Resident scholar's performances inspire Middle Schoolers to pen their own poetry

“Together, we unlearn shame. We dream silly. We sing what we cannot say to anyone else. 

“So say it. Say I am 12 years old, and my joy is stainless.” 

These words, from Dr. Joshua Bennett’s poem “Say It, Sing It If The Spirit Leads (After Vievee Francis),” are powerful enough, but when the author performed them onstage during a fall Middle School Special Assembly in Thompson Hall, his audience sat transfixed. 

Bennett, a Dartmouth professor and award-winning poet who currently serves as a scholar-in-residence at Thayer, has made a point of showing, not telling when it comes to the power of his craft. That particular assembly saw him open with that poem — written in 2012 for a class of Bennett’s students in the wake of the Trayvon Martin killing — and then follow with “Balaenoptera” and “Owed (a play on ‘Ode’) to the 10th Grade English Teacher.” The first poem is ostensibly about the massive size of a whale’s heart, he told his young audience, but it’s really about love because, as a young poet, he wanted to give someone love as big as that. And the latter work, he told students, is a celebration of those special people who help us along the way. “In spite of it all, you dared to call us possible, and so we were,” the poem reads. Through his poetry, Bennett demonstrated to his young audience the power of language to connect at both an intellectual and an emotional level.  

For his efforts, Bennett was deluged by questions from students eager to learn more about him and his life as a poet. In response, Bennett revealed how terrified he was teaching his first college course, how much he loves dinosaurs, and how he can’t remember not being in love with words. 

“I always was a poet,” he told students. “I didn’t know I was going to stay one.” 

Asked his favorite poem, he said “Balaenoptera” was his favorite to perform but that his overall favorite was “Dad Poem X,” which was recently published in The New Yorker and is — on the surface level, at least — about apples. 

“Before we moved here,” reads an excerpt from the poem, “I knew so little of apples, their untamed array of shapes & names: Ginger Gold, Honeycrisp, Crispin, Cortland, Cameo. Both Rome & Empire, somehow, which feels like it must be an inside joke between members of the committee.” 

And now, Bennett told the audience, strangers are using social media to send him messages about their favorite variety of apples. He even struck up a conversation with someone from outonalimbapples.com, a Central Maine homestead farm devoted to tracking down and preserving rare apples. Bennett said he loves the unexpected connection with apple lovers via his poem, which, like his other “Dad” poems, is an imaginative meditation on fatherhood. 

Bennett has visited campus several times this academic year to work with Middle School and Upper School classes on a variety of projects where students are penning their own poetry. In October, Middle Schoolers worked on their own "Owed" poems, for example, and in January Bennett visited Middle School English classes and offered several drop-in periods where students could workshop their poetry. 

Thayer Academy’s Scholar-in-Residence Program was created to “bring the world to Thayer,” part of efforts to develop curricula and training around critical communication and leadership skills that students need to navigate a changing global landscape.