It is a pleasure to introduce this conversation by two outstanding and generous literary citizens: Tina Cane and Rachel Abramowitz. In both writers’ bodies of work, we see a poetics powered by community, enriched by conversation and emboldened by dialogue across genres and mediums.
Rachel Abramowitz is also the author The Birthday of the Dead, which just launched from Conduit Editions, as well as the chapbooks The Puzzle Monster, winner of the 2021 Tomaž Šalamun prize (forthcoming from Factory Hollow Press in 2022), and Gut Lust, the winner of the 2019 Burnside Review prize (Burnside Review Press, 2020). Her poems and reviews have appeared in Tin House Online, The Threepenny Review, Seneca Review, The Kenyon Review Online, Crazyhorse, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Oxonian Review, POOL, jubilat, Sprung Formal, Transom, Colorado Review, and others. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Oxford, and has taught English Literature at Barnard College in New York.
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 books include The Fifth Thought,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. Alma Presses Play, Tina’s debut novel-in-verse for young adults readers, will be released in September 2021 with Penguin/ Random House Books.
Tina Cane: There’s a poem I keep returning to called “Vantablack” from your new collection, The Birthday of the Dead. It’s named for that blackest shade of paint ever made, but manages to encapsulate the book’s exploration of how, in your words, “any human interaction” with the natural world “turns out to be devastating in unexpected ways.” The thrust of this observation pervades your book, which is a place where “the forest fills and unfills, drops itself down root tubes and turns to dark lace.” Where does this vision of our relationship with nature spring from? How would you characterize your relationship with the natural world?
Rachel Abramowitz: At the time I wrote the poem, Vantablack was the blackest black. Now there are several more, even blacker blacks (the latest, I think, is an MIT concoction that absorbs 99.995% of visible light). I’m not only fascinated by the contentious competition between artists regarding the use of these black pigments—Anish Kapoor infamously secured the exclusive artistic rights to use Vantablack, so fellow artist Stuart Semple created what he claimed to be the “Pinkest Pink” (and eventually “The World’s Most Glittery Glitter” as well as his own version of Vantablack) that anyone can purchase except Anish Kapoor—but by the drive to create a substance that can absorb all light (a metaphor made for poetry, no?). Both the practical, NASA-like applications for these pigments as well as their use as artistic material pointed me toward the particularly human desire to understand nature. NASA needs to see into deep space; artists do too! The danger, of course, is that understanding can tempt one to dominate, which we have seen repeatedly throughout history, always to the detriment of both humans and the environment.
Ideally, what this ultimate black can help capture is entropy—how planets orbit and stars die, how terrestrial moments of decay pass through their stages, how it might feel to not exist. Humbling discoveries all. It’s therefore somewhat reassuring to know that even MIT doesn’t quite know how their super-black pigment works; talk about another fantastic metaphor for art!
Part 2 will appear tomorrow.
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Author: Kristina Marie Darling
