video here because it is such a granola bar of knowledge that I wanted to be selfish and keep it for my own. I mean, the professor is a lexicon of Emily Dickinson intelligence. If you can ignore the delivery, which is in a sort of monotonous flatlined long distance single sentence sounding brain dump. And, the impulse to scream at him through the screen to take a sip of water for God's sake! He speaks at record speed and grows parched as a result. This trips into nearly becoming a stutter on several occasions. Also, there are no visuals besides the original -the only- daguerreotype of Dickinson, placed side-by-side with a sort of photo-shopped version of Dickinson; where a curl and a flush to her cheeks have been added, possibly, to make her look less severe.

Frankly, ED might be the first alien-human hybrid. She has those wide planed eyes, the pale skin, the perfect egg-shaped head - one imagines her greeting Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters as he is about to enter the spaceship. In all seriousness, I make the alien connection because, after listening to this lecture, you are going to be absolutely blown away by her brilliance. Her mastery of language is among her greatest tools; she uses this to create the most layered, deceptively simple seeming, though HOTly (higher order thinking) complicated, quadruple meanings poetry I've ever encountered. She is the great aunt, if not the mother, of such poets as Marriane Moore, Sylvia Plath, Richard Hugo, Richard Wilbur, and many others, surely. Before I give too much away, here it is in full:



Beginning at around 44:00 minutes, the professor - sadly, we never find out his name, starts to speak to my present aesthetic perfectly. More on the Saylor Foundation, which is where this video came from, and their wonderful free bachelor certificate programs in the next post or two.  Enjoy!!
      
Correction: I meant to add the new search terms that I used to great success in the post above, but skipped it. The new search terms I used are: "poet biography, long" and just that slight change from documentary to biography led me to "voices and visions," a fantastic find! Read my next post.