In December 1990, the poet Cornelius Eady, now 71, felt discouraged by the literary world. He had attended the Assn. From the conference of writers and writing programs to Denver that year and had the impression that he was the only black poet present.
“I was not,” he assures me, all these decades later. “But it was like that. I was on an island. I felt like I was the only person there. I couldn't bear it. And I was doing an interview at the time and asked:” Well, why can't we have a place that is right for us? “”
It would take six years before Edy and his compatriot poet you Derricotte, now aged 83, arrive a tangible response. Together, they imagined a place where black poets would not have to explain or defend themselves. Eady and Derricotte planned a retirement which would be a large part of the literary workshop and the summer camp, for free, for black poets. They called it Cave Canem.
Appointed from a Latin sign that Derricotte had seen during the visit of the tragic poet's house in Pompeii, Cave Canem (“Beware of the dog”) was envisaged as a community strengthening company. There, the black poets of all the bands could extinguish the world and rather to refine their profession. Eady and Derricotte knew that finding institutional support for such a project would be difficult, if not impossible. And so, in a crisis of brilliant madness, they decided to take it from themselves – financially and logistically.
Almost 30 years later and now a registered non -profit organization, Cave Canem is able to offer free tuition fees for his annual summer retirement. He welcomed more than 550 scholarship holders, including the Liminary Dane Smith Littéraire, the winner of the Pulitzer Jericho Brown Prize, the winner of the Kingsley Tofts Gay Poetry Prize and the American poet Laureat Tracy K. Smith. Its faculty, on the other hand, praised tastes of MacArthur Fellows Terrance Hayes and Claudia Rankine, the winner of the Harryette Mullen prize and the winner of the National Book Award Nikky Finney.
With a year -round programming and two annual books, Cave Canem's mission is better illustrated by these two weeks a year at the University of Pittsburgh in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, where retirement has been based since 2003.
The first retirement took place in Mount St. Alphonsus, a former seminar of Esopus, ny those who gathered there in 1996 were encouraged to sit in a circle and to appear to each other. The question asked these poets in other spaces – “Why are you here?” – was not a hostile challenge but an opening.
“Someone started crying starting to speak,” recalls Derricotte. “And no one went to hit it on the back or hold it or anything. They let it cry. And that's why it took three hours.” The spirit of this inaugural meeting remains intact.
Cave Canem Fellows.
(Cave Canem Archives)
What the opening circle has offered and continues to offer Canem Fellows cellars is space to be fully, really themselves. The exercise is motivated by the conviction that what of these poets brings to the table is sufficient. And what they will create or share in this space will take place with care.
For Morgan Parker, author of the National Book Critics Circle Circle Award “Magical Negro” (2019) and a Canem Fellow cellar (2012, 2014, 2015), the opening circle was a welcome exercise.
“This introduction puts the bar in terms of vulnerability,” explains Parker. “Yes, there will be a rigor. And yes, there will be a lot of poetry manufacturing. And yes, there could be poet winners and prices in your future. But for the moment, it is a question of opening and taking care of each other as we do.
As such, Cave Canem is proud to be a place where belonging and the community are one and the same thing. This is also why the mixture of scholarship holders of a given year includes emerging and established writers, recent graduates in the twenty and poets who work in the 80s, those who work in established traditions and those who experience the form.
“It had to be for all black poets”, as Eady says. “To underline the idea that there is not a single way of being a black poet. That everything is legitimate.”
For Evie Shockley, finalist of the Pulitzer Prize which was for the first time (1997, 1998, 1999) and then returned as a member of the faculty, Cave Canem gave way to vast ideas of what it means. She remembers how to have Mullen and Rankine as instructors and seeing the experimental black took the collective established during retirement was revealing for a poet emerging like her.
“It was transformer,” says Shockley. “I will not say that without the cane canem, I would not have been a poet. But that happened so early in my serious period about writing that I have no idea what my writing would have been without it. ”
Likewise, it seems impossible to imagine what contemporary American poetry would look like without this long -standing organization.
“If there was a centrifugal force in American letters in the past 25 years, it is undeniable that it is Cave Canem,” explains Reginald Dwayne Betts (2006, 2007). “It was largely out of the power of literature. It was not motivated by the power of commerce. Work has in fact created these opportunities for writers to improve in their profession. ”
Or, as Derricotte said, the emphasis is put on “doing work” and seeing traditions and aesthetics, lines and links, constantly forged and taken.
CAVE CAVE CANEM CAVERCOTTE and CORNELIUS EADY.
(Cave Canem Archives)
“The first year I went, I brought a pantoum of her,” recalls Nikia Chaney (1997, 1999, 2002), a poet based in California. “It doesn't really make sense. Just follow the sound. I still remember the reception that I learned. Angela Jackson said:” You have spread on the page. “I never really thought that some of my interests had a tradition.”
For Betts, a recent MacArthur scholarship and the author of “Felon: Poems” and “Shahid reads his own palm”, Cave Canem was also an entry point in the cannon of black poetry that he had encountered for the first time when he was incarcerated. At the time, he did not know that many poets he read were associated with the idea of Eady and Derricotte. When he attended retirement as a scholarship holder in 2006, he found himself in community with poets whom he has long considered as heroes of his heroes with whom he is now in direct conversation, on and out of the page.
“I once called Sonia Sanchez at 10 o'clock in the evening to read him a poem,” he said. “But I also had the chance to listen to her on how much she missed her good friend Toni Morrison, and how she missed the days when Amiri Baraka called her to read a poem in the middle of the night.”
It was a cannon living and breathing in American letters nourished through generations. In Lynne Thompson, former winner poet of Los Angeles and the current chairman of the board of directors of Cave Canem, this is where the key vanity of the program resides.
“How can we provide them with a community, where they feel free to express themselves as poets, as well as finding all possible ways so that the reading public understands that the American voice is very diverse and which is worth reading?” she said.
As its 30th anniversary approaches, Cave Canem has high ambitions to continue this mission. Last year, he launched a Digital archives collection And announced, alongside Ithaka S + R, “Magnitude and Bond: A Field Study on Black Literary Arts Organizations”, a research project that will examine the needs, strategies and organizational models behind these institutions.
Above all, however, Cave Canem is a reflection of ethics that all those involved has brought to effort.
“It's like writing a great poem,” says Derricotte. “It's mysterious. You don't know what's going to happen. It took so much shine and so many people who come at the right time. But it is a question of leaving space not to know and believe and trust blacks. Trust black poets. And that's what happened. “
