Readings:

"On Coming Across Christina's World at the Museum of Modern Art" by Ginny Wiehardt

School Dose reading of Emily Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death."

Ginny Wiehardt’s chapbook Migration won the 2016 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Contest. Her poems have appeared in literary journals including Bellingham Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Southern Humanities Review,Subtropics, and Willow Springs and in the anthology Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity(Sundress Publications, 2016). She holds an MFA in Poetry from the Michener Center for Writers. Originally from Texas, she now lives in Brooklyn, NY with her family.

Keegan Lester is the author of the collection of poetry this shouldn't be beautiful but it and it was all i had so i drew it,  selected by Mary Ruefle for the 2016 Slope Editions Book Prize. His work is published in or forthcoming from The Boston Review, Poem A Day for the Academy of Amercian Poets, Boaat, CutBank and Sixth Finch among others.  For more check out his website www.keeganlester.com  

music by Spirit Night

https://spiritnight.bandcamp.com/

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.

Sebastian Matthews is the author of a memoir, In My Father’s Footsteps, and two books of poetry, We Generous and Miracle Day. A new hybrid collection of poetry and prose, Beginner’s Guide to a Head-on Collision, comes out with Red Hen Press in the fall of 2017. In conjunction with Woolly Press, Matthews is currently serially publishing The Life & Times of American Crow, a “collage novel in 11 chapbooks.” Learn more at sebastianmatthews.com or americancrowgraphicnovel.com.

this podcast includes "the Message" grandmaster flash

it is produced by Tian cane & Atticus Allen

Tina Cane on the creation of "Teacher, Teacher"

I was commissioned by The Total Teacher Project at Bryant University

to write an ode to teachers for their annual conference in August. While I loved the idea

of celebrating teachers in a poem, I wasn't too keen on writing such a poem. Since I am a teacher myself.

it seemed disingenuous to make the attempt. I do, however, have access to children through my program,

Writers-in-the-Schools, RI and through the school that my children attend in East Providence. I chose

to approach the teachers at our neighborhood school, Myron J. Francis Elementary. I gave a brief primer on odes and invited

interested teachers to have their students write odes as a classroom or extra credit activity.

In June, i received about a hundred odes and, during July, I read them all, pulling a line, word or phrase from each--it was important

that every student be represented, even if they were to remain anonymous. Finally, I read the phrases I had collected, settled on a

refrain and began arranging the words into lines to form a poem. The end result is "Teacher, Teacher," a poem composed entirely of

children's own sentiments.

Their candor and humor and love confirmed what I already knew: That they would write the better poem!

I recruited my own children to record and take turns reading the poem. I think they did a wonderful job.

I hope this ode helps to remind teachers, as we start the school year ,that they are valued by the people

those who count the most.

music:

atticus allen

outro, 38 Special "Teacher Teacher"

Here's a recording of Catherine Pierce reading her poem "Beach Town," and she talks about what went into writhing that poem.

she also gives a reading (for School Dose)of E.E. Cummings's "since feeling is first".

Andrew E. Colarusso was born and raised in Brooklyn. He is assistant professor of literary arts at Brown University and editor-in-chief of the Broome Street Review. His debut novel, The Sovereign, was just published by Dalkey Archive Press. www.iDoNotMove.com

reading 1: "Rachel" by Andrew Colarusso

reading 2: "Blue Dementia" by Yusef Komunyakaa

Gary J. Whitehead reads his poem "Grey Water"

as well as one of his favorites from William Blake called " The Tyger"

Gary J. Whitehead’s poems recently appear or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Epoch, andThe Massachusetts Review. His third book of poetry, A Glossary of Chickens, was chosen by Paul Muldoon for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and published in 2013 by Princeton University Press. His work has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s NPR program The Writer’s Almanac and on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Guardian’s Poem of the Week. Whitehead has been the recipient of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize (The Massachusetts Review), a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and the Princeton University Distinguished Secondary School Teaching Award. A featured poet at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival and the Princeton Poetry Festival, he teaches English at Tenafly High School in New Jersey and lives in the Hudson valley of New York.

http://www.garyjwhitehead.com/

Amy Pickworth reads her poem "The Ohio Poem", followed by "Ithaka" by C. P. Cavafy.

Amy Pickworth is the author of Bigfoot for Women. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island. You can find more of her work at amypickworth.com.

Matthew Lippman is the author of three poetry collections, AMERICAN CHEW, winner of The Burnside Review Book Prize (Burnside Review, 2013), Monkey Bars (Typecast Publishing, 2010), and The New Year of Yellow , winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize (Sarabande Books, 2007). He is the recipient of the 2010 Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from The American Poetry Review .

www.matthewlippmanpoetry.com/