This past week, graduate student Emily Ruppel wrote an editorial for the MIT newspaper The Tech that offered a formula even a poet can understand: "MIT - poetry = a travesty." She was lamenting the cancellation of MIT's "Advanced Poetry Workshop" for financial reasons, while the school continued to offer such courses as "Writing for Social Media," "Writing for Games" and "Communicating With Mobile Technology."
One can certainly question a school's decision to fund a course on Twitter theory over its only advanced poetry workshop. But is it fair to question it at MIT, a school with a stated mission of "the advancement of knowledge and education of students in areas that contribute to or prosper in an environment of science and technology?" Ruppel thinks so:
Explore the origin of every noun you speak, and you will find a metaphor for something concrete, tangible, and otherwise inexpressible except by grunts and arm-flailing. Poetry, as long as man could string words together into longer, more involved metaphors and language-pictures, has been the remedy for our dumbness. Good poetry paints pictures of the previously inexpressible. It is not just a flowery literary form for men in tights and white-mustached monks, it's a useful tool for any young scientist who would someday like to communicate with the world outside her lab.
I think Ruppel is right. At the very least, a poetry class could help make MIT's yearly output of brilliant scientists and mathematicians better communicators and more well-rounded people. I would take her argument even further, though, and offer that poetry can also be a useful tool for a young scientist inside the lab.
I've spent some time in both the science and the poetry worlds, attending a science and technology high school, and focusing on biology for two years in college before I took to poetry. And while there are obvious fundamental differences between poetry and science, I think that the process of writing poetry has a great deal to offer the scientist.
Writing a poem not only requires the poet to be creative; it requires that she constantly subject that creativity to the pressure of analysis. Good poets learn to let alternating moments of creation and analysis lead them beyond the boundaries of their understanding. Couldn't scientists -- who engage in their own, more deliberate process of creativity and analysis -- benefit from experiencing poetry's far more concentrated creative process? More simply, wouldn't scientists benefit from learning how to better harness their creativity?
Einstein once said, "Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas." An MIT student should, at the very least, have the opportunity to take a class that will help her decide for herself what Einstein meant by that. And I seriously doubt she'd find that sort of wisdom in a Twitter class.
When I was there I took a course is Baroque Music - FIgured Bass for Piano
But then again there was also a IAP course in 'Introduction to Elevator Hacking' too
Also at the time it had the largest number of intramural sports offerings for any university in America
but no football team, oh and the cheerleaders were sometimes taller than our basketball team's players.
Also MIT should make use of their open edu courses and notes they put on the web, and start charging international visitors to the site who want to take an exam through the internet based on some of their courses. They get about 15 million views per month. I myself want to take an exam based on the notes on sustainable development and planning.
Keep the coursework free, but start charging 100$ per exam for anybody wanting to get an MIT subject and using the internet to self-study from the course material they put up there.
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/09/0082640
when i was growing up. i had no care for reading poetry.
but i wrote it.
i have notebooks and notebooks of it.that my mother saved.
if you need a lesson to write poerty........
to me that is like learning how to live on the moon.
Oh, sweet friend, why do you spread these falsehoods about art?
All art is constructed and learned. Sure: some are "born" with talent that makes them approach art with high distinction. But talent alone does not an artist make. One is not born with creative *abilities* or with craftspersonship per se. One hones an artistic craft as surely as an artisan like a house builder hones his practice through study, application, drafting, and problem-solving. There are plenty of "creative types" who make absolutely no viable art and, if they do, their art lacks the kind of rigorous, innovative formal construction required for truly deep and concerted sharing beyond the limited confines of one's friends.
I'm so tired of these clichés about art:
YES: all artistic practices can be taught just as much as the forms, concepts, and best practices of any human endeavor might be taught.
YES: all artistic practices can be learned just as much as the forms, concepts, and best practices of any human endeavor might be learned.
Sincerely yours,
Brenda in Baltimore
The core of that piece turns on the assertion that MIT's poetry curriculum had been cut, and that no classes beyond the introductory level will be taught next spring.
Not true.
The Writing Program typically offers four classes in poetry per year, one introductory and three upper-level. We are doing so again in this year (and expect to do so in the future).
Ms. Ruppel's real complaint is not that poetry has been cut at MIT, but that one course she wished to take has been removed from the schedule for this year (though not from the catalog). This change occured because we have been fortunate enough to be able to add a fourth poet to our group this year, and adding her teaching to our program has shifted our offerings a bit. I understand Ms. Ruppel's disappointment, but disagree strongly with her suggestion that this is a bad thing.
Consider: MIT students may now study under four different accomplished poets. Each of these artist-teachers possesses a distinctive voice and approach to composition. That is: the world of poetry is enormously diverse – and I value highly capturing some of that diversity in our curriculum.
IMHO, Mr. Lundberg owes MIT an apology.
Canceling the advanced poetry class does exactly what I said in my message–trades this intimate and necessary familiarity for technology-dependent or hybridized classes, which is, I think, a mistake.
Partially in response to my letter in the Tech, writing students at MIT have requested to be part of the decision-making process as the PWHS restructures itself, an effort that Mr. Levenson has, much to his credit, truly welcomed. Student interest and involvement in the future of the humanities is a worthy initiative, regardless of what your opinion on the worth of poetry happens to be.
The fact that my letter in the Tech has caused so much conversation about what we, as a society, value, and why, has been a real surprise. A welcome one.
I, as a female, was an Engineer for over 30 years. It did not make me unapproachable. I was married to an Engineer for 33 years and we managed to raise two loving children that live in the world of reality and not what should be. They own their own business together.
I am not part of the "politically correct crowd." Art,poetry, etc. are very subjective fields, math, science, physics are not. They are very black and white, but are very creative in their own right. I fine the arc of electricity from point A to point B very poetic. The dancing of neutrons a ballet. A chalk board full of a mathematical formula a painting to behold.
However, I have made the experience that many students of engineering and natural sciences feel embarrassed to take a poetry class. This may have different reasons: Some do not enjoy remembering their literature classes at High School, some are afraid that they may have to open up too much in a poetry class.
To take the edge off, I have therefore integrated creative literary approaches into our overall body of communication classes. I teach communication at a technical university. Whenever appropriate, I introduce the students to more “literary” or creative means, i.e. free or associative writing, word field exercises, looking for metaphors to describe their visual models, etc. Sometimes we even end up writing a poem or summarize complex texts as tweets. I admit that this is a pretty humble and pragmatic approach in comparison to offering a true poetry class; but when I see that the students’ playfully raise their linguistic capabilities I have reached my aim.