Dr. Joshua Bennett discusses the history of poetry at MIT: a tradition that flourishes in the midst of difficult courseloads and a general emphasis on the study of science and engineering. Where do the students find time to write new poems? Anywhere and everywhere they can.
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One of the highlights of my first three years as a literature professor at MIT—and indeed, of my 15-year career as an educator—has been the recent discovery that some of my students, past and present, formed an arts collective: The People’s Poetry. It began, I was told, with the first class I taught at the institute. Several students in that course, “Reading Poetry: Social Poetics,” created their own group chat, and eventually started meeting outside of class to write together. Every time I taught a new course, their membership grew. These engineers and scientists in training, hailing from across the world, were gathering to compose and critique poems outside the classroom.
Many of these young people were, in other classes, studying or even actively developing forms of technology that raise a range of questions about the purpose and power of human expression: why humans write or draw; what ethics govern our inspiration and training; how the creative act brings us together and alters our thinking. In the midst of a technological revolution, while taking on a notoriously difficult courseload, why have they chosen to devote their time to the ancient art of making poems?
These kinds of questions are not unprecedented at the institute. In the early 1960s, the reading series Poetry From M.I.T. explored the relationship between a strong technical education and the pursuit of the good and the beautiful. In service of this larger inquiry, the series organizers invited renowned writers such as Robert Penn Warren, Denise Levertov, and Richard Wilbur to campus to share their work. These events were broadcast on WGBH, a Boston public-radio station, and featured timely insights on where the practice of poetry and the future of technology might intersect. My students bring some version of this exploration into the classroom with striking consistency—most vividly in their observations of how it feels to use poetry to work through our obsessions, our dreams, in times like these. And at a place like this, no less: an elite research university where they spend most of their time working on projects that feel orthogonal to that sort of labor.