Hypertext Magazine asked Peter Kahn, editor of Respect the Mic: Celebrating 20 Years of Poetry from a Chicagoland High School, “Which do you enjoy more, writing/publishing your own poetry or editing/publishing the work of others?”
By Peter Kahn
I am a teacher first and foremost. That’s where my passion lies and where I feel I’ve been able to have the biggest impact. I began writing poetry so I could be a better teacher/role model. Early on, it was rubbish. Then, in August of 2001 while on sabbatical in London, England I was fortunate enough to meet the wonderful Malika Booker at Centerprise Bookstore in Hackney near where I lived. Malika asked me if I was a poet and I said something like, “No, but I write for my students.” She responded with, “Then you’re a poet.” She told me that she had just created a poetry collective, wrote down her address and told me to show up at 8pm on that Friday night. I met Malika’s co-founder Roger Robinson that night and became a founding member of Malika’s (Poetry) Kitchen. Over the next two years, I spent pretty much every Friday night with an incredible group of writers and human beings. We’d try to end by 11:00pm, but sometimes, it meant running to catch the last train on the Victoria line and getting home after midnight. They became my extended family and we have collaborated on various projects—from the London Teenage Poetry Slam to the Spoken Word Education Training Programme to many international exchanges. Years later, Malika’s Kitchen leader Nick Makoha connected me with Jane Commane, the editor of Nine Arches Press in the UK, which led to my first and only poetry collection—Little Kings. I’m quite proud of it and it allowed me to “walk the walk” to my students and to fulfill a promise to my Malika’s Kitchen friends, but its publication doesn’t bring me quite the level of gratification as creating/editing The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (the University of Arkansas Press) and Respect the Mic: Celebrating 20 Years of Poetry from a Chicagoland High School (Penguin Workshop).
One of the motivating factors to creating The Golden Shovel Anthology was to allow lesser-known poets (or for some of my students and younger alumni, previously “unknown” poets) to be credited alongside well-known poets like Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, Phil Levine, Tracy K. Smith, Buddy Wakefield, Sharon Olds and Danez Smith, and other writers like Richard Powers, Sharon Draper, Sharon Flake, Gail Carson Levine, Rita Garcia-Williams, Ellen Hopkins and Julia Glass. It allowed me to place former students from the UK alongside former students from the US. It also allowed me to put some of my mentors from both sides of the pond—Malika Booker and Roger Robinson from the UK with Terrance Hayes, Baron Wormser and Mark Doty from the US—in the same book, which led to some amazing cross-cultural readings. All of this–along with celebrating the legacy of the legendary Gwendolyn Brooks and the genius of Terrance Hayes—brings me great joy.
What has brought me equal joy is the publication of Respect the Mic: Celebrating 20 Years of Poetry from a Chicagoland High School (Penguin Workshop) edited by Hanif Abdurraqib, Franny Choi, Dan “Sully” Sullivan and me. I’m finishing my final year as an English teacher/Spoken Word Educator at Oak Park and River Forest High School (I began in 1994.) This anthology celebrates the 20+ years since I created our Spoken Word Club. The anthology– deemed “Electric and expansive” by Kirkus Reviews– is comprised of 76 poems written by current and former students from our Spoken Word. It includes poems by singer/songwriter, Kara Jackson–Amanda Gorman’s National Youth Poet Laureate peer–who just signed to September Records; National Student Poets Natalie Richardson (2012) and RC Davis (2021); NBA and Dancing with the Stars champion, Iman Shumpert; Nova Venerable from the Louder than a Bomb documentary; and, comedian Langston Kerman (Insecure, South Side and The Boys). It is a game-changer for engaging and inspiring students– and the wider world– through the power of poetry.
Over a third of the contributors were in high school when we collected poems (three were high school freshmen) and for many, it will be their first (but certainly not last) publication credit. I hope it will catapult their writing careers. We’ve created a free website with lots of supplementary materials so that educators lacking the confidence to teach poetry (as I was for many years) will have the tools to cultivate and promote student voice via poetry (https://spokenword.oprfhs.org/respect-the-mic-anthology.) I can’t fully express how good it feels to know that my students, alumni and co-editors have created something that will have such a wide-reaching impact. Little Kings, nor any book of my own writing, could match that.
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A former Chicago social worker, Peter Kahn has been an English teacher since 1994 and a Spoken Word Educator since 2003 at Oak Park/River Forest High School. His students can be seen in Louder Than a Bomb and America to Me. A founding member of the London poetry collective Malika’s Kitchen, he co-founded the London Teenage Poetry Slam and, as a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths-University of London, created the Spoken Word Education Training Programme. He earned his MA in English Education from The Ohio State University, student taught at Columbus East High School and taught for the Young Scholars Program. Peter was a featured speaker at the National Council of Teachers of English’s annual convention and runner-up in the NCTE and Penguin Random House Maya Angelou Teacher Award for Poetry. Along with Patricia Smith and Ravi Shankar, he edited The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks reviewed in The New York Times by Claudia Rankine. Along with Hanif Abdurraqib, Franny Choi, and former student Dan “Sully” Sullivan, he edited Respect the Mic: Celebrating 20 Years of Poetry from a Chicagoland High School, deemed “Electric and Expansive” by Kirkus Reviews. Peter’s 2020 poetry collection, Little Kings has poems featured in The London Guardian and The Forward Book of Poetry.