Brendan Kennelly, one of Ireland’s best known contemporary poets and a professor of modern English at Trinity College Dublin for more than 35 years, is this week’s featured expert. Kennelly has written more than 20 books of poetry, drama and essays; his 400-plus-page epic poem, “The Book of Judas,” was the best-selling book in Ireland in 1991.

Kennelly’s poems are frequently written in a persona, which he explains as a desire to understand by “becoming someone else,” even when it means trying to be one’s worst enemy, as he did in the case of his book-length poems “Cromwell” and “The Book of Judas.” Here he discusses with CNNfyi senior education editor Lynn McBrien his feelings about writing and ways in which those theories translate into teaching.

CNNfyi: Why do you think it is important to “be someone else”?

Brendan Kennelly: Certainly I have made discoveries when I struggle to become other people, both historical figures and common men and women. Unless Protestants become Catholic, and Catholics become Protestant, unless kings become servants, unless men become women - unless we switch empathically, until we give up all the chains of egotism and release ourselves imaginatively into something else, I don’t think we’ll discover our full potential as people.

CNNfyi: When did you first begin exploring the concept of becoming someone else?

Kennelly: Oh, since boyhood, really. As a child I would watch my grandmother bake brown bread, and I would wonder, “How does that bread feel at the end of her fingers?” Years later I wrote the poem “Bread”:

Someone else cut off my head
In a golden field.
Now I am re-created
By her fingers. This
Moulding is more delicate
Than a first kiss,
More deliberate than her own
Rising up
And lying down.
Even at my weakest, I am
Finer than anything
In this legendary garden.
Yet I am nothing till
She runs her fingers through me
And shapes me with her skill.

CNNfyi: How do your poetic theories affect your methods in the lecture halls of Trinity?

Kennelly: I like to try to get my students to see these people, whether they be historic or contemporary figures, not as symbols but as individuals. And by doing so, they may blaze a path into themselves. Even the ones traditionally so hated by the Irish, such as Cromwell and Judas. You should always get into what scares you, because there are sides to yourself that are as bad or worse than that which you judge in a man like Judas.

CNNfyi: You have taught for over 30 years. How would you describe the students in your classes today?

Kennelly: I’m thinking now that kids are too tense. They’re too grown-up. They know too much. And yet they’re innocent as well. And they’re very threatened. It’s crucial for them to learn to relax into their own intelligence. I try in Trinity to get them to relax, you know. I tell them, “Enjoy yourself; relax and try not to see human experience as something measurable. Just experience it, you know. Just experience it.”

CNNfyi: How do these ideas translate themselves into the expectations of the conventional classroom in which students have to take traditional tests?

Kennelly: ... Exams ... they’re the basis by which generations of people are judged on their intellectual ability. You ask a question, and you get an answer. But, of course, that’s a very oversimplified way of approaching knowledge, isn’t it? Why not ask a question and get another question? If I had to define what is the nature of education I would say it’s asking questions. All your life don’t ever settle for answers. And you’ve got to keep on asking questions, and secondly, you’ve got to keep on having fun with life.

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