At a Back to School Night, CA Parents Participate as Learners
On April 8, 2025, English Department Head Sabrina Sadique guided a group of enthusiastic parents through the same poetry analysis process she engages in with her students at Concord Academy. That this was the first class taught in the Centennial Arts Center didn’t dawn on Sadique or her adult students until that evening, but that fact—as well as the beautiful environment for discussion the ensemble rehearsal room offered—added to the excitement of the Back to School event.
Over an hour and a half, families in attendance took as their texts Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” and “Sestina,” both poems Sadique recently taught this spring in her course Shapes of Disobedience: Feminist Experiments from Emily Dickinson to Evie Shockley, an upper-level elective on 19th- and 20th-century feminist experimental texts.
“The idea is, if you cannot break cultural constraints, how do you break form in the art that you create?” Sadique said about the poets whose work she teaches in that course. “And then, once you break the form in the art that you create, how does that go back and change culture?”
With parents, Sadique situated their collective investigation of these poems in the biographical context of Bishop’s life, which was shaped by early parental loss, her carefully guarded queerness, and her loved ones’ mental illness. With all this in mind, the class examined how Bishop’s lifelong public reticence found expression in the very forms of the villanelle and the sestina that she chose to wield—forms that, even as she subtly subverted them, revealed her vulnerability.
For example, read aloud, “One Art” sounds deceptively simple. But exploring patterns in this villanelle—a complicated 19-line form that prescribes repeating rhymes and refrains in a fixed order—uncovered how well those repetitions serve as a “self-consolation device,” as Sadique said, that aptly serves Bishop’s theme of reckoning with loss.
What’s more, they probed Bishop’s finely honed use of literary technique such as slant rhyme and sonic proximity to unsaid-but-present double meanings. In a free-flowing discussion, they came to understand how Bishop structurally presents a progressive acceleration of losses and offers a controlled intimacy with the narrator’s process of coping through creating.
“Sestina,” the second poem of Bishop’s they examined, takes the name of a highly structured, ritualistic verse form even more complicated than the villanelle. “The repetitive and recursive pattern of the sestina creates layers of emotion as one reads the poem,” Sadique explained. The six terminal words repeat, but their placements vary across six sestets and the final envoy. Participants had the insight that, if there were to be a seventh sestet, the pattern of the first stanza would resume. “The form itself compounds both the poem’s emotional quotient and foreshadows its cyclical return,” Sadique said.
The class also examined the knowledge gaps in the poem, the personification of objects, and the displaced sense of agency that convey the experience of a child who senses the weight of a grandmother’s grief but has no language through which to communicate it.
“I have come to deeply love Bishop, partly because she teaches me how to harness control against loss,” Sadique said.
As the participants testified, the close reading of both poems was richly rewarding—as was the experience of engaging with their children’s teacher and one another through the lens of these texts.
