Lasky scooped up examples everywhere, from poems by H.D., Emily Dickinson, Alice Notley, and D.H. Lawrence to The Shining, to hiphop. ("I've always loved Biggie," Lasky enthused in the post-reading Q&A.) She discussed color and sound. She talked about how people used to cover portraits of people in their homes because it was believed that even in inanimate objects, "the act of seeing is bi-directional." To expand on that idea, she said "the visual has viscera."
The point that Lasky was making was about "shared imagination," how a poet writes some words and a reader reads some words and the two consciousnesses meet in a zone outside of time and space. All the ghostly talk ascended to a smarter, grander point about immortality and ephemerality and the ways that you agree to meet an author's brain outside yourself, for a stroll outside your life. Lasky's lecture was one of those moments, when dozens of brains find some level of extra-contemporaneous agreement in wondering at the complexity and beauty of the world.