“We don’t know what we know until we can express it.”

– Mortimer Adler

When prompted to respond to this article, “Why So Many MIT Students Are Writing Poetry” by Joshua Bennett, it immediately brought to mind my own university days, where I had a friend who was a Math and English double-major. I was an English and Creative Writing double-major, and we spent time doing what these MIT students are doing. We talked, read, and shared our compositions. We discussed zeitgeists past and present, and how they shape poems, how poems shape lives, and how these particular poems influenced our thoughts and feelings. We both believed that the arts and sciences were in pursuit of the same underlying attempt: understanding what it means to be human. He found poetry in maths and set theory in poetry. One can be moved by logarithmic functions as much as Shelley.  

What Bennett phrases as the “purpose and power of human expression” is the driving force behind all my studies. It is why I read, write, and teach. I write to make room for the small, seemingly inconsequential observations of my daily life. I read to remind myself that those things matter. The classroom is, for me, a place for “making room for the miraculous,” within the quotidian, and is also a place to “practice being human”, as Bennett writes. I love seeing school as a practice for being human, which is to say, a practice of understanding yourself, continually. 

But I don’t claim to have all the answers. I write to surprise myself. I teach, too, to surprise myself. In fact, teaching poetry can prompt more questions. 

What is surprise? What does it mean to be moved by a poem? 

In my class, I aim to make space to simply be moved by a poem. Many poets have described these sensations that poetry can bring forth; for instance, Emily Dickinson described it as feeling “physically as if the top of (her) head were taken off.” However you describe it, or fail to describe it, there is an undeniable feeling of being moved– and it’s not a superficial one. 

Bennett argues that a poem “does the opposite function of AI– it lives and dies on its ability to surprise.” In any form of creative writing, I tell my students what my mentors told me: ‘Write toward surprise.’ Writing toward surprise allows us to be open with ourselves, to be unpredictable and unknowable to ourselves. 

If I can’t even learn to be me, then neither can AI. Bennett is “led to wonder whether the hunger for connection, understanding, and astonishment that seems to characterize much of the public interest in AI from the same need that poetry fulfills.” Through writing in class, I want my students to allow themselves to connect and understand, and practice making connections within themselves and with others. What else is being alive about? 

“Poetry has always been a technology of memory and human connection,” Bennet asserts. The sublime (or that sensation we feel when a good poem moves us), according to the Greek philosopher Longinus, fills us “with joyful pride, as if we had ourselves produced the very thing we heard.” This is not a frivolous pride that he suggests. In fact, poetry is more critical than it may seem.

The poet and author Audre Lorde, in her essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”, posits that poetry “is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into an idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give a name to the nameless, so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.” 

Allow yourself to be moved. Allow yourself to give language to what already lies inside. And who knows– maybe your words will move someone else. 

• Uma Jagwani