Poet, performer, and scholar Joshua Bennett is the author of three collections of poetry, Owed, The Sobbing School, and The Study of Human Life, which was longlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is also the author of a book of criticism, Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man, and a book of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History. He received his PhD in English from Princeton University, and is currently a Professor of Literature and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT. His writing has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University.
Selected poems
by Joshua Bennett
No poems, not even
one, since the minute
you were born. Now, I live
the thing that was the writing,
more intensely, alongside you
each day. Hours blur,
and are measured
only in feedings, naps
just quick enough to not subtract
from your later dreaming.
Mom & I divide the night
into shifts, dance through the fog
of sleep deficits doctors say
we won’t feel the weight of
until wintertime. So what.
Our home glows
like a field of rushes,
moonlight ensnared
in their flaxen heads.
Most early mornings
with you are mine.
We play the elevator
game and improvise
lyrics, rhyming August
with raucous, florist, flawless.
As I write this, you rest
in a graphite- gray carrier
on my chest, your thinking adorned
with language that obeys no order
my calcified mind can
express.Tomorrow, I will
do the thing where I make my voice
sound like a trombone, and I hope
you like it as much as you did
today. There is no sorrow
I can easily recall. I have
consecrated my life.
Copyright © 2022, Joshua Bennett, The Study of Human Life, Penguin Books
Dad Poem, XII (The New Temporality)
A boy, I am told.
The familiar numbers fall
like a wall of ash across my mind,
the future now made
both freshly opaque
& terrifying in its clarity.
I know what I have
survived. I have lived
to tell of it only in songs
I can belt without ending
the world. But enough
of the untold terrors we know.
There is an entire genre
of poems about the fear
of bringing another
black son onto the Earth.
I refuse them all.
Little one, they are not ours
to bear. There is a war
outside, yes, and inside
our home there are books about flowers,
ten-speed bicycles, dinosaurs with names
you can’t even pronounce yet.
We are building a story
for you that is bigger than bombs
or the words of assassins
who do not love us.
Your inheritance is this refusal
and infinitely more: triceratopses, hyacinth,
racing uphill in our blue
helmets, two runaway ice comets
cracking the night air open,
so swift within
its shadow
we are almost invisible.
Copyright © 2022 by Joshua Bennett, The Study of Human Life, Penguin Books