Focus on Fellowships: Cornelius Eady on the Collective Cave Canem

LitNYS: You started a fellowship at Cave Canem that was a very new thing at the time, so what experience led you to develop it in the first place? 

CE: Because there was clearly a need for it. In my head, Cave Canem started as a collective. It’s me. It’s Toi [Derricotte]. My wife, Sarah Micklem, and the full time director of Cave Canem — Carolyn Micklem — who just died recently, Alison Meyers, our second ED, and the fellows themselves who had a lot to do with the shaping of Cave Canem. 

It came from a very long understanding of how unrepresented we were – and not just in terms of writing — but in publishing and schools. There’s so many stories that people can tell you about being the only Black in the classroom. In the 70s and 80s, I have this memory of finding Yusef Komunyakaa’s first book at a used bookstore in Charlottesville, Virginia, and being stunned by the fact that there was a poet I didn’t know about. But also he was a Wesleyan poet. That’s just an indication of what it was like in terms of publishing. I didn’t know all of the [Black] Wesleyan poets, but my guess was I could count them on the fingers of one hand. 

That was the atmosphere. The status quo wasn’t us. It didn’t look like us. We weren’t being represented. So how do you correct that? I was interviewing another poet for my radio show that I do at Poets House now and  brought up the story where someone had interviewed me for a podcast. It was about my background and how I became a poet and the books that I read. I remember the story of stumbling upon Sleeping on the Wing — which is this great anthology that was heavily relied upon by Poets in the Schools program. Kenneth Koch and some other people put it together. 

It’s a neat anthology of mostly modern poets at that time. (this was around the late 70’s/early 80’s). It was intended, in its own, quiet way, to be a subversive book, and it was. I taught in that program, and you were encouraged  to take that book into an elementary or high school school and turn them all on to great poets, and maybe even inspire some of them to become poets. New readers, new writers and wider audiences. It was a really great book, and it did its job well. But, during the interview I started looking over the table of contents again — decades later — and realized it was mainly male poets. There were two women poets — one being Emily Dickinson. Both long dead. And there was one Black poet and that was Amiri Baraka. It took me a moment to process that because in my heart it’s been one of my favorite books. 

Cave Canem arose out of those assumptions. A year or two before we finally started to do this there was an incident at the Community of Writers where Toi and I taught one summer. Something happened between the fellows. Community of Writers is a great program, but at that moment there was a misunderstanding between the fellows. Toi and I independently started to think about how complicated these spaces can be when you invite African Americans in without setting the parameters for what’s about to happen. If you haven’t done it for very long, or ever and suddenly increase the population by a degree with writers of color and think everything’s just going to work, you could get lucky, but in that case they didn’t. 

I think that incident jump-started our thinking about this idea of a space for Black poets, but I think we both had been thinking about it even earlier than then, before we actually met.  When I was teaching at Sweetbriar College as their (Bannister) Writer in Residence, around 1981-or 82, I had been interviewed with Charles Rowe, the editor of Callaoo. In that interview, that wasn’t published, I had just come from that year's AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) — it was the last AWP I went to before Cave Canem got involved with it.  

The reason I stopped going there was because I didn’t see the point. As a poet of color I had this feeling that it was a desert. “Why am I paying for this”? I was telling Charles about that, and in the interview I blurted out “Why can’t we just invent a space for people like us where you don’t have to think about this? It can just be about the writing, and not about why are you here, or on what terms are you here. Why do you have to go through that to become a poet? You don’t, right?” That was already in my brain when I met Toi and we taught at the Community of Writers. 

When Toi, her then-husband Bruce and my wife Sarah and I took a vacation together to Capri, Toi was teaching at the University of Pittsburgh. I was teaching at Stony Brook. Just before I took that position I had guest-taught at Sarah Lawrence College, and there they had a term called “beating your head against a pillow.” A gentle “no.” Nothing violent or mean in their response, but you won’t get anywhere. Toi had tried to do some sort of ask for a space at her university and it didn’t work. This is what I had been thinking about as well.

While I was at Sarah Lawrence I had a conversation with Herman Beavers  who was also guest teaching there at that moment, and  would actually turn out to be in the first class at Cave Canem. We were sitting at the old B Smtihs  restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, I think there had been a strike organized by the blacks students there for more representation in both faculty and studies, and we thought, “Why can’t we just do something” Let’s do it on our own”, and we kept working each other up until it got to the point of who is going to pay for this. Then the conversation started to drift because we knew that we could never go to Sarah Lawrence and say, “We want to start up a workshop on campus just for Black poets-and we’d like you to pay for it”.

Here Toi and I were in Capri, post Community of Writers.  I had tried. When Toi told me she had tried. I thought, “This is it. This is the person I need to do this with.”

I got really excited. We were both thinking about this, and we just started to map out what it would actually be. We started thinking about money, the conversation again began to cool and my wife said “You know what, why not pay for it yourselves? You’re both tenured professors.” Instead of going on vacation to Capri, we could start thinking about using our money for that. That cut the gordian knot.

The idea was to try to find a safe space where we could just be who we were and there wasn’t going to be any litmus test about how Black you were, or are you Black enough, or are you too Black. We could just come together. See each other and write. That was the bare bones of it.

When we started this, we weren’t even sure people would respond to it. We weren’t even sure there was a need for it. In part, it was an experiment. It was a collaborative effort. 

LitNYS: How long ago was that?

CE: Oh Lord I don’t remember. I think it’s 96.

LitNYS: What are some of the core values that you developed for this fellowship? Maybe it wasn’t explicit but when you look back, what are the values that you saw in this particular fellowship?

CE: We built the core values as we went along. One of the things that’s interesting about Cave Canem, now that I know more about arts administration, is that it shouldn’t have worked. If we’d gone the traditional path of putting together an organization — starting it off, getting your core values together, getting a board together, and fundraising before you opened the doors — we never would have gotten out of the gate. It was just that push of wanting to see what would happen. 

We wanted African Americans to feel that they were safe, they would be seen, and would be taken seriously. We were there to help each other. Other things came from the fellows themselves. They brought things to the table. 

We actually borrowed some things from the Community of Writers. One was that once you were accepted into Cave Canem, you could return for three times without having to reapply. We also borrowed the work schedule — everyone has to write a new poem once a day. You couldn’t bring old work to Cave Canem. And after a few years we noticed that would mean some poets would wait the entire year to write the poem that they couldn’t write anywhere else, that they didn’t feel comfortable with writing in their MFA program, or they didn’t feel they could just write it and say it wherever they were. Family wouldn’t stand for it. The boss wouldn’t get it.

They waited to write what is called at Cave Canem the hard poem. You could come to Cave Canem to write the hard poem, and nobody’s going to walk away and call you weird or a freak. You get to utter what it is without having to feel like you’re going to get hurt. So, the first idea was safety.

The second idea was the ideal of community. We were trying to build a community and keep that community intact when we weren’t in session. We did a few things, like a listserv. The fellows would keep in touch. This is where you get to be who you are. There’s always a place in the world that sees and feels you, and that circle we started off with — a concept brought to the table by the Fellows — grows year-by-year, class-by-class.

The people at a certain point get to understand that there is this community that you belong to, and it helps you get through the rest of the year. 

LitNYS: What were some of the challenges you faced getting it off the ground? 

CE: Cave Canem’s first years were in upstate New York in the Hudson Valley. Toi knew a Catholic priest who was part of a retreat center on the Hudson River. The fellows could just pay the retreat center directly, so that’s how we got around the funding. We didn’t have to raise money. This worked for a few years. 

We also got a lot of things done pro bono. My wife Sarah Micklem  is a fine graphic designer, and she was willing to make our ads and posters for free. This gave us a professional “look” and the famous logo of the black dog with its chain broken. For the first two years, when we approached places, like Poets and Writers for advertising, they either gave us pro bono or a reduced ad price. 

Word of mouth was also very important. At the time of the first Cave Canem I was teaching in DC as a writer in residence and part of my duties there was to run a local workshop. A lot of black DC poets ended up in the first year at Cave Canem, and they spread the gospel when they got back, “You can’t believe this place. It was amazing; you gotta go.” Very quickly that became the buzz. 

The faculty we invited the first year — Afaa Michael Weaver and Elizabeth Alexander — did it for free. They both returned for the second year as well. We got to the third year and had to make a decision if we were going to pay our faculty or not. We had these very deep discussions about the growth of Cave Canem. Could we just keep it a mom-and-pop, or do we have to become a nonprofit? That was a big decision.

In many ways mom-and-pop works. People were happy to volunteer, but we came down to the decision that it was important to go nonprofit because then we could get funding and start to pay our faculty and our staff. That was a big move, but we finally decided it fit our mission, which was at that moment to find more ways to serve our fellows year-round. It fueled our decision to leave Carolyn Micklem’s spare bedroom in Charlottesville, VA and move our office to a small office space in Soho in Manhattan.

LitNYS: You mentioned that it’s one thing to create a space for Black writers that didn’t exist prior, but even once you develop a fellowship, you’re still going to face issues. What did you find were some of the issues that these fellows faced?

CE:  Safe space doesn’t mean easy space. Toi is fond of saying this. There’s always going to be interpersonal relationships within the group. I think what helped was the understanding that the philosophy of Cave Canem was that you weren’t supposed to go at each other’s throat for a week. You weren’t to say “You’re not political enough, so I can’t talk to you. Or, you’re too queer; I can’t hang with you.” There was  an understanding that that would not be tolerated in that space. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. 

Another challenge was that you get to a place where the writing of the fellows is really high. People used to joke that when you come to Cave Canem you have to bring your A game. And if you’re not on your A game, you might feel a little weird. Or, you think you’ve got your A game, and then you run across someone who’s an A+. You begin to wonder: What am I doing here? Why did they pick me?

It’s challenging because they challenge each other. 

I know that sometimes people felt isolated and out at sea being there. But, I also think that the fellows were very hyper supportive of one another. For example, for the first few years we only had one printer and it was in the lounge. People would just hang out in the lounge, some of them 24/7, writing their poems, and helping each other with their poems. They wanted to make sure everyone understood they were in it together, and they were not going for each other’s throat. They were trying to help each other become their best writer.  

One night during the first year the faculty went up on the roof to hang out, to gaze at the stars, and drink. The fellows decided to go down to the river and had a little ceremony there. They bonded. I think Cave Canem clicked right then.

LitNYS: Writing is so intimate, but we do write for an audience.

CE: You do have an audience now at Cave Canem – an audience of Black people. Of Black poets. This applied to the faculty as well. Unless you taught in a historically Black college, where back then creative writing was not highlighted, you had never had that experience. It was like that Lou Reed song–a “New Sensation.” Some of the Black faculty were struck by that a little bit too.

I recall that when we invited Michael Harper to teach at Cave Canem, his first year, he would eat his meals, do his class, and go upstairs and disappear for the rest of the evening. We started thinking, “What’s up with that?” “Doesn’t he like us?” It was just that maybe he was afraid people would say, “Oh, Harper? C-O-R-N-Y.” That jazz guy.” He didn’t trust it. But he was great in the workshop. He was tracking people after the workshop as he did with so many others — including me — during his career. When he came back the second year, he opened up. He relaxed. 

Amiri Baraka was highly suspicious of Cave Canem, but once he finally got there to read and hung out with the fellows, he got it. He came back the next year to do a lecture. He wanted to be there. Again, it’s one of those things that you think you know what it is until you get there and you’re in it.

There is an adjustment in order to reimagine the space because the space hadn’t been imagined. A Black space? What does that actually mean?

I think the question would also be: Do I have a right to contribute to this, or is it something that’s set in stone and I can’t do anything about it? I think fellows, especially in the first five years felt they had an investment in Cave Canem, and they felt they could talk to us. They could tell us stuff that they felt wasn’t working. 

I think the idea that we are getting at here is of imagined space. How do you imagine a space you’ve never had before?

LitNYS: What advice would you give to presses that are developing fellowships today? What would you want them to know based on your experience? And where are the gaps that you see today in publishing? The fellowship that you developed was to create this space and opportunity, but we’re still sort of plagued with certain gaps.

CE: You have to remember that publishing has gotten much better than when Cave Canem got started and when I started as a poet in the early 80s. I’ll go back to the story of Yusef Komunyakaa as the only Black Wesleyan poet. That’s the way it was. You would have presses that would publish one of us. That was considered progressive. “We’ve got our own poet.” 

It worked that way with the publishers. It worked that way with the reading series and universities. There was this idea of being progressive, but not doing anything other than window dressing.

Fast forward to now. What I see from my perspective, being 69 years old, is a lot better than it was 30-40 years ago. There has been some progress, but I do agree with you; we ain’t there yet.

I keep saying this in a lot of interviews, and I'll say it again: People think diversity is the hardest thing in the world to do. “It’s complicated.” It isn’t complicated. You just have to commit to doing this and mean it. It’s not complicated. You can complicate it. People complicate things all the time, but it’s not complicated. 

You simply say, “Our press is doing this sort of publishing. These are voices that we’re going to have and we’re going to support that idea with the understanding it will change our culture.” It’s going to change it. It's not going to destroy it. The bogeyman is a horrible creature, yes?. You fear that these horrible things will happen if you do this. Poetry will destroy itself though your clumsy, good intentions. I’ve heard it. I’m sure you have too. We’ve heard the different reasons why you can’t do it, why it can’t be done, or why it’s so complicated. It’s not complicated.

It’s the easiest thing to do in the world, but you have to commit to it. You have to mean it. The culture has to understand that this is a good thing. This is true progress. 

I don’t do publishing, but my sense of it is that there are lots of writers out there trying to knock on the door right now. 

LitNYS: A lot of Cave Canem writers have gone on to win major awards.

CE: Yes. Everybody needs these stories. There’s part of me that defines this era that we are going through as filling in the blanks. All the stories that you couldn’t get before, all of the voices that were shut up at the door, are now starting to seep in. And it’s the stuff that was always around, but not paid attention to. 

The one constant through all of this is: Why do we publish at all? To find ourselves. To find our stories. To have our stories there. To simply say this was real to who I was. This is who my people were. And this is how we lived our lives. 

If you don’t find it, you fill in the blanks. 

CavanKerry Press is a press that I am on the board of. They are really making a concerted effort to try to broaden their roster in more than a superficial way. It’s going to take them years to do it, but at this moment I think that they are truly and honestly committed to that idea. Fast forward five years and you’ll see a change in the roster. I feel the same way about Four Way Books.

What I’m getting at is: Do you mean it? And do you know what it means when you actually say, “We mean it?” How much are you willing to give up to make it work? I don’t consider it giving up in my estimation, but what are you willing to change? Do you change the board of directors? Do you change your readership? How do you reach out to communities and let them know that their stories are now welcome there? That you're looking actively for this kind of voice, these kinds of speakers, this kind of music.

People come back and say, “Well it’s so hard to do. We don’t know how to do this. It’s complicated.” It’s not complicated. It’s the easiest thing to do in the world. The hardest thing is to mean it. You can say it all you want, but to mean it and operate in such a way that supports that belief is the complication. But people make it complicated in my estimation.

LitNYS: And they talk a lot and they don't do.

CE: They talk a lot and they do the opposite. They get a good copywriter — just hit all the buttons and the right words. But, then you look five years down the road and nothing has substantially changed other than simply saying it. It’s the same kind of progressive idea back in the day of having just one person of color on your roster and feeling good about it.

Also, they try and then when things get a little hot, they say, “We tried it and it didn’t work.” That means you need to reassess where you are as an organization. Why isn’t it working? Is it because your funders are having a little trouble with that? Is it because your board of directors isn’t the right board of directors for you? If you are getting pushback, why are you getting pushback and how do you readjust and keep the mission in sync? But you have to stick to it. Be ready and willing to make adjustments.

There’s also a kind of fear that you are upsetting the standards or you’re placating when you try to deal with diversity. You don’t know how many times in my life, people have said to my face in various ways that the only reason I was there is because I am Black. The only reason I got this or that gig is because I’m Black. I’m sure I am not the only person who has heard that. The underlying idea is that by hiring us you’re pandering “We all know in the end they can’t write this well.” I keep going back to Phyllis Wheatly and the fight over her first — and only — book. The trial-the actual trial that she had to go through to prove she had written her poems because a slave couldn’t possibly write poetry. That still lingers. That’s still an undercurrent in a lot of ways. I’ve been through that mill — as a student, as a faculty member. 

But that’s the mindset that we try to address in the best ways we can if you are an arts administration, in my opinion. The arts lead because we are not corporate. We should be the incubator and the leaders for this. For me that is part of the mission of arts administration when it’s done well. They mean it.