The Kansas Association of Teachers of English
  • Home
  • Events & Meetings
    • Calendar of Events
    • Fall Conference
    • KATE Summer Camp
    • Register for Meetings & Events >
      • Past Meetings & Events
  • Publications
    • Kansas English
    • KATE PAGES >
      • KATE PAGES Submission Guidelines
    • Voices of Kansas >
      • Voices of Kansas Archive
  • Resources
    • Censorship & Challenges
    • KATE Archives
    • KATE General Resources
    • KATE Publicity >
      • PR Request
    • KATE Recommended Books
    • Social Media >
      • KATE's Facebook
      • KATE's GoodReads
      • KATE's Instagram
      • KATE's Pinterest Board
      • KATE's Twitter
  • About
    • Awards >
      • Elections & Awards Nominations
    • Board Contact & Mission
    • KATE & Education Services
  • Membership

“Sing Something Sideways”: A Poetic Collaboration for Reemergence

11/17/2021

3 Comments

 
By Peter DeVries, Claudia Esparza, Jolynne Fisher, John Franklin, Steve Maack, Brittany Rubin, & Kiara Sosa-Suarez  ​
At the 2021 KATE Conference, I (Steve Maack) led a session about reigniting our teaching passions and reemerging from pandemic isolation following the last 20 months. I began with a piece by an incarcerated former student, Alex Tretbar, who published a piece in KATE’s journal, Kansas English (vol. 102), called “‘A Pair of Ragged Claws’: Poetry and Pedagogy in Prison.”

​We looked at some of Alex’s poetry (from which the title of this collaborative poem comes and can be found in “A Pair of Ragged Claws”) and at some poems by Jimmy Santiago Baca, a poet and memoirist who learned to read and write in prison.

Alex started a poetry study group in the Oregon prison where he lives, and just before COVID led to a lockdown, he had proposed his poetry study group write a renga, a style of Japanese collaborative poetry consisting of alternating 3-line and 2-line stanzas. In Alex’s honor, I proposed that the attendees at the “Sing Something Sideways” conference session write a collaborative poem to be shared with all of KATE, and the result is below.

I provided the opening lines of the renga in the session (an honor traditionally bestowed upon the poet who gathers their collaborators), and discussed renga format, but everything else in the poem comes from the contributors listed above. I provided only light editing to make pronouns and verb tense consistent and to try to order the submissions into something that seems whole. Individual line credits have intentionally been left off to emphasize the collaborative nature of the poem.

I could not be more pleased with the result, both as a collaborative exercise and as a poem in its own right. My thanks and congratulations to Peter, Claudia, Jolynne, John, Brittany, and Kiara for attending my session at the KATE Conference, but also for sharing their beautiful lines of verse and giving me permission to share them.

Here’s what we came up with:

“Sing Something Sideways”: A Poetic Collaboration for Reemergence

We awoke one day,
In nightmare solitude, sad
Glow of filtered screens. 

A cracked-concrete world where the
Cold sun burns with wind unleashed.

Isolation --
Alone and yet not alone,
Surrounded day in and day out by chaos inside,

Searching for,
Longing for the peace of the outside once more.

We fearfully stagger,
Pursuing a light
That scatters across the cage.

Filtered, fractured, sifted, lost,
Shelved until a time unknown.

Burning rays of optimism --
Seclusion infringes on the need to be
Absolute and free.

Comets, stars, and crescent moons
Grace the path in purple chalk.

Months in agonizing isolation
Begging for just a glimpse
Of connection.
 
Sideways across a window
A sunbeam beckons us out.

Barred from grasping its glow
It dances — 
It taunts.

The glare swallows the oxygen,
Leaving us empty with our solitude.

Listen to our poem
We want to read this aloud
We want to make you hear us!

Pieces of broken marble
Joined in hues of blue and gold.

We finally re-emerge,
Igniting feelings of warmth,
Together again.
About the Author
Picture
Steve Maack is a National Board Certified Teacher and English department co-chair at Wichita High School East. He is a past president of the Kansas Association of Teachers of English and just completed his thirtieth year teaching in the Wichita Public Schools. Steve can be reached at steve.maack@gmail.com or on twitter, @stevemaack.

3 Comments

    Message from the Editor

     If you are interested in being published on our blog, or have any comments or questions for me, please email kansasenglishblog@gmail.com

    Thank you and happy reading!

    Archives

    March 2023
    February 2023
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    November 2021
    October 2021
    July 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    July 2018
    October 2017

    Categories

    All
    Art
    Awards
    BIPOC
    Book Club Guidelines
    Censorship
    Curriculum
    Elementary
    Executive Board Meetings
    Gatherings
    Kansas English
    Language
    LGBTQ
    Literacy
    Member Highlights
    Middle
    NCTE
    Poetry
    Practice
    Publishing
    Secondary
    Student Teaching
    Submission Guidelines
    Theory
    Vocabulary

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Home
  • Events & Meetings
    • Calendar of Events
    • Fall Conference
    • KATE Summer Camp
    • Register for Meetings & Events >
      • Past Meetings & Events
  • Publications
    • Kansas English
    • KATE PAGES >
      • KATE PAGES Submission Guidelines
    • Voices of Kansas >
      • Voices of Kansas Archive
  • Resources
    • Censorship & Challenges
    • KATE Archives
    • KATE General Resources
    • KATE Publicity >
      • PR Request
    • KATE Recommended Books
    • Social Media >
      • KATE's Facebook
      • KATE's GoodReads
      • KATE's Instagram
      • KATE's Pinterest Board
      • KATE's Twitter
  • About
    • Awards >
      • Elections & Awards Nominations
    • Board Contact & Mission
    • KATE & Education Services
  • Membership