Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh,and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.
Earlier in this series I commented on Irish poet Eavan Borland’s poem referencing American poet Anne Bradstreet. Today we’re going to shift timelines and talk about Tina Cane’s poem Some Kinds of Fire.
Cane is an American poet and currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island. She grew up in New York City, and many of her poems speak to life there. Her poem Sirens - a character study / memoriam is a good example. I was listening to her read several pieces earlier this month during the Camperdown poetry series season finale.
This particular poem caught my attention for several reasons. One is that it references iconic Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. In her poem, Cane visualizes a fire scene - one of many things that happened at New York’s Chelsea Hotel - home, over the years, to an absurd number of poets, and artists, actors and dreamers of all sorts, - in which a fire creates an ambiance like a war zone:
iron balconies were dropping like lace
windows were popping like sobs...
Despite the drama and descriptive poetic language here in the middle of the poem, what caught my eye an ear was the opening:
Anna Akhmatova burned
her poems
A line that is a story all in itself. Akhmatova is a woman who struggled to say what she wanted - not because she had any difficulty in putting words on the page, but because, through war, and revolution, and war, and pogroms and gulags and threats, and a thousand shattered hopes and dreams, she was kept from writing what she wanted. Her books were banished, she was heavily censored at the best of times, and much of what she did manage to get published was destroyed.
You can read the full text at:
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And you can learn more about Tina Cane at https://www.tinacane.ink/about.html
