JOSHUA BENNETT: I've been a
writer for my entire life, as long as I can remember,
since I was 4 years old. I've written poetry
and improvised sermons. I come from a very
musical family, a family of
ministers and deacons and vocalists and
instrumentalists. ANNOUNCER: Next up to the
mic is Joshua Bennett. JOSHUA BENNETT:
Every single day is a toast to living, an ode to
the way we made survival an art. My classroom is a self-love
anthem in nine parts. I am dying, yes, but
I am not the marrow in a beloved's memory just yet. Who can be alive today
and not study grief? I think increasingly,
I'm just trying to capture moments of
astonishment and amber, so that's a lot of what I'm
trying to do in my practice as a poet. I'm trying to preserve
moments in history. I'm trying to preserve
the names of ancestors. I'm trying to keep a record of
the most beautiful things I've ever seen and heard and touched. You don't necessarily
know the ending, at least with the good poems, right? You're surprised by it. And so the poem is
actually the work of discovering the surprise. I'm a professor of literature
and distinguished chair of the humanities here at MIT. Oh, are we on camera? Hi. What's up, world? The first class I
taught when I got here was called Reading
Poetry: Social Poetics. This most recent course is
called Writing and Reading Poems: Nature Poetry,
and it's a workshop. Welcome to our bus for our
super secret field trip to a local institution for the
final session of our nature poetry workshop. So much of what I'm trying
to teach is really for us to just use the literary
arts as an excuse to come together and
celebrate being alive, so today is an example of that. We basically read essays
and poetry together and works of fiction. We listen to music
and watch films. And then we write poems
from shared prompts inspired by that ensemble of works. MATTHEW CAREN:
I've always thought of people who one day woke
up and jumped on a boat. And on their venture,
they're lost in the ocean. I always wonder who
mourn for such people. YASMEEN SHABAZZ:
It's been a minute, and I'm staring out
the window still. I don't have to look to
know what's behind me. If it's quiet,
and I focus, I can picture every bedroom I've ever
had, almost hear the music, almost start to dance. CINDY XIE: We learned
that memory is at once too much and not enough. We learn to ignore the
sound that the death of a love in April makes. We learn to no longer
gather what falls. [APPLAUSE] I think in teaching
primarily undergrads, what I found is, very few
self-identified poets take my classes. So that's been
interesting to see. They clearly have a
respect for and delight in the creation of poetry
and the sharing of it. They'll talk about poetic
moments or encounters with it in the wild in
ways that I really love. So there's a kind of
emotional openness that I've appreciated
from my students. It's miraculous to me that
we do this as a species and that I get to do
this with you all. YASMEEN SHABAZZ:
Listening to the poetry that people in our class write,
it's so interesting to see. Oh, it's not just like some
random poet out in the world. It's like, no, you wrote this. That's so cool. I don't know. [LAUGHS] I used to write poetry
when I was younger just as a way to express myself. I think this class really
helped me reconnect to that and start writing
for myself again. MATTHEW CAREN: I tend
to collect thoughts over the course of the day. Some of them go in a journal. Some of them go in my notes app. Some of them just stick
up here in my head. And when I sit
down to write, it's kind of a cataloging
of all of these things and how they relate
to each other. HERMON KAYSHA: I
would use writing to challenge my own beliefs
because it's easy to catch them while writing. If you have some
kind of assumptions, if you have some kind of
belief, you'd catch them, and then now, you can write
something that challenges that. So I think writing offers, to
me, a shift in perspective. CINDY XIE: Something that
Professor Bennett always emphasized that I
really appreciated is that writing is--
although it sometimes seems like the
solitary endeavor, it's really a
community practice. JOSHUA BENNETT: I'm
always learning from them about what it feels like to be
young right now, how one might cultivate a certain relationship
to literature in the present. Many of the students
I work with, they're artists in other genres. They're makers. They're engineers. They work on AI. They're chemists and physicists
and biologists in training. And so part of what
I've also tried to do is say, take the skills that
you've honed in other classes and see how you can really
let your imagination fly free. In lieu of a traditional
final paper or essay, I've been having my students
work on adaptations. You take one of the
works of art that we've explored over the
course of the term, and you take it from
one genre, and you move it lovingly into another. And so one example of
that is my students, Yasmeen, put together
this beautiful collage. She took lines from the poem
and essentially used that as the thematic core of
this visual art piece. I think I like
this one the best. This was my original
inspiration. Another one of my
students, Matt, he had an adaptation of
a John Murillo poem that he turned into
an entire album, which was pretty
incredible, which took nature sounds and his original
music and put them together. Cindy took a poem by Aracelis
Girmay, this incredible poet, and transformed it into a short
story about a boy named Galileo and a trip that
he and his mother take to the Hayden Planetarium. I mean, I still think about the
adaptations you all handed in. It's inspiring for me as
an educator, as a parent, as a thinker, because it
just reminds me to be brave. Hearing them
articulate their vision is so interesting and rich
and full of surprises for me. They've been so patient and
thoughtful and respectful and generous. [MUSIC PLAYING]
