Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Living Poetry with Poet Joshua Bennett
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Living Poetry with Poet Joshua Bennett
This episode features a wide-ranging conversation about poetry: what it is, where it comes from, and why it matters. Our guest, poet (and poetry professor) Joshua Bennett, talks about the early experiences that pushed him toward poetry and about the people who shaped and inspired his creative approach as a writer. Many of these people are fellow poets, others are his own grandparents, parents, and teachers, but Prof. Bennett has also found inspiration in less expected figures; over the course of the interview, he name-checks the singers Yolanda Adams and Marvin Gaye, the biologists Charles Henry Turner and Ernest Everett Just, the astronaut Mae Jemison, and various characters from the TV series Star Trek: the Next Generation. Other topics Prof. Bennett addresses include the relation between poetry and generative AI (his own work is among the vast body of text that has been fed as training data into large language models), education as liberation, and the concept of social poetics. Eventually, the interview blossoms into a heartfelt meditation on human experience: childhood, aging, parenthood, identity, and the ways poetry enhances our humanity by capturing the magic of being alive.
Relevant Resources:
MIT OpenCourseWare
The OCW Educator Portal
Joshua Bennett’s faculty page
Joshua Bennett (Poetry Foundation)
Aracelis Girmay, from The Black Maria
June Jordan, “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America”
Charles Henry Turner (Wikipedia)
Ernest Everett Just (Wikipedia)
Mae Jemison (Wikipedia)
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Call us @ 617-715-2517
On our site
On Facebook
On X
On Instagram
On LinkedIn
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Support OCW
If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!
Credits
Sarah Hansen, host and producer
Brett Paci, producer
Dave Lishansky, producer
Jackson Maher, producer
Show notes by Peter Chipman
View all episodes
By MIT OpenCourseWare
4.9
4141 ratings
This episode features a wide-ranging conversation about poetry: what it is, where it comes from, and why it matters. Our guest, poet (and poetry professor) Joshua Bennett, talks about the early experiences that pushed him toward poetry and about the people who shaped and inspired his creative approach as a writer. Many of these people are fellow poets, others are his own grandparents, parents, and teachers, but Prof. Bennett has also found inspiration in less expected figures; over the course of the interview, he name-checks the singers Yolanda Adams and Marvin Gaye, the biologists Charles Henry Turner and Ernest Everett Just, the astronaut Mae Jemison, and various characters from the TV series Star Trek: the Next Generation. Other topics Prof. Bennett addresses include the relation between poetry and generative AI (his own work is among the vast body of text that has been fed as training data into large language models), education as liberation, and the concept of social poetics. Eventually, the interview blossoms into a heartfelt meditation on human experience: childhood, aging, parenthood, identity, and the ways poetry enhances our humanity by capturing the magic of being alive.
Relevant Resources:
MIT OpenCourseWare
The OCW Educator Portal
Joshua Bennett’s faculty page
Joshua Bennett (Poetry Foundation)
Aracelis Girmay, from The Black Maria
June Jordan, “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America”
Charles Henry Turner (Wikipedia)
Ernest Everett Just (Wikipedia)
Mae Jemison (Wikipedia)
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Call us @ 617-715-2517
On our site
On Facebook
On X
On Instagram
On LinkedIn
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Support OCW
If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!
Credits
Sarah Hansen, host and producer
Brett Paci, producer
Dave Lishansky, producer
Jackson Maher, producer
Show notes by Peter Chipman
More shows like Chalk Radio
View all
Global News Podcast
7,909 Listeners
Economist Podcasts
4,283 Listeners
The Best of Car Talk
16,523 Listeners
The Gray Area with Sean Illing
10,700 Listeners
Learning English from the News
251 Listeners
Inside Trader Joe's
4,305 Listeners
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
6,751 Listeners
Think Fast Talk Smart: Communication Techniques
794 Listeners
For Heaven's Sake
439 Listeners
Huberman Lab
28,494 Listeners
The Ezra Klein Show
15,335 Listeners
Plain English with Derek Thompson
2,208 Listeners
The Economics of Everyday Things
1,619 Listeners