Tina Cane is the founder and director of Writers in the Schools, Rhode Island and served as Poet Laureate of Rhode Island 2016-2024. Her books include Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, Body of Work, and Year of the Murder Hornet. She’s also published two verse novels for young people, Alma Presses Play and Are You Nobody, Too? and is co-host with Joey Sweeney of the forthcoming podcast Stay Free.
It feels a shame to be Alive
When Men so brave are dead
One envies the Distinguished Dust
Permitted such a Head
The Stone that tells defending Whom
This Spartan put away
What little of Him we possessed
In Pawn for Liberty
The price is great Sublimely paid
Do we deserve a Thing
That lives like Dollars must be piled
Before we may obtain?
Are we that wait sufficient worth
That such Enormous Pearl
As life dissolved be for Us
In Battle’s horrid Bowl?
It may be a Renown to live
I think the Man who die
Those unsustained Saviors
Present Divinity
-Emily Dickinson
Excerpts from Are You Nobody, Too?
Tina Cane
Fact Check:
The excerpt from Are you Nobody, Too? titled “People/Purses,” is introduced with the beginning of a Dickinson poem Savior! I’ve no one else to tell - / And so I trouble thee. / I am the one forget thee so – Dost thou remember me? that Tina notes as #295 before she reads. This is the poem’s number in the collected works published by Ralph Franklin. In the Thomas Johnson edition of her collected works, it’s #217. You may see poem numbers noted as J-something or Fr-something; this system is what is being referred to. The Dickinson poems that you find online at the major sites such as the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Foundation normally note the Franklin numbers. You can read the complete J217/Fr295 here.
Other Dickinson poems mentioned:
To the stanch Dust
We safe commit thee –
Tongue if it hath,
Inviolate to thee –
Silence – denote –
And Sanctity – enforce thee –
Passenger – of Infinity –
Watch Tina’s co-presentation at the 2025 Tell It Slant Festival, Emily Dickinson Museum, Amherst, Massachusetts. (“Open My Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Legacy of Correspondence”)
Concepts mentioned:
People named in the interview with Tina:
Frazar Stearns (although this article is dated, it gives in-depth context for the circumstances around and impact of Stearns’ death)
Sheila Maldonado reading her poem Tina quoted from, “Temporary Statement”
Interview recorded October 2025.
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