Taylor Swift dropped her newest album this past week—Midnights—and I’m convinced that she must be an Emily Dickinson fan. It’s important to note that I am only using one part of a longer poem here and am not interpreting Dickinson’s work in its entirety, but when the poet wrote,
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Success in Circuit lies
I hear Taylor in those lines! Though I don’t think Dickinson had Swift’s genius marketing plans in mind, I see something worth teasing out in my close reading of them both. Down the road I would not be surprised if in some interview Swift shared about Dickinson’s poetic influence on her life. Specifically:
That the road to success is not a straight one.
And the truth-telling that happens along the way can be painful.
At least this is the story of artistic confluence that I’m telling myself.
I’m not the only one making links like this. Connections made between the lives of famous artists, Hollywood scandals, and larger societal woes are not hard to find. They are written about in magazines like The New Yorker or made into movies. Quoting No Country for Old Men to myself, “What you got here (Natalie) ain’t nothing new.” So, to extend my own learning I take it a little farther. I attempt to bridge social realities, both good and bad, through an analysis of pop culture and poetry. Or I might find links made between fiction and philosophy, for I find that when I take what might seem easily digestible and parse it for a deeper meaning, I will find it! Poetics as self-discovery (with the help of a literature degree and the internet). The weight of well-chosen words.
Let me give an example. In my last year of teaching high school English I used a very thoughtful Buzzfeed essay by Elamin Abdelmahmoud to discuss the complex experience of what he determined to be a major cultural shift. In the essay he discussed the connection between the war in the Ukraine and the social movement towards a (not yet) “post-pandemic” world. He book-ended the piece with an analysis of a song performed by the stand-up comedian Bo Burnham. Because a few of my students had watched Burnham’s Netflix special, they were willing to dive into what was a difficult essay more easily. It was as if seeing the name of their pop culture hero in the essay’s first paragraph somehow bridged the complexities of war, making the work of social and self-analysis feel more accessible to them.
Abdelmahmoud is also a Swiftie, like my 14-year-old niece (and me!). He has expounded on her artistic talents in many a tweet, noting her ability to “play with her life as a text.” What could be more Dickinson-esque? Words chosen with great care that contain layers of meaning, working together to communicate some part of a self in development. Personal growth laid bare in a few lines of text. “Telling the truth but telling it slant because success in circuit lies.” Said another way, the personal win of being seen and received as a whole person requires sharing many versions of the self and making connections along the way.
I love scouring Twitter for pop culture soundbites! I am constantly learning, sewing together the opinions of writers and artists, politicians and academics, who all share puzzle piece-sized snippets of themselves in the wild public sphere that is the internet. But it is the slantwise truths told in the links I make between them and the world we share that inform some of what I see when I look in the mirror. Such poetic—and personal—analysis is a work in progress, one carefully chosen, word at a time. Thanks, Taylor.