n many forms.
Today's guest explores the history of spoken word and its expansion of the contours of poetry and its ability to capture the urgent social issues of the day.
He's Dr. Joshua Bennett, this week on "Story in the Public Square."
(energetic music) (energetic music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.
I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.
- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with the Pell Center at Salve.
- This week we're joined by scholar, slam champion, and poet Dr. Joshua Bennett, a Professor of Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He's also the author of a new book, "Spoken Word: A Cultural History."
Joshua, thank you so much for being with us.
- Thank you both for having me.
- There's so much we want to talk to you about, but I think that for our audience at home who may or may not be familiar with spoken word, what is it, and what is it as an art form?
- Yeah, it's a fantastic question.
I mean, as I define it in the book, spoken word is just poetry that's written to be recited.
It's poetry that's written with an audience in mind, and so whether it's memorized or read off the page, it's always a social occasion when spoken word is involved.
- We have a recent performance of yours.
It's an extended clip.
We're gonna play it now.
- "Balaenoptera."
When we are older, hair the color of tombstones, bones that sound like wet windshield wipers whenever we slow dance through the living room.
I imagine I will look you in the eye as if there is something small and precious imprisoned there, and say to you, "Darling, did you know that a blue whale has a heart the size of a car?"
When you reply correctly, as you always seem to do when I ask you difficult questions about oceanography, I'll probably just laugh, rejoicing over the fact that every time you smile, it makes the wrinkles at the corner of your eyes look like six willow branches all lifting their heads from prayer in unison, the wind humming a somber hymn beneath its breath.
Just as our anthem jogs to a close and I whisper in your ear, "How did you know that I was the one?"
When all those well-dressed jackals came galloping to your door, begging for the rights to your ring finger, what made you lock the deadbolt on your ribs?
Looking them squarely in the face, and saying with joy, "I am keeping all of this beauty for someone I have never even met."
Did you ever doubt, ever sit in your dorm room and think that maybe your soul mate had chosen someone a lot more boring, but a lot less picky than you, and opted for the easier way out of a life filled with love?
When I was twenty-two years old, beard freshly grown, an ocean away from my family with the kind of pain that drives people to do selfish, barely forgivable things, I dreamt of you nightly, hunted for your smile in every audience that I broke for, hoping that I could literally steal a glance, download it onto my retinas and replay the moment our eyes first played freeze tag and neither one of us wanted to stop being it, so we just kept on touching, hoping that Father Time would give us a hall pass and allow us to orbit one another forever.
And speaking of orbits, did you know that there are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the entire planet, and that I would give you either one if you merely asked, peel the night from the sky's skin like the rind of an orange or ask God if I could borrow the breeze for just a moment and blow the shoreline of every beach into a giant hourglass made just for us and say this.
This is how long I will adore the things about you that no one else even notices, like your laugh, and how it sounds like a mix of Jimmy Hendrix at Woodstock and two rainstorms singing perfectly in tune.
Those orthopedic shoes, and how they always match your cardigans perfectly.
Those crooked glasses, and how they dangle at the edge of your nose like the legs of two lovers on a tire swing, the last summer they will ever see each other's face.
The first time I saw your face, I thought, "Wow."
If there were a gorgeous Olympics you would be a lock, and maybe I would be your key, and maybe love is a club that we both got into for free, and we just haven't stopped dancing for all these decades because we really like the music in here.
And maybe, if you asked me to, I would crawl through the vein of a blue whale on my hands and knees, photograph that Volkswagen-sized heart of hers and place the picture underneath your pillow before you went to sleep.
When you ask me about it, I'll probably just laugh, giggling like I've got a handful of diamonds in my throat and say, "See, I told you.
The biggest heartbeat God ever made, and now it's all yours."
- Joshua, an incredible poem, just amazing.
Tell us about it.
Was it written for your wife?
- That's a great question.
Whenever I recite it now, I think about her, but I first wrote that poem 12 years ago as a senior at the University of Pennsylvania.
I had to take an oceanography course to graduate.
I did not realize this in advance.
I just remember one day my professor said a blue whale has a heart the size of a car.
They didn't say what kind of car, Humvee, Prius, what species of car.
(interviewers laughing) But I do remember thinking I want to give someone a love that big one day, so I wrote that poem as a kind of aspirational poem, a poem about the life I envisioned for myself one day, and I'm happy to say now with my wife Pam, I have some version of that utopian vision every day.
- So how did you write it?
How long?
Get into the process of writing, and this of course would apply to all of your other work as well.
- Yeah, it's a great question.
There are some poems that come in minutes, like "Balaenoptera" I think I wrote probably in 20, 30 minutes, and there are other poems that have taken me a decade, but this one, it was Kierkegaardian in a way.
It was fear and trembling.
You want to get it right, you're just there, you're kind of pouring over the images in your mind.
But I think that blue whale's heart really helped anchor me, and then the idea of being someone who'd been in love for decades slow dancing in a living room.
I think I felt like if I had those two images in there, then we were getting close to a deeper emotional truth that I wanted to communicate.
- The book itself is "Spoken Word: A Cultural History," and this is a cultural history, but it's also something of a personal memoir, of your coming of age in the spoken word environment.
It's clear though that both in your formal education, but also at home, words were valued.
Can you tell us a little bit about how that all came together to influence you both as a student of spoken word, a performer, and ultimately an educator yourself?
- Sure, sure.
My mom's classic line appears in that book, which is that our gifts meant to be shared.
The first poetry slam I ever attended was actually in the Yonkers Public Library.
I was 11 years old.
I got second place, which I remember not just because the memory is sort of seared into my mind, but because my mom sent the trophy back from the basement in our house in Yonkers, New York.
I'm at the age now where they're clearing out all of my stuff, my parents.
The idea that gifts were meant to be shared, it wasn't just something she said to encourage me that day at the poetry slam.
It really was part of the ethos of our home life, part of our family culture.
I was raised in the Black church.
The first poets I ever saw were preachers, and I just admired the power of their sermons.
When my mother would hear a beautiful sermon, she would say, "That's my word for the week."
There was this idea that language was a kind of armor you could carry around with you.
It was a way to protect your dignity, but also it was this treasure trove you could return to whenever you needed it.
With a book, you could be anywhere, you could be anyone.
I engaged in this kind of practice of metamorphosis every day with the books my parents gave me.
I pretended to be a pilot or a giraffe or a shepherd.
There was no limit to what I could dream up, and that's because I was raised around a lot of books and a lot of people who loved language and loved literature, so by the time I discovered spoken word, first at 11 and then kind of rediscovered it in high school, I had this wealth.
I had this tradition that I was pulling from, and it really just took off from there.
- You were a college junior in 2009 when you were invited to the Obama White House Evening of Poetry, Music and the Spoken Word.
Tell us about that.
That must have been an incredible experience.
- Yeah, it really was.
- [G. Wayne] And you were a young person clearly, too.
- I was, yeah, young enough that my mom bought that suit for me from Cross County Mall together.
It was really incredible.
My mom also went over that poem with me two or three times backstage, which you don't see on the YouTube footage, but it was an incredible day.
I got to sound check with James Earl Jones and Lin Manuel Miranda and Esperanza Spalding.
We got James Earl Jones to say, "Luke, I am your father" backstage on camera, so that was really cool.
Spike Lee was there, Saul Williams was there.
I mean, we packed out the East Room of the White House, and we recited our deeper truths.
We got to be standard bearers in our fields that day, and it completely changed my life, in no small part because in that moment at least, as a 20 year old, I thought, "What can I ever do to top this?"
Not too long after that, I realized, well, maybe I can just live a beautiful, dignified life, or try to.
So that's one of the core stories of the book as well.
There are big moments like that.
It kind of ends with the inauguration with Amanda Gorman performing.
That's one of the final notes of the book.
But really, this is a book about groups of friends, some of whom weren't very famous at all, who found this art form that allowed them to speak to not just their deep individual truths, but the truths of their communities, the beauty of places that were said to be nothing at all.
That's really what I wanted to approach in that book.
- One of the things that I kept coming back to as I was reading it was that the importance of community, the importance of networks, the importance of friends groups that really drive spoken word as a movement.
One of the, I'm gonna butcher the pronunciation, for the Nuyoricans.
- That's it.
You got it.
The Nuyoricans.
- Tell us a little bit about them.
- Oh, wow, okay.
At least in terms of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, which is a venue that's right at the core of the opening section of the book, that started as a living room salon in the early to mid-seventies, held by the brilliant poet and academic Miguel Algarin.
Miguel, it was so funny in researching this book.
I met Miguel as a 17 year old boy performing at Nuyo, as we call it affectionately.
I just thought he founded this cafe.
He's a very interesting character, and sometimes he'll affirm your poem if he thinks it's good.
I had no sense that he had a PhD in comp lit, that he was a Shakespeare professor, that he'd taught at Rutgers and Brooklyn College.
In going into the archive to write this book, I discovered all these echoes I hadn't expected between myself and this man that I had met and really admired.
I admired what he built, but I didn't know him, and I didn't know what was behind it.
The Nuyorican Poets, many of them were part of this group of friends that met in his salon.
Part of why he opened the cafe was because he had a day job as a professor, and they stayed too late.
People would be there until one or two a.m. so he said, "Look, I need to open a venue so you guys can keep performing, because I have to go to bed.
I have to wake up and lesson plan for these students who take my classes."
They were a really diverse group.
I mean, Ntozake Shange, the incredibly famous Black feminist playwright, was one of the 20 founders of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Lucky Cienfuegos, Miguel Pinero, the playwright.
These people came from all across the city and all across the world, and they came together under one roof to really help create the sound that I argue has now traveled back across the world in the present moment, largely through the internet.
- There really are two main aspects to the spoken word creation, the actual writing, and you've talked a little bit about that, and then there's performance.
I want to zero in on the performance, now and when you started out.
Is there anxiety?
Do you get butterflies?
What's going through your head when you go on stage?
- That's a great question.
I think I've had some version of stage fright my whole life, especially for the first 15 years of doing it.
It would be hard to sleep before a big gig.
I performed at the Chautauqua Institution a long time ago, maybe about two or three years ago now, and there were 3,000 people in that venue.
But once I was in the flow of it, even just one or two minutes into the set, I felt as free as I've ever felt in my life, and I think that's true for a lot of the performers I know who've been doing it for a while.
There are always nerves because you care about it, and especially in a big venue, I think there's the pressure of hundreds or thousands of faces.
But when you're fully inside the poem, when you're inside the story, as we used to say when I was a teenager at Urban Word NYC, there's something else that happens in you.
There's a kind of inner transformation.
You're in a flow and you feel invincible.
- It sounds almost spiritual in some senses.
- Oh yeah, it is for me.
- Something happens inside of you that has transformed you when you get on stage.
- I think so.
You transcend.
- It's not that you the day before or walking into the theater or wherever, you get up there and something happens.
- You make the point in the book that part of what makes spoken word and slam so important and so powerful is that there's audience interaction.
It's not just about some words written a century ago by someone who's dead.
This is the lived moment, the lived experience of the people who are presenting these performances.
- I think that's absolutely right, and I think these two points are connected.
I think the point about community and audience is absolutely linked to a feeling of almost metaphysical transcendence.
There's the preacher practicing the sermon in the mirror is one thing.
That exact same piece of text is a completely different animal when it's in front of a congregation.
I think about the performance of poetry in much the same way.
Like when I say that spoken word is meant to be recited, I mean that it's meant to be shared with actual living, breathing human beings, and that those people make the performance something new.
One of the chapters begins with an epigraph from Albert Lord, who essentially says that every performance by the oral poet is an original.
Even that clip you played of "Balaenoptera," I've done that poem hundreds of times, but every time is an original.
Why?
In part because it's a new audience every time, and they bring something new out of me every time.
Sometimes I actually change the words depending on the audience.
- [Jim] Really?
- Oh, yeah.
Depending on the day, you'll hear a completely different.
If you look on YouTube, I have different versions of that poem sort of scattered everywhere across the world.
Some of it, if I'm at the end of my set and I'm like, "All right, let's speed this up and let's see where I can find pockets in it to play," but other times I just want to have fun.
You've done a poem 200 times, I think you find different kind of room in it to do something new and exciting for you as the individual performer, and the audience gets to go along for that ride.
I think that's part of that transformation.
Every time I get on the stage, I'm someone new.
- What drew you to the performance part of this in the first place?
You obviously write great poetry.
You could have just been a poet.
- [Jim] An academic poet.
- An academic poet.
What was the appeal, and do you remember the first time you actually performed?
- Yeah, I was probably about four years old.
- [G.Wayne] Four years old, really?
- Oh yeah, for sure.
- Where, when?
- I've written poetry ever since I was four years old, and I would come home and I would improvise sermons for about 30, 40 minutes.
We would leave church.
- At that very young age?
- Oh, yeah.
My parents and my big sister would create a little half circle around me in the dining room.
They would set up chairs and I would improvise these sermons.
- That's amazing.
- Yeah, and then from there, I wrote my own poetry and I sang in the children's choir.
I've always been a performer.
I acted in church plays.
- What did your family think when you came home and did this?
- They thought it was fine.
(interviewers laughing) - Did they applaud?
- Oh, yeah.
They would say amen.
They would do the whole thing.
And again, I come from a very child-centered family, too.
The arts are everywhere.
Everyone sang.
I wasn't the only poet, but when I wrote my poetry, everyone paid attention and locked in.
My sister had Maya Angelou's "Phenomenal Woman" taped to the front of her bedroom door, so I tell my students I walked past poetry every day as a boy, and I've always loved performing in part because it gave me space to say things that didn't come to me easily in everyday conversation.
- You grew up in a family where a child's voice was important.
Literally, a child's voice was important.
- [Joshua] It was central, even.
- Yeah, and I think that's an essential component of any healthy and vibrant family.
- You mentioned that you walked by poetry every day.
There is a line I think towards the end of the book where you said that among the important things to take away is that poetry should be an every day thing.
Expand on that for us.
- Any student that's ever taken a college class with me has written poetry at the beginning of each class session.
I give them five to seven minutes and a shared prompt, and we write poetry together.
That's no matter what class it is, if it's a nature poetry class, if it's an African-American literature class, a philosophy of literature class, we all write poetry together, and in part it's because I think it's an ancient human practice that we use in part, as someone like Allen Grossman would say, to war against forgetfulness.
We write poetry to remember and to make our mark on the world and to say we're here.
When my students come in from that busy, hectic schedule on campus, I want them to have a second to create something that's not graded.
You don't have to share it if you don't want to.
You get to just play and live in your imagination, and it's a moment that we share together, and I want that for everyone.
I teach children as young as five years old, and I teach people that are many years older than me poetry.
I've been doing that for 17 years, traveling the world, and it's one of the great joys of my life because for those 30 or 40 minutes, we all get to play again.
- Have you ever encountered anyone who didn't like poetry?
- Oh, every time I do a show, yeah.
(interviewers laughing) I mean, one of the highest compliments is, "I don't even really like poetry, but I like the thing you did up there."
It's one of the arguments I think of the book.
- What an interesting comment.
- Oh yeah, but they mean it.
They really mean it.
I was one of those kids who didn't love poetry in school, either.
I just felt like even the selections we were given from people like Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, it wasn't their best work.
- That was something I wanted to ask you about, because you have been a proselytizer of arts education in the United States.
How are we doing?
Because I think back to my experience.
Now, I'm older than you.
- No, you're fine.
- And Wayne's older than me, but the exposure to arts that I got in schools was about what you would expect.
It wasn't great.
There was some exposure.
I think that if you had taught me poetry, there would've been a dynamism and an excitement about it that would have been transformational.
How are we doing overall on arts education in the United States today?
- That's a great question.
I think in some corners we're doing the best we can, and I appreciate it.
I wouldn't have a career without the elementary, middle, and high school teachers that teach my video from the White House or teach "Balaenoptera" in their classrooms to their students.
They'll put me sometimes right next to Langston Hughes, in a place of honor, or right near.
- [G.Wayne] That is an honor.
- Yeah, it means a lot.
That means a great deal to me.
I'm in that tradition.
I think people are working within real constraints to say poetry is alive, and there's poetry made that is as diverse as the bodies of students that are being taught, and I think that's a hard fight for many reasons, for political reasons, but also for educational reasons.
Sometimes people are just teaching from what they've been taught.
Part of my work is to try to diversify the field.
It's to work with places like Penguin Classics to put out anthologies every year of minor poets, maybe poets you haven't heard of before, and to have those collections be accessible so that people can teach it to 10 year olds and can teach it to college students.
- You're a scholar and a professor.
What drew you to the academy?
You could have had this other life, and you still have that other life, but that could have been your only life.
What drew you to the academy?
- That's a great question.
I promise I didn't plan this, but I think it's the Black church thing again.
A family friend gave me a copy of Cornel West's book, "Race Matters," when I was a senior in high school, and my high school was about two hours away from where I lived in Yonkers, New York.
- [G.Wayne] Two hours, wow.
- Oh yeah, it's no joke.
One bus to the Seven bus to the Metro North, and then I would walk up the hill with all the other scholarship kids, and I read that book just about every day.
I remember looking to the back of it and seeing that he taught African American studies at Princeton, and I thought, "Okay, I've never heard of African American studies, what is that?"
I went looking for programs, and I found a place called UPenn, and I saw that they had a Center for Africana Studies.
I fell in love with the idea that I could study the tradition of the people who'd made me possible, and that apparently there were professors out there who shared that dream, so it really was Cornel West who inspired me to make that turn, and my professors at Penn who helped solidify that vision.
- While you were at Penn, you did that performance at the White House, among other places.
- During finals, yeah.
- During finals, really?
- Oh, yeah.
- In the epilogue to "Spoken Word," you mentioned the performance of Amanda Gorman, the America's Youth Poet Laureate at the time at the Biden Inauguration.
And almost as an aside, you talked about the return of poetry to the public space.
You performed at the White House, she performed at the inauguration.
Why is poetry important in public places like that?
- Oh my goodness.
It reminds us to dream.
It reminds us that language is not stayed, it's not stuck, it's not set in stone.
Language is something that's flexible and dynamic and should be available to all of us.
Part of what I love about that poem is to my knowledge, Amanda Gorman doesn't identify as a spoken word poet, but she's clearly pulling from that tradition in the atmosphere.
I thought, this is it.
This is a great achievement of this particular section of our tradition that so many of us have been kind of letting our voices out to the air that now a US youth poet laureate has that music in her ear when she steps on to one of the biggest stages in the world.
I think it reminds people that they can get up and speak with clarity, confidence and conviction, and that they can be vulnerable and come out on the other end alive.
I think that's a very serious lesson.
It's a hard lesson to learn, and I think it's one that we owe to our children, frankly.
- Do you write what I would call private poems to your wife or your kids or friends, things that you never expect to be published, could even be just a good morning type thing?
- Sure.
I didn't used to.
Before, everything I read and wrote pretty much was for public consumption, and I think since meeting Pam and kind of building our life over the past couple years, I write that sort of stuff all the time, even just for myself.
- [G.Wayne] That must be precious.
- It is, it's cool.
I write it on napkins and PostIt notes.
- Save them.
Make sure you save them, because years to come you'll be happy to have them.
Another quick question here.
You're leaving Dartmouth this summer for a job at MIT.
MIT is associated more in the minds of many people with science and technology, but you're a humanities guy.
What drew you to MIT?
- Hmm, that's a great question.
It's an incredible place to learn and to teach.
- Nobody would argue with that.
- To be honest, part of it too is that poetry is a kind of technology.
It's a way that we've been building archives of our memories and our dreams and visions for as long as we've been alive.
Part of the case I wanted to make at MIT, but also everywhere I walk, everywhere I go, everywhere I teach, is that these things are not easily separated.
Like the practice of science and technology and the practice of the arts, it's all a part of, it's all making, it's all poiesis, as the ancient Greeks would say.
Even at Dartmouth, many of my students were STEM majors.
I taught a poetry class about a year ago that had maybe one English major in it.
There are these larger national trends where most of my students, they're not there necessarily to major in English, but I think they take classes with me because they're in search of something, something that maybe they've seen on a YouTube video, but maybe something that they saw in 10th grade when an English teacher handed them a poem and they were moved by it.
I think every student has that.
I think every person has that in them, that sense that they don't always have the words, which is why I think when people die, when people get married, when children are born, we turn to poetry.
It helps us say what we might not have the words for right away, and so that's part of what I'm trying to teach in the classrooms too, a reservoir of language that my students can turn to in moments not just of great difficulty, but great joy.
- Joshua Bennett, it's great to have you on the show.
- It's an honor and pleasure.
- The book is "Spoken Word: A Cultural History," and everybody should go read it.
I think that's the takeaway.
He's Joshua Bennett.
That's all the time we have this week, but if you want to know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on Facebook and Twitter, or visit pellcenter.org, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.
For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."
(energetic music) (energetic music continues) (energetic music continues) (gentle music)