Cornelius Eady: Selections

Down the aisle for the likes of us.
In our heads The Tingler scurried, our darkest screams,
The horror we know, but won’t talk about,
From the mouth of the corpse

Like a weevil, looking for a home.
So many characters perished
In that movie—they never believed they had it in them
Until those pincers closed.

—Cornelius Eady, “The Racist Bone”

Poet Cornelius Eady is the author of collections including Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2008); Brutal Imagination (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001), a finalist for the National Book Award; The Gathering of My Name (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1991); and Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (Omnation Press, 1986). Eady is a recipient of the 2023 Pegasus Award for Service in Poetry. He collaborated with Diedre Murray on the libretto for Running Man, a roots opera that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund. In 1996, Eady and Toi Derricotte cofounded Cave Canem, a nonprofit organization that supports emerging Black poets.

Eady “leads and then cuts a line like no one else: following the laughter and the compassionate path of a dauntless imagination, these poems beeline or zigzag always to the jugular.”

—June Jordan

Cornelius Eady is a poet who has charted great depths of personal and family histories, of musical landscapes, and of sociocultural influences. Eady’s work explores class and racial disparities, home-grown violences, simple joyful pleasures, and the onslaught of international wars that blight our living. At times, his tone is witty, juggling language with the sly ease and playfulness of a one-act marvel; he can also be exacting with clear-eyed anger. Either way, he leans into any subject with astonishing intimacy and vulnerability. The “what if” and “how come” probings that often underscore his work are never didactic; instead, they strike readers like a curious student engaging with the world sincerely, seeking clarity that evokes feeling. Eady’s frequent use of a conversational tone walks readers through his poems like a friend; indeed, he sometimes calls readers “my friends,” breaking the fourth wall with direct address and insisting on our participation in his work.

As a lover of both narrative and music, it is no surprise that Eady references the blues and jazz often in his poems. Of this, he said, “I really enjoy the idea of the language that’s inside of music itself. The idea that maybe when you hear a jazz solo, or when you’re hearing a good saxophonist, or a guitarist, that you’re actually hearing that person’s story.” Whether crafting poems or songs or libretti with collaborators, Eady’s work draws place as character and paints people in bright shades that refuse hiding. We are pulled into evocative, imagined spaces and long-ago memories made flesh before our eyes. That gravitational tug is a hallmark of Eady’s earnest and exuberant nature—admirable qualities that surely played an important role in his founding, along with Toi Derricotte, of Cave Canem, the esteemed, nonprofit organization committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of Black poets. Since 1996, more than 500 fellows have transformed American letters with critically acclaimed, award-winning books.

—L. Renée

Looking back, I don’t think I had the will to do it alone, to push through adversity; I needed the support and validation of a community of like-minded people, which I found in Cornelius and Sarah [Eady’s wife]. Cave Canem is a partnership. It would have been a different place if it had been started by one person. The hardest work for me perhaps happened before I said anything; this was the underground work, the willingness to want this space enough to trust. If Cave Canem is a safe space, it was first of all a safe space for us—not that we always agreed or didn’t argue, but we were and are bound by a desire. There’s an unsteady steadiness in the number three that made things move and kept them stable at the same time. It bespoke the respect we had for each other, which was a hallmark of the safe space we wanted to encourage. I think the first participants felt this. Maybe part of the success came from our love and trust of each other.

—Toi Derricotte, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade

Cornelius Eady’s selected poems in order of publication

1990s

“Victims of the Latest Dance Craze” (1997)

And he spins around the dust bin
And machines and thinks:
Is everybody happy?
And he spins out the side door,
Avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk,
Grinning as if he’d just received
The deepest kiss in the world.

Sound is a craft tool Eady consistently uses to propel narratives forward with the acuity of a magician’s wand or musician’s head bop—consonance punctuates diction like a drum beat while assonance sways with lyrics that luxuriate in the mouth like a hook’s perfect harmony. “Victims of the Latest Dance Craze” is no exception, since music ushers in the opening scene of the poem, “The brass band led by a child / From the home for the handicapped,” with thudding d sounds while old men whose shirt buttons are “Popping in time / To the salsa flooding out / Of their portable headphones” is a flight of O-sounding swiftlets glittering up the ear. Like this listing of the latest “victims” and the play on the capitalized word “Popping” acting as both verb and the noun Papa, readers instantly feel the intergenerational characters of this poem moving to ecstatic rhythms. 

However, these siren songs hold a secret, which Eady says derived from experiments with “what-if poems” in his first book, Kartunes (Warthog Press, 1980). In this poem, the speaker imagines a dance step that hits and becomes like a virus. “Once you got infected with it, what would happen is that you started to reveal your true self—the self that you don’t show to everybody else, your deeper self,” Eady says. His term “dance craze” also echoes as a play on the scholarship surrounding “dancing mania,” which was first coined as a major outbreak dating back to 1373 across Europe and persisting through the 18th century—often in times of hardship. Whether illness or social phenomenon, historical theories abound, but all declare that collective dancing in the street was not just the title of a catchy song by Martha and the Vandellas.

In this speaker’s world, assigned roles are subverted once the dance virus spreads: mothers allow strangers to hold their babies, bus drivers tape over their fare boxes and give directions, even “Thick, adolescent boys / Dismantle their BB guns” while an oil slick at the curb is personified and dances “into a thousand / Splintered steps.” The poem moves smoothly from a quick accounting of the infected to longer stanzas beginning with the word “And,” a repetitive device that cues readers to linger longer with their subjects. These stanzas don’t simply catalog actions; the speaker implores us to look closer at who people become in their new environments. “Shy young girls” are emboldened to move away from the shadows of “Their nameless boyfriends, / Twirling their skirts,” and a delivery boy gains the confidence of his body’s voice fashioning “a runway, / A polished wood floor” from the street. Even insects join this wave of newfound revelation, surfing the waves of flinging bodies: “It is the ride / Of their tiny lives” that ultimately causes them to “drop away / With the scorched taste / Of vertigo”—a whimsical detail that scales the readers down to the tiny size of bugs as in a Pixar movie. 

The apex of this poem comes with the entrance of an old man who repeats the phrase “I am dancing” through the wind’s leaf kisses, the subway’s rail strike, a barrel flying over Niagara Falls. His litany is so fantastic that when he praises Jazz music, the z sound contorts his body into the looping arc of a heron’s neck. Here is a world where the deeper self shimmies unabashedly like desire, where a mother sloughs off a dress to pursue her lover, where a janitor in a factory grasps his broom “like a woman / He’d have to live another / Life to meet.” In the world this speaker creates, each character is liberated from performing social mores and settling for inauthenticity in fear of judgment. Each dance step is not just part of a craze, but rather a step toward sociocultural healing.

2000s

“I’m a Fool to Love You” (2006)

Is the blues the moment
You shrug your shoulders
And agree, a girl without money
Is nothing, dust
To be pushed around by an old breeze.
Compared to this,
My father seems, briefly,
To be a fire escape.

In a single stanza of short lines that lilt and deadpan the way a songwriter crafts memorable lyrics, this poem seamlessly braids together family narrative and a meditation on the blues—a genre of music originated by the narrative songs, field hollers, and spirituals of Black Southerners. This is not a traditional blues poem, like Langston Hughes’s “The Weary Blues” or Sterling A. Brown’s “Riverbank Blues,” in the sense of following a strict form in which a statement is made in the first line; a variation given in the second; and an alternate, ironic choice is offered in the third line. However, Eady uses hallmarks of the blues in this poem, imploring repetition of the word itself—“Is the blues…”—as a refrain throughout, as well as rich imagery and sounds characteristic of blues lyrics.

The speaker begins in a conversational tone, saying “Some folks will tell you the blues is a woman, / Some type of supernatural creature.” This possibility is undercut by the speaker mentioning their own mother—a real woman, not a mythological being—whose own lived experience became not just a definition of the blues, but the blues itself. “She would tell you about the choices / A young black woman faces,” the speaker says, noting their father was “a strange and sometimes cruel gentleman.”

Eady creates an immediate intimacy between the speaker, his mother, and the reader by consistently evoking the proverbial “you” throughout the poem. It is as if the speaker is talking directly to us by posing rhetorical questions based on his mother’s experience, as in, “Is falling in with some man / A deal with the devil / In blue terms, the tongue we use / When we don’t want nuance / To get in the way” or “Is the blues the moment / You shrug your shoulders / And agree, a girl without money / Is nothing, dust / To be pushed around by any old breeze?” The sounds of these lines, chocked full of lush l’s and squeaking e’s, enact that push-pull of decision-making particular to the experience of Black women in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. More pointedly, the speaker says: “And is the blues the moment you realize / You exist in a stacked deck, / You look in the mirror at your young face, / The face my sister carries, / And you know it’s the only leverage / You’ve got?” The young Black woman must use her looks to hook a man, who will hopefully offer some measure of security on which she can build her life. However, as we see later in the poem, this is a poor presumption. 

Eady evokes the shouts or cries of a blues singer ad-libbing to an audience that the first choice was “…a man / Who was, as we sing it, / Of no account,” and encourages us to sing “Of no account” in unison. This crescendo comes before repetition of the word “made,” like a homemaker attempting to make a home on a sturdy foundation—a rock, instead of a stormy sea. He also brilliantly uses simile to make the comparison between his mother’s first choice in love and his father.

This man made my father look good,  
That’s how bad it was. 
He made my father seem like an island 
In the middle of a stormy sea, 
He made my father look like a rock. 

With every remaking of the father, he is more of an attractive option and finally becomes, metaphorically, “a fire escape.” This surprising image moves us from the fanciful environment of island living—perhaps representing the early stages of dating where the sun always shines and a breeze teases our hair—to the realities of everyday city life where threats to safety abound. The mother imagines she is making the safer bet by choosing the speaker’s father, which later becomes the source of her blues, or “the way the blues works / Its sorry wonders.” With sharp line breaks on evocative nouns or verbs, Eady reveals that choosing a lesser evil is still a mirage: It “makes trouble look like / A feather bed, / Makes the wrong man’s kisses / A healing.” This dismount ending might undo somebody at a blues concert, might make them shout, stomp their feet, or slam down a glass of something brown and strong enough to take the edge off, weeping condensation on a table in dim light.

2010s

“What Do You Call” (2016)

And the strangest thing
About this, the damn thing
Is how meek he still looks
After he cuts, and cuts again.
Dun as a female robin,
His tongue slices and whittles.

In an episode of PoetryNow, Eady introduces this poem, which reenacts a scene of racial discrimination and housing bias in the classic 1961 film A Raisin in the Sun: 

The scene is basically a Black family in Chicago has put down a down payment on a house in the suburbs. The white neighbors get together and they designate this one guy who comes into Chicago, into their apartment and basically give them a deal. […] The deal basically is that if you will sell your house back to us, we’ll give you a good price—I think maybe even more than you actually paid for it, just to make sure that you will not be able to move in, under the guise of peace. 

Eady’s poem “What Do You Call” makes a fantastic metaphor of the white man who comes to swindle the family: “The man who smiles / With the knife, / Who IS a knife.” In capital letters, the poem’s speaker calls out what the abstract concept of racism actually is: a weapon. This tool of injury used to thwart and threaten this Black family is also a symbolic instrument used to cut out all Black entry into the middle class, to slice through any hopes for security or comfort through home ownership. In this speaker’s iteration, the weapon is re-weaponized against the man’s hubristic, foolish expectations: “They’re looking at him / The way he expects / Them to look at him,” the speaker says, and suddenly jump-cuts to future tense with the casual next three lines: “Later, as they mop / Up the blood, they replay / What he said.” Readers can almost hear the record scratch. Like the man, our expectations are undermined. 

The genius of this poem is the conversational tone the speaker uses to tell this story, which begins with assumed intimacy: “You know, the white guy / In the film version of Raisin In The Sun.” The speaker describes the white man as “whipped and rumpled” and a “Close, personal friend of sorry.” The man (insert the weapon, insert the concrete object representing white supremacy) is shown almost as a tired, go-to reflex. It is a strange occurrence that the family ponders over too—“how meek he still looks / After he cuts, and cuts again,” how “his tongue slices and whittles. / He is singing the song of his / Brood; money if you stay, / Fire if you come.” The man’s proposal is a familiar threat of intimidation packaged as a solution for everyone’s benefit. The family pushes past their thoughts that “maybe he ain’t a / Knife in sheep clothes, baaa / Baaa, baaa; such a foolish-looking, / Goofy little white guy.” Their rage at his audacity to “trot through / Their door” is tempered only by their thirst to disarm the man by using his violent trick against him, which the speaker smartly recounts in cutting diction: “you don’t see until you’re cut.” The family disposes of him, inverting the tool used against them and taking their power back—“A pack of Dobermans / Couldn’t have done a neater job.” But the speaker ends the poem with a gut-punch: dogs, unlike this Black family, don’t have to apologize for defending their dignity. 

2020s

“I Am Here Because Somebody Survived” (2021)

Which means, sometimes, you disarm
The goon by acting the fool—what they want
Is your throat cut, or your heart broken
By a dum-dum bullet, or your eyes filling
With the void.

Poets often inspire other poets to be in conversation with them, writing across generations, across time, and across oceans. In this poem, the speaker responds to a quote offered by poet Mahogany L. Browne as a meditation that also doubles as the poem’s title: “I am here because somebody survived.” This plain-spoken fact carries a particular resonance in the voices of Black narrators, whose ancestors persisted through chattel slavery, Jim Crow laws of segregation, and disenfranchisement to make their lives possible. The speaker of this poem defines this quote with the sing-songy repeated seven syllable count of the first full phrase: “Which means, sometimes, you disarm / The goon by acting the fool—” These lines mimic the cartoonish ramblings of a fool, repeating m-sounds and o-sounds in a flat bellow that emphasizes the caricature that outsiders (the “they” in this poem) project onto the speaker. These muscle powers are ready to choose violence at any perceived threat: “—what they want / Is your throat cut, or your heart broken / By a dum-dum bullet” which is avoided by feigning dumb—a cleverly-selected word with dual meanings of foolishness and silence.

The anxiety of a casual encounter potentially becoming a savage attack is all too familiar to this speaker, whose fear temporarily paralyzes his body the instant before he predicts the goons might attack. This morphs into the kind of zany scene a cartoon might feature: floodwaters appearing out of nowhere then suddenly stopping before they reach the speaker, who is steeling himself on the top step; or a hawk—a predatory bird—grasping feathers instead of the speaker’s own flesh. 

For me, the image of a foiled attack calls back to an old African folktale. “The People Who Could Fly” recounts the story of enslaved people who escaped brutal incidents with their enslavers by magically transforming into birds, their arms expanding into wings, soaring at the last second out of a lash’s grasp. In this poem, Eady masterfully offers readers the same temporary relief after the height of heart-beating action by inserting a stanza break, which is an intentional moment for readers to breathe and release tension, much like a meditation. 

The pause provides space for the speaker to collect themself, returning back to their body, like Mahogany L. Browne instructs in a meditation you can view here or here. The speaker accomplishes this reunion with self once his breath is “slowing back from flight / To human, you’ve won it.” The metaphor here reflects the poem’s title: to win is to survive, and to survive is to refuse succumbing to evil forces that might preempt one to lose their own humanity. This knowledge, a kind of survival calculus, a kind of testimony of how we got ova, is embedded in the wisdom of ancestors. It is our inheritance, or as the speaker ends this poem: “You can pass it on.” This final line clicks the poem to a perfect close, like a light switch being flicked on or the freedom of taking flight in assuredness, not in anxiety, which echoes in the end words of each line in the last stanza: “off,” “flight,” “on.”