Sure, students in the course, taught by Professor Joshua Bennett, spend much of the semester reading and discussing poems. But they create and perform, too, often using tools from their other studies at MIT. One student in 21W.756 built a custom field microphone to incorporate recorded sounds into his work; another designed collages to complement her poems. 'The students are phenomenal,' says Bennett, a professor of literature and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT. 'I try to think about how everything else they're studying at MIT might meet up with the study of literature in a productive way. We've got great students who do super-interesting things.' He adds: 'They are willing to take the leap between other classes and our class very seriously. They see it as an opportunity ' and they've explicitly told me this ' to talk about being human. They've cherished that, and it's been a transformative experience to have witnessed that.' Bennett, an award-winning professor with a...
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