Search Posts
Recent Posts
- Gimme’ Shelter: Mocchi is waiting at the Pawtucket Animal Shelter December 1, 2024
- Rhode Island Weather for December 1, 2024 – Jack Donnelly December 1, 2024
- Discover Beautiful Rhode Island: Seasonal photos of Herman Brewster December 1, 2024
- Get Your Holidays On! Cranston Historical Society Open Houses. Tree Lighting. TODAY December 1, 2024
- Is your grocery bill gobbling up your budget? – Mary Hunt December 1, 2024
Categories
Subscribe!
Thanks for subscribing! Please check your email for further instructions.
Rhode Island State Poet Receives Award from Academy of American Poets
The Academy of American Poets announced today that Tina Cane, State Poet of Rhode Island, has been named one of its 2020 Poets Laureate Fellows. Cane, a resident of East Providence, will receive $50,000 to support community-based poetry projects throughout the Ocean State.
In Rhode Island, Cane will bring visiting poet workshops and residencies to underserved schools and community centers in Rhode Island. She will also organize and curate a reading series at the RISD Museum and local bookstores, as well as bring her Poetry-in-Motion, RI program to every public school in the state through a broadside poster initiative. In addition, Cane will develop the Youth Poetry Ambassador program she launched in 2017, with Rhode Island Center for the Book, to further engage youth across the state.
About Tina Cane
Tina Cane was born in New York City. She received a BA from the University of Vermont and an MA in French literature from Middlebury College. She is the author of Once More with Feeling (Veliz Books, 2017), as well as the chapbooks Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante (Skillman Avenue Press, 2016) and The Fifth Thought (Other Painters Press, 2008), a book-length poem. The recipient of a Fellowship Merit Award from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, Cane is the founder and director of Writers-in-the-Schools, Rhode Island, for which she works as a visiting poet. She has taught French, English, and creative writing in public and private schools throughout New York City and Rhode Island. In 2016 she was selected to be the sixth poet laureate of Rhode Island. She lives in Providence.
Shelter in Place – a poem by Tina Cane…
Schools are shuttered everything is cancelled and my body has become
an extension of my house this shift is strange but not entirely unfamiliar
the way a cardinal’s home is a disordered stick bomb just about captures
how I feel
how the mother bird uses her shape as a template to form her nest
shoving sticks together in a fit of random engineering randoming would be
the verb I guess or jamming as it applies to me
a steady state of hysteresis
in which applied pressure changes the ensemble in which the structure
bounces back but not completely
I’ve been thinking
of ways to speak to my children about fear how to be adaptive
I want to tell them about zebra finches who are content in captivity
and who unlike robins which favor mud as cement make their nests
from anything they find strips of paper or string fibers from a coconut husk
I want to stress that these elements the finches assemble seem haphazardly
placed but behave collectively how there’s a logic buried deep in the mother
building her nest which is a story of the nature of her body as every child’s
first home that we don’t struggle alone as the architects of our days
that nature will continue to amaze us in ways we don’t expect