Originally broadcast at 10:45 a.m. EDT Friday, July 26, 2019.
Joshua Bennett offers thoughts on — and demonstrates — the power of the spoken word, detailing his journey as a poet and as an educator, and explaining the role of poetry in his life and in the world.
Bennett is the Mellon Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. His first work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf. Bennett is also the author of The Sobbing School — a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in Poetry — as well as the forthcoming Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man, and Owed, his second collection of poetry.
“This is ancient; what we’re doing here. This is the oldest tradition in the Western world, this oral poetry,” Bennett says. “The ancient Greek poems taught in school; they began as performances. I don’t think we’ve ever lost that, but I think we need to recover that memory.”
About Chautauqua Institution: Chautauqua Institution is a community on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York state that comes alive each summer with a unique mix of fine and performing arts, lectures, interfaith worship and programs, and recreational activities. As a community, we celebrate, encourage and study the arts and treat them as integral to all of learning, and we convene the critical conversations of the day to advance understanding through civil dialogue. CHQ Assembly is the online expression of Chautauqua Institution's mission.
Originally broadcast at 10:45 a.m. EDT Monday, July 15, 2019.
Laura Carstensen examines the effects of a rapid increase in human life expectancy. The founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity dissects trends that have created an aging population. In her lecture, she lays out the “new...
Originally broadcast at 10:45 a.m. EDT Wednesday, July 10, 2019.
Rae Wynn-Grant is a conservation scientist, large-carnivore ecologist, nature storyteller, and advocate with expertise in using emerging technology to identify how humans are changing the way carnivores use landscapes.
She is curr...
Originally broadcast at 10:45 a.m. EDT Thursday, July 4, 2019.
Risa Goluoff details the initial reaction to the fallout of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. The first female dean of the University of Virgina School of Law, she recalls the Charlottesville rally, neo-Nazi movem...