Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Words as amber: Capturing life in poetry”.
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 ] .