About Cornelius Eady
Cornelius Eady spent his entire childhood in Rochester, New York, a destination for many African Americans during the early twentieth-century migration. Though Rochester had once been a frontier town known for its radicalism and such famous residents as Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass, by the time Eady was born there in 1954, it had become somewhat provincial, a conservative place good for raising kids, which suited Eady's parents just fine. They had moved to the city from Florida because of the promise of union jobs and the opportunity to buy property, and their house was comfortably situated in a tight-knit African-American community, on a dead-end street, in a neighborhood once populated by Italians.
The Eadys' backyard, filled with apricot trees and grape arbors, with its close proximity to the Pennsylvania Railroad, gave a precocious, would-be poet plenty to explore, plenty of images to store away as future material. Still, he had a longing for more than his hometown had to offer, and for a while his restlessness was satisfied by books. When Eady wasn't investigating the bounty of things right in his own backyard, he was entrenched at the Rundell Public Library, reading everything he could get his hands on, including the works of poets like William Carlos Williams, Amiri Baraka, Pablo Neruda, and Allen Ginsberg. Since his family was too poor at the time to buy a record player or albums, Eady also spent hours at the library listening to records, sampling everything the library had, fostering his eclectic tastes in music. He loved what he heard there, and in the music of his parents' voices at home. In their speech he encountered the cadences they'd brought North with them, as well as a language
rich in metaphor, and he began to do the kind of listening necessary to become a poet -- a poet with a finely tuned ear and skillfully rendered musicality in his verse.
Writing poetry, however, was not what Eady's father thought of then as a practical thing to do; figuring out how to make a living was. Yet Eady's seventh-grade homeroom teacher, Joanna Mason, noticed his talent for rhyme and lyrical expression right away, as did others in the school. One of his first efforts was a poem about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Eady vividly recalls its reception: "People were coming up to me, telling me how they had been thinking exactly what I'd articulated for them in the poem. I realized then poetry's larger implications." With his teacher's encouragement, Eady eventually transferred to Rochester Educational Alternative for his junior and senior years -- a free school modeled after the Summerhill method that he remembers as the "hippest place in Rochester." He spent almost all his time there, engaged in "marathon writing sessions." He'd write poems for days straight, and in the evenings would sleep over at the homes of friends, in one of which he met Sarah
Micklem, the woman he would marry.
After high school, Eady stayed in Rochester to attend Empire State University, where he discovered he could major in English with a concentration in creative writing. It was during this time that he began searching for collections of poems in which he might see himself reflected, works by black poets that might provide a kind of validation. Among others, he ran across a collection of poems by Yusef Komunyakaa. "I was thrilled," Eady says, "because it was that moment when you actually find yourself in the books you're reading."
From that point on, Eady embarked on the creation of his own body of work. To date, he has published seven collections of poetry:
Kartunes (1980);
Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (1985), which won the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets;
BOOM BOOM BOOM (1988);
The Gathering of My Name (1991);
You Don't Miss Your Water (1995);
The Autobiography of a Jukebox (1997); and
Brutal Imagination (2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has been the recipient of numerous honors, including grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund. He was an associate professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he also served as Director of the Poetry Center, and is currently Visiting Writer at the City College of New York. He lives in Manhattan with his wife of twenty-three years, Sarah Micklem, and has been busy of late with theater productions. A cycle of poems from his most recent bookwas the basis for a libretto for a roots opera,
Running Man, on which he collaborated with Diedre Murray, and which was a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize. And the main sequence from
Brutal Imagination was adapted into a play that opened off-Broadway last fall at The Vineyard.
Yet, even with his personal success, Eady never forgot the lack of community he had felt as a young poet, and thought he could and should do something more. In 1996, Eady and the poet Toi Derricotte founded Cave Canem. "It began as a series of conversations with various black writers and scholars," he says, "loose talk that often ended when the question of money arose. Then Sarah, my wife, suggested we just pay for it ourselves. For the first two years, we did." Since then, the Cave Canem retreat, a summer workshop for African-American poets, has flourished, inviting approximately fifty-two new and returning fellows each year to work on their craft. In addition, they've established an annual book prize that includes publication by presses such as Graywolf and the University of Georgia, and overall have created a community that celebrates the diversity and richness of African-American literature. Indeed, one of Cave Canem's main achievements has been its declaration of another tradition in American
poetry, one that is no monolith, but that is varied and important. Note Eady's unflinching lines from the poem "Gratitude":
I have survived
Long enough
To tell a bit
Of an old story.
And to those
who defend poetry
against all foreign tongues:
Love.
And to those who believe
a dropped clause
signifies encroachment:
Love.
And to the bullies who need
the musty air of
the clubhouse
All to themselves:
I am a brick in a house
that is being built
around your house.
Whereas many poets shy away from a political agenda, Eady is clearly unafraid to embrace one. "I tell my students that it is a thing to face if you are a black poet. People will say your writing is political and that you are writing about race even when you think you're not, even when you think you're just writing about the people you know best."
After the publication of his most recent collection,
Brutal Imagination, his niece remarked, "Good, you've started writing political stuff again." The title sequence of the book presents visions of the black man in the white imagination. Eady assumes the voices of several African Americans from popular culture -- Uncle Tom, Uncle Ben, Steppin Fetchit -- but for the most part, he draws upon the infamous case of Susan Smith in Union, South Carolina, writing from the point of view of the imaginary black man she had invented as an alibi for her murder of her two sons. In
Brutal Imagination, Eady gets to the heart of a frightening and sad state of affairs -- that the image of the black man in America is such that a story like Smith's could be readily believed. Mr. Zero, as Eady calls the imaginary carjacker, becomes a mirror for all of us, a way to contemplate how far we have and have not come. In an earlier poem, "Anger," Eady wrote: "It would be difficult to stuff my anger into an envelope." What is beautiful about Eady's work is the way in which the poems themselves become envelopes, containers for the elegant missives of his characters' voices -- not angry in their tone, but piercing, quiet, intelligent -- reflections of Cornelius Eady's wonderfully restless spirit.
Natasha Trethewey's second collection of poems, Bellocq's Ophelia,
has just been released by Graywolf Press, which also published her first book, Domestic Work.
She teaches at Emory University.