SPACE ODDITY—A Generative Workshop with Tina Cane (via Zoom)
Take your protein pills and put your helmet on… Plus bring some poems, scissors and a glue stick. Because we all need space. Because a poem is a place. Because the page is a field. Because there’s room enough for us to breathe some space into our work. To cut and paste. To erase and rearrange. To refresh our gaze. To reconsider. We will look at work by Stephane Mallarmé, Gaston Bachalard, Apollinaire, Anne Carson, Gary Snyder, Orlando White and others for inspiration, instruction and ideas. We will also look to each other, play with words, compose new work, rework poems old and new. We will consider space, how it operates in poetry and to what effect. We will expand or contract, reflect or refract—depending on our mood. We will use lots of paper and make a fine mess in our effort to explore. It’s time to leave the capsule, if you dare…
Tina Cane was born in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC in 1969 and grew up in the city’s East and West Village. She attended the University of Vermont, the Sorbonne and completed her master’s degree in French Literature at the University of Paris X-Nanterre and Middlebury College. She is the founder and director of Writers-in-the Schools, RI, for which she works as a visiting poet. Over the past twenty-five years, Tina has taught French, English, and creative writing in public and private schools throughout New York City and Rhode Island. Her poems and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including Spinning Jenny, The Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Common, Poem-a-Day. Her work,The Fifth Thought, was the 2008 Other Painters Press chapbook winner. Her other books include Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, Once More With Feeling, and Body of Work. Tina was the 2016 recipient for the Fellowship Merit Award in Poetry from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island where she lives with her husband and their three children. In 2020, Cane was named a poet laureate fellow with the Academy of American Poets. Tina is also the creator/curator of the distance reading series, Poetry is Bread.
