Finding the heat

Poet Joshua Bennett invites MIT students to gather around Black American poetry. On a Monday afternoon, poet Joshua Bennett is chatting with early arrivals to his class, asking how they spent their weekends. The wistful chords of the 1979 Bill Evans jazz album "We Will Meet Again" play in the background. It's a relaxed, convivial start to a new MIT Literature class that explores the relationship between poetry and the social lives of everyday people. Bennett, a visiting professor in spring 2023 who will join the MIT faculty as a full-time professor of literature and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities this summer, designed class 21L.004 (Reading Poetry: Social Poetics) with an emphasis on Black U.S. poets - part of a group historically barred from literacy and many forms of ownership and belonging. The course explores questions like: What social function has poetry served for African Americans, then and now? How can readers from different backgrounds come together to learn from these writers about the Black experience and about themselves? Once everyone's assembled for class, Bennett switches off the music. He begins class like he always does, with an ungraded writing prompt; today, he offers eight minutes to write "a poem about the beginning of a world." Then he breaks the comfortable hush to introduce a topic close to his heart: Black nature poetry.