Los Angeles ? For those with perhaps a grade school exposure to Emily Dickinson or a wariness about poetry, “Loaded Gun: Life, and Death, and Dickinson” is comfortably akin to Cliffs Notes.

Which is not to say that the PBS documentary about the reclusive poet isn’t illuminating or worth watching.

“The idea we had was that we weren’t making a film for people who are poetry or Dickinson fans,” Producer Jim Wolpaw said in an interview. “We’re trying to draw people in who might not otherwise pay any attention to poetry.”

Fun with her poetry is one thing; getting inside the enigmatic poet’s head or heart is another.

“She was a powerful soul,” actress Julie Harris, acclaimed for her portrayal of Dickinson in the one-woman play “The Belle of Amherst,” says in the film.

The documentary airs at 9:30 p.m. CDT Tuesday.

Dickinson wrote the first of her nearly 1,800 poems when she was about 20, sharing them with family and close friends. Only a few were published in her lifetime.

By 23, she had begun to choose solitude over society, dabbling in romance but never marrying.

She died in 1886.