Arts
Rhode Island Poet Laureate, Tina Cane, and author Matthew Zapruder host a reading and discussion of poetry and its role in modern society lIve in front of an audience in the Woodman Center at the Moses Brown School in Providence, RI. Matthew Zapruder is the author of four collections of poetry–his most recent, Come On All You Ghosts, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and his prose volume Why Poetry was released by Ecco Press/Harper Collins in August 2017. A 2011 Guggenheim fellow, Zapruder is also editor-at-large at Wave Books, and from 2016-7 held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine. In Why Poetry, Zapruder examines what poetry—and poetry alone—can do, and argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. He explores what poems are, and how we can read them, so that we can, as Whitman wrote, “possess the origin of all poems,” without the aid of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose. In addition to serving as Poet Laureate of Rhode Island, Tina Cane is the founder and director of Writers-in-the-Schools, RI. She is an instructor with the writing community, Frequency Providence. Cane is the author of The Fifth Thought (Other Painters Press, 2008), Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, poems with art by Esther Solondz (Skillman Avenue Press, 2016) and Once More With Feeling (Veliz Books, 2017). In 2016, Tina received the Fellowship Merit Award in Poetry, from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts.