Dr. Joshua Bennett Introduces Spoken Word Poetry as Smith Schol ar

by meredith h . reynolds

Anne Carson once said: “If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it.”

This year at RL, we had the distinct pleasure of welcoming Dr. Joshua Bennett as our Smith Visiting Scholar. Through his three inspiring Halls and visits to English classes across Classes I through IV, Dr. Bennett awakened us to the rhythm, energy, and power of spoken word poetry. His poems ran through the halls of the Perry Building and the aisles of the Smith Theater like a man on fire, and he inspired our boys to create work that would do the same.

Dr. Bennett—a world-famous spoken word poet—is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is the author of five books of poetry, literary criticism, and narrative nonfiction. His works have been recognized with the Paterson Poetry Prize, the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize, and the National Poetry Series. He has been a finalist for an NAACP Image Award, the Massachusetts Book Award, and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Dr. Bennett has recited his original works at the Sundance Film Festival, the NAACP Awards, and at the White House for President Barack Obama.

During Dr. Bennett’s first visit to RL last November, he performed a number of his poems in Hall. It was a Tuesday at 8:30 in the morning, and Dr. Bennett had all 310 boys in the room completely alert, awake, rapt. His second and third visits featured Hall conversations between him and expert colleagues. In January, in celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and legacy, Dr. Bennett had a conversation with Dr. Brandon Terry,

Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and one of the country’s leading scholars on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Together, they illuminated for boys the breadth, depth, and power of MLK’s philosophy of love and non-violence as a means of bringing about meaningful action and change. Finally, in April, Dr. Bennett spoke with Dr. Jarvis Givens, Associate Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, about the history of American education for Black children, and their own early educational experiences in majority-minority schools.

After each of Dr. Bennett’s Halls, he visited English classes and worked with students, delivering master classes on reading, writing, and appreciating poetry. Boys in Classes I and II created their own spoken word pieces guided by Dr. Bennett. He shared with them his own writing process, which he has described as “simply gathering stories and telling the truth.” Through a number of creative exercises, boys learned how to tell their own stories in this new and exciting literary style. Classes III and IV engaged in critical analysis of poetry with Dr. Bennett. In teaching poetry to students, Dr. Bennett takes an immersive approach. He begins by having students watch a spoken word performance, knowing that there is power in the delivery—that even more than words on a page, watching someone speak and emote aloud can make a young person feel he is being spoken to directly. Dr. Bennett has described spoken word as a conversation infused with the musical elements of sermon. “It’s important for people to encounter one another through something like spoken word,” he has said in a lecture. “There’s nothing like it in the world.”

The first time Joshua Bennett fell in love with words was in his grandmother’s hair salons in Harlem, where the many women getting their hair done would offer him a dollar for every word he could spell that was longer than two syllables. This is when he began poring over dictionaries, when he learned the words recalcitrant and myopic, when he began listening to words everywhere he went—on the bus, on the street, in church—and writing them down in the notebook his mother had purchased for him at the 99 Cents Only Store.

The first time he heard spoken word poetry was in church. He has written, in his most recent book Spoken Word: A Cultural History, that preachers were his earliest examples of poets. His own father was a deacon, and he learned through watching him that what you say, and how you say it, means everything. On Sundays, Dr. Bennett and his mother would drive hours from their home in the South Bronx to the Baptist Worship Center in North Philadelphia to hear Dr. Millicent Hunter deliver sermons that had such tempo, emotion, and power that they got everyone out of their seats. “Truth [was] imbedded in the telling,” he wrote. “Indeed, the telling [was] another kind of truth altogether.”

In his own poetry, Dr. Bennett brings the stories of people, spaces, and objects that have been historically deemed insignificant and unworthy of attention and study to the fore. “I want to represent not just places and people that have been underrepresented in American literature, but not represented at all,” Dr. Bennett said in a lecture for the Chautauqua Institution. “We have a world. Poor people have a world, working people have a world… and it has its own aesthetics, and principles, and ethics. And we have to write those things. We have to sing them to the world.” In that spirit, Dr. Bennett analyzed two poems with Class IV: For Those Who Need a True Story by Tara Betts and Feet by Ross Gay. Both works by prominent Black poets explore the worlds they inhabit through vivid descriptions of small truths— the killing of rats in a small urban apartment, the act of trying to hide one’s ugly feet from prying eyes at a local pool.

In exposing our boys to oral poetry throughout the year, Dr. Bennett introduced them to the most ancient tradition of the western world. As he points out in Spoken Word, the Odyssey and the Iliad—texts with which RL boys are certainly familiar—were not originally written texts, but rather “elaborate performances… public recitation for crowds of everyday people.” Dr. Bennett continues: “Spoken word, in this sense, is where poetry as we know it begins. Oral performance precedes written mastery.” To Dr. Bennett, it is important that we recover that memory of oral tradition. In his brief time with RL boys this past year, he certainly succeeded in reviving that tradition within our walls.

In 2007, the late Robert Smith ’58 and his wife, Salua, established the Robert P. Smith International Fellowship so that RL could bring visiting scholars to campus each year, enhancing our curricula with their insightful perspectives on our increasingly complex world. We are grateful to Mr. and Mrs. Smith for their generosity and for enabling our greater understanding of critical global issues, domestic themes and events, and influential literary art forms. //