“We’ve got great students who do super-interesting things. I try to think about how everything else they’re studying at MIT might meet up with the study of literature in a productive way,” says Joshua Bennett. Credit: Adam Glanzman
Joshua Bennett’s scholarship, poetry, and teaching help students address core questions about values and meaning in life. “They see it as an opportunity, and they’ve explicitly told me this, to talk about being human,” he says.
The Study and Practice of Being Human
Written by Peter Dizikes.
Professor Joshua Bennett’s scholarship, poetry, and teaching help students address core questions about values and meaning in life.
For their last meeting of the fall 2023 semester, the students in MIT’s course 21W.756 (Nature Poetry) piled into a bus and headed to a local performance space for a reading: their own.
Sure, students in the course, taught by Professor Joshua Bennett, spend much of the semester reading and discussing poems. But they create and perform, too, often using tools from their other studies at MIT. One student in 21W.756 built a custom field microphone to incorporate recorded sounds into his work; another designed collages to complement her poems.
“The students are phenomenal,” says Bennett, a professor of literature and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT. “I try to think
about how everything else they’re studying at MIT might meet up with the study of literature in a productive way. We’ve got great students who do super-interesting things.”
He adds: “They are willing to take the leap between other classes and our class very seriously. They see it as an opportunity — and they’ve explicitly told me this — to talk about being human. They’ve cherished that, and it’s been a transformative experience to have witnessed that.”
Bennett, an award-winning professor with a broad portfolio of work, knows about leaping between disciplines. He has published books of literary criticism, cultural history, and three collections of poems. Bennett has also gained renown as a spoken-word poetry performer — he has another major tour slated for this summer — and helped found the poetry collaborative Strivers Row. His readings have gained what must be millions of views on YouTube, including “Tamara’s Opus,” a dramatic work written for his deaf sister.
In short, Bennett also does his own super-interesting things, while encouraging students to join him in the pursuit of knowledge.
“Why do we create literature in the first place?” Bennett asks. “Why do we go to college? Why do we listen to people tell stories? Why do 300 or 3,000 people at a poetry reading listen to me or others talk? I imagine some of it is, there are things we love about being alive. And one of them is the feeling you can learn something new. You can be astonished. There is a space for you to become more complete through knowledge.”
Reading (and listening to) everything
Bennett grew up in Yonkers, New York, in a family that included preachers and musicians, and helped inculcate a love of learning in him.
“I’m thankful I had parents who just weren’t narrow-minded,” Bennett says. “They taught me to read everything, to listen to everything. At school I was reading Fitzgerald, and other works that were canonical, and wherever I saw beauty I really gravitated to it.” At the same time, he notes, “I was exposed to the genius of gospel music, jazz, and Motown,” while learning about Black scientists and much more.
He credits a 10th grade English teacher, Kaliq Simms, for helping him realize his potential as a student and writer.
“We read Hamlet, the Merchant of Venice, the Canterbury Tales, and she took us through literature in a way that made it land,” Bennett says. “She taught those works alongside Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. There was just something about the way she spoke to us. Ms. Simms said I was a ‘witty elocutionist.’ She just saw something in me other people didn’t see, or couldn’t. She had a serious role in changing my trajectory.”