The Beat: A Reading and Conversation with Cornelius Eady

Alan May: 00:04

Welcome to The Beat. Today we’re very excited to have the poet Cornelius Eady with us. Eady will read several of his poems, and we’ll follow with a conversation.

Cornelius Eady is a Professor of English and a John C. Hodges Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee. From September twenty twenty-one to December twenty twenty-two, he served as interim Director of Poets House in New York City. Eady published his first collection, Kartunes, in nineteen eighty. His second collection, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, was chosen as winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Lamont Poetry Award. He has since published eight other collections, including The Gathering of My Name, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; Brutal Imagination, a National Book Award finalist; and Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. In addition to his poetry, Eady has also written musical theater productions, collaborating with jazz composer Diedre Murray. The two worked on Running Man, a roots opera libretto based on Eady’s poems that was named a nineteen ninety-nine finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, and Brutal Imagination, recipient of Newsday’s Oppenheimer Award in two thousand two. Eady is also a musician: he performs with the band Rough Magic and the Cornelius Eady Trio, which whom he recently released the album Don't Get Dead: Pandemic Folk Songs. He has published five mixed-media chapbooks with accompanying CDs, including Book of Hooks, Singing While Black, and All the American Poets Have Titled Their New Books The End. With poet Toi Derricote, Eady founded Cave Canem, a beloved nonprofit organization that supports emerging Black poets via a summer retreat, regional workshops, prizes, events, and publication opportunities. In twenty sixteen, Eady and Derricote were honored with the National Book Foundation’s Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community on behalf of Cave Canem, and, in twenty twenty-three, awarded the Pegasus Award for service in the field of Poetry by the Poetry Foundation. Eady’s other honors include the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Cornelius Eady: 02:55

I’m going to read some selections from a poetry cycle that I’ve been working on called Mercy, and it involves the first slave to publish a full-length book of poetry in the colonies, Phillis Wheatley--we now call her Phillis Wheatley Peters—but she was captured in Africa around the age of eight years old, brought over to America across the Middle Passage, and then was sold to a family called the Wheatleys in Boston. Phillis’ name comes from the name of the boat that took her over, which was The Phillis, and the family that bought her, the Wheatley’s. And she, again, published the first book that was ever published—full-length book—that was published by a slave, because there were no African Americans at that point. [Laughs.] But it’s a fascinating story. There is, actually, a film version of these poems, interpretation of these poems, that was just filmed up in Montreal this summer, and will probably be released sometime during next year, probably in the spring. I became fascinated by this story from a conversation that I had with an African American scholar in Washington state years ago. Phillis Wheatly has always been one my fascinating—I've always been fascinated by the work of Phillis Wheatley and also the story of Phillis Wheatley. And I was having this coffee with an African American scholar and she brought up an interesting point. Phillis’s book, her first book, was actually published in England. The Wheatley family had found a publisher, because there was no publisher in the colonies that would publish her because she was African American, or she was black. So, Phillis got onboard a boat with one of the Wheatley family representing her, and she went over to England. The book was published. It was an incredible sensation, and then word got back that one of the Wheatley family—I believe one of the sisters—was very ill, and she got back on the boat and went back to Boston. Now, the dilemma, the question the scholar raised to me was why’d she get back on the boat? She had left America. There was no more slavery in England by that time. There was also a law, an English law that said, basically, if you set foot on English soil, you cannot be taken back to your country of imprisonment. So why would Phillis Wheatley do that? Why would she do that? And that started me thinking about this idea, what was it like to be Phillis, you know, and it also started me thinking about what it was like to be eight years old, when she was captured. What was it like to be an eight-year-old, and having to learn a new tongue, and a new language, and a new culture? She was a prodigy, obviously. The Wheatley family learned she very quickly took to reading and writing, and they encouraged that. She was raised as almost as if she was a family member. But what did it feel like to actually have to lose the language or to hold in the language? Her real name? The name of her parents. The location where she grew up until she was eight years old. What would be the word for house? What would be the difference between one way of eating and another way of eating? So, I kept thinking about this, and I also started to realize as I read the book—one of the things about Phillis Wheatley that’s still contested is that she doesn’t talk a lot about being—a lot of her memories about being in Africa. But as a scholar pointed out to me, that wasn’t true. There are places in the book, peppered all the way through the book, where she does bring up her memories of Africa. It’s slight and it’s fleeting, but they’re there. And this first poem, to Phillis Wheatley’s mother, has an epigraph from Phillis Wheatley’s book, where she actually mentions her mother and father. And I decided to write a poem to Phillis’s mother in an attempt to try to tell her what happened to her stolen child.

“To Phillis Wheatley's Mother”

I, Young in life, by seeming cruel fate

Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat:

What pangs excruciating must molest,

What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?

-Phillis Wheatley

They say your daughter is a rare orchid. She lives in a fancy house on a high street. They named her after the ship which bore her, wild (they claim) across the waves. They say your daughter is a coo-coo's egg. She walks the streets in English garb. She did not fill the shark’s belly. She does not sweep, hoe, or breed. She stood just once upon the block. Your daughter is as exotic as white pepper. She reads, she travels, and when she dreams, a clean head kisses a starched pillow. She can cradle the owner's spell book ‘tween her dark hands. She has learned to sing in robbers’ tongue. Your daughter’s quill makes patriots blink. Her black skin, spooled parchment, poem, bill of sale. God has given her a kingdom you can hardly pronounce. Sometimes, in her famous book, a line will slip, and she is returned, unrefined, before Mrs. Wheatley scooped the sickly child, fed her broth and bound books. Alas-my dusky mother, she writes, if only she knew: the first note of mercy is pain.

“Lexicon”

The Good Lord puts new sounds in the heathens’ mouth; holy is a word that burns the fingers as you cradle the book, a stern beard that plucks a child from her mother, a law that names you chattel, then blesses your soul. Turn the page, and read a story about the skin you wear, and what that mark earns you. Say faith, a veil of questions you get to pull back, perhaps, with your last breath. Roll it on your tongue, sickly girl. And then there’s mercy; when you stood, shivering on the Boston dock, draped only in a dirty carpet, you had no words for what came towards you, out of the wronged air. How your mind would lick that word like butter, once you found it.

“God Could Not Make Her a Poet.” This is based on something that was written by Thomas Jefferson after he read Wheatley’s book. This is always my fascination with Thomas Jefferson who’s clearly one of the most lively minds of his era, and yet he couldn’t, with all that intelligence and all that scholarship and fervor for democracy, could not bring himself to think of a slave as his equal. So, in his estimation, when he read the book, I’m paraphrasing here, but, basically, what his estimation of the book was: religion could produce a Phillis Wheatley, but it could not make her a poet.

“God Could Not Make Her a Poet”

Thomas Jefferson said this, more or less, after he read the musings of the clever African Phillis Wheatley, a sensation of both the Colonies and England, a black patriot, though a slave. Whatever a black hand can build, he knew, could only be guided by a master’s vision, like this room of the mansion he probably wrote his option in-what black mind could dream in these proportions? And gather the slope of these Virginia hills so lovingly to his window? God could give her words, but the subtle turn? Like giving a gull a sack of gold.

“Benighted”

In order to learn this word, the slave girl has to shake off her pagan tongue; she is ape to her owner’s hearing, they are an alphabet, a cup of noise poured into her dark ear. Apples don’t know they have a name, have a taste, crisp, or tart, a way to describe how it feels when white teeth break the skin. The beagle never knows what their owners call his breed, only his master’s whistle. The bible will tell her; there was a young, dark girl. Before she found mercy, hoof, drum, and mud was her maiden name. The hatchling doesn’t know what to call its egg-tooth, why the first word of her new world is called Phillis?

”English”

Stop saying that, and say this. Stop wearing this, and put that on. Sink your teeth into this, and, tongue, bid farewell to that. Bit by bit, word by word, the young slave’s speech is chiseled. Make your hands learn this. Lay your dark head on that. Translate mercy, black girl. Clear your throat.

“Diabolic” And this is from a line in her most famous poem “On Being Brought to America from Africa.” It’s an eight-line poem, and, to me, it’s the basis of everything you’re going to need to know about African American poetry, poetics, and the argument about it going forward.

“Diabolic”

"Their colour is a diabolic die."--Phillis Wheatley

What they say they are and what they actually do is what Phyllis overhears. It’s like she isn’t there. It’s like she’s a ghost, at arm’s length, hearing the living curse out the dead-which, she’s been lead to believe no decent person does in a church. How they say they love her and how they look at her is what Phyllis observes; like she’s the hole in the pocket after the money rolls out. God loves everybody—even the sinner, (they say) even a mangy hound can rely on a scrap of meat, scraped off the plate (they say). What they testify and what they whisper in earshot is as dark as her skin, whistled from opposite sides of a mouth. Is she the Bible’s fine print?

And the last poem in the cycle. I’m still working on the cycle, but the last poem that I’m going to read is called “The Trial of Phillis Wheatley.” And this is based on a true story. Henry Louis Gates has a very slim book about this event. Phillis started writing poems, I think, when she was around eleven or twelve. They became broadsides. They became circulated around Boston. And, at a certain point, people started to wonder if she really was the person who was writing those poems. If she was real. So they actually got a committee together—John Hancock was one of the people on the committee—to determine, to prove, that this young slave actually composed these poems.

“The Trial of Phillis Wheatley”

She claims she wrote a book, but here’s what could have happened; in order to make a point, to move things along, a rich white man in pre-revolutionary Boston decides to raise some abolitionist sand by pretending to be a young, black female slave, burning with the Good Word,

bristling with Alexander Pope. Maybe he owns a Printing Press. Maybe he got some buddies to go along with the gag. Up and down the block fly the broadsides; between slugs of ale and church hymns, the panic of black verse. An alternative could be all of the above, plus a young, black female slave, bearded to the cause. Teach her to recite, just enough, petticoat her, just enough. An indentured rebel. Written by Phillis Wheatley, a slave, owned by John Wheatley. Versed by Phillis Wheatley, a teen Ethiop, late of Africa. If a negro can write a poem, why not a fish, then? Why not a cloud with feet? What is your name? A long way from home, sir. What is your tongue? Poetry, and the breath of the Lord. What is your accent? A patriot, sir. It will take a jury of proper white men to prove this true, John Handcock to swear in ink this we saw; the paper, the quill, her black hand, singing.

I also like writing about jazz and music, musicians. To me, they’re the kind of the unsung poets. [Laughs.] Some of these people like, for example, one of my favorite blues singers, Son House, who I actually met in my hometown of Rochester, New York, was really very articulate, and I just think that--a lot of those things are--African American artists get pushed sideways into certain things. Like, for example, Nina Simone wanted to be an opera singer but couldn’t get in because she was African American and got shoved into being Nina Simone. [Laughs.] To me, they’re the unsung poets. This one’s about the very famous album Kind of Blue.

“Kind of”

My friend is writing about the first time he listened to “Kind of Blue,” by Miles Davis, and I tell him, yes, I bet everyone has a story, kind of like their first kiss-how did it happen, where were you, on which of your younger days did Paul Chambers’ bass first lick your ear? Did you first think you didn’t want anything to do with that crazy stuff, no words, no verse/choruses, music for dark glasses and cigarettes holders, did one of your friends, a convert, drag you to the stereo, fired up by the sight of a world, wider than the narrow, invisible rails you were running on?

The record is famous for this, the record that readjusts your opinion, and you pause, the needle has hit a new groove; on which of your younger days did the afternoon simmer down, and that smoothness called out to you, and then everything else?

This is a poem about Lester Young and Charles Mingus. When Lester Young Died, Charles Mingus wrote this great elegy for him called “Goodbye, Pork Pie Hat” because Lester Young wore pork pie hats. And it’s also about Billie Holiday. Lester Young and Billie Holiday were really good friends. Depending on who you talk to, they were romantically involved or they weren’t, but, years ago, when the national networks were obligated to deal with the arts, there was this TV show called The Sound of Jazz that was taped in New York at the CBS broadcast studios. And they brought all these people together to start talking about what the new sounds in jazz were. And it actually became a reunion for Billie Holiday and Lester Young. In fact, it’s the last time, I think, they ever played together. There’s this wonderful shot after she sings “Fine and Mellow” that I’m going to quote in the poem, where, after the song is done, they walk out--the doors are opened, you can see fifty-seventh street, I think it’s where the studios were, and you see them talking to each other, and they both go in opposite directions, and, as far as I know, as far as I can tell, that’s the last time they see each other. Ever.  

“Goodbye, Pork Pie Hat”

Charlie Mingus wrote this mournful goodbye. Had the horns sound like a room with old men watching the barge slip into the river toward the other side. Lost uncles, fathers, brothers, the stink of tobacco, splash of gin. The coolness some of them carried, the ones we think of when we remember certain diners. Because Lester young had that sound. You can hear it as he plays with Billie Holiday in a ‘50s TV studio. “Fine and Mellow.” Love: that faucet which turns off or on. How that dumb hope, maybe next time, rises from their lips and tongues and throats. Because Lester soothes the bruises in Billie’s voice one last time. They chat, then walk out of the studio into loveless New York, never to meet again. In the elegy, the horns sound like a warm hand clasping a cold one on the cooling board. Then letting go.

Otis Redding. This is a poem about Otis Redding. He died in a plane crash that hit a lake, I think, in Wisconsin in nineteen sixty-seven. He was coming back from a gig. And there’s a photo of him—I saw it only once on a TV show—a special—where they actually... You can see him being dragged up from the lake the next day. I’ve always thought about this as an ekphrastic poem, I guess, about that photo.

"Otis Redding Being Pulled from Lake Monona”

January. Wisconsin. nineteen sixty-seven. At the crash site, they’ve pulled Otis into the boat, arms akimbo, still dressed for the gig he sang the night before. Up from the sunken, fickle plane. The silt swirled by guitar cases, sweat laid on electric piano keys, boxes of band amps and mics and speakers which only sang of love. Below the backbeat lies stopped. All that was faulty, weather, fatigue, faithless part, will be washed into a photo a cop now clicks to file. It’s a blues to break a heart. The end of a young man’s shout. The fall and sinking of every bump and grind we felt we had coming from that throat. What do these loons care about the funk hidden beneath the bow of this small craft? Or that this black man, gently harvested by the morning shift, soon to be ferried home on the monochromatic waves, was, only the night before, knee-deep in the business of sweat. Moved in well-dressed fire to plead, to unbutton, moved with love’s unstoppable fuse.

“Piano Solo: Thelonius Monk on ‘The Man I Love’. Thelonius is, of course, to people who know him, a fantastic composer and jazz pianist, but, also, kind of his own man, I guess is the way of putting it. And he would tick people off, right? There’s this wonderful session that was recorded on Christmas Eve, I think around nineteen fifty-four, where he’s playing with Miles, and Milt Jackson, and some other people. And you can hear this take, of “The Man I Love,” first take. They’re starting, and then you hear some commotion, and then you hear Miles’ voice coming in, and… And what’s going on is that they’re about to play a ballad and you know that Monk will not play it straight. So Miles told Monk to lay out. “Shut up. Lay out. Don’t play on this.” And you hear the “Rrrr. Rrrr. Rrr.” And then you hear Miles talking to the engineer and he says to the engineer, “Get all of this down! Get all of it!” Then it stops and there’s this second take, which is absolutely gorgeous.

“Piano Solo: Thelonius Monk on “The Man I Love”

On the first take, Miles Davis tells Monk’s strange-fingered Thelonius to shut up. To lay out. It’s a ballad. No tinkering brown pixie dust against the groove. No wading through measures the way an albatross slops up to the sky. Miles is a man who is used to having his own way. And if Monk were a woman, who knows where this might end. But then, Milt Jackson replays, rethinks the intro., the hushed tones of a man clearing his throat before his chords vibrate in prayer. And these five men, who seemingly have nothing better to do on Christmas Eve, nineteen fifty-four, get back to the lyric. Love is food, water, air, lonely sucks. Then, from out of the negotiations, plinks Monk. Toy piano Monk. That stumble-bum bird. The boy who will always grab the wrong crayon.

I’ll read one more poem. And this is not a music poem. This is a poem about Emmett Till. And it’s about his casket. The story of his casket. I’m sure most people know about the details of how he was murdered. After he was killed, they sent his body back to Chicago, where he’d come down for that summer. And his mother demanded that it be an open casket. And I think I remember his mother saying, “I want the whole world to see what they did to my boy.” And so it was a casket with a glass top. And then it was buried. And then there was a trial. And, during the trial, the defendants insisted that they needed proof. This was a retrial, I think, actually. They wanted proof that the person in the casket really was Emmett Till. So they exhumed the body. Went back to the cemetery, exhumed the body, did a DNA test to determine it really was Emmett Till in that coffin. But, legally, you can’t re-bury in the same casket, so they put Emmett in a different casket, reburied him, and the glass-top casket ended up in a shed in the cemetery grounds. Years later, the owners of the cemetery had some legal problems. They closed the cemetery down. They started to do an inventory of the grounds. They went to the shed. They found the old casket. They opened it up and there were a family of possums living in the casket.

“Emmett Till’s Glass Top Casket”

By the time they cracked me open again, topside, abandoned in a toolshed, I had become another kind of nest. Not many people connect possums with Chicago, but this is where the city ends, after all, and I float still, after the footfalls fade and the roots bloom around us. The fact was, everything that worked for my young man worked for my new tenants. The fact was, he had been gone for years. They lifted him from my embrace, and I was empty, ready. That’s how the possums found me, friend, dry-docked, a tattered mercy hull. Once I held a boy who didn’t look like a boy. When they finally remembered, they peeked through my clear top. Then their wild surprise.

Alan May: 30:39

Welcome, Cornelius Eady. I’m so glad you’re here.

Cornelius Eady: 30:42

Thank you, Alan. Thanks for inviting me.

Alan May: 30:44

We’re so glad that you’re here in Knoxville, and that you can come and talk to us here in the public library. I have just a few questions I wanted to ask. I’m always interested in origin stories, and I’m wondering, how did you get started out as a poet?

Cornelius Eady: 31:01

Well, you know, Alan, I’m seventy years old now, so that’s a long story. [Both laugh.] But I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version. Basically, I started writing as, kind of, connected to song writing. I wasn’t really writing songs back then, but I was really into the lyrics of a lot of the songs that were coming out during the time. This was the sixties, right? So I started writing dry--what I would call dry lyrics in iambic pentameter with no real melodies to them. But then I ran into a high school teacher whose name was then Joanna Mason, her married name, in my high school in Rochester, New York, and she was so instrumental in just being so understanding and kind about a kind of a nerdy guy who just sat around scribbling into his notebooks. But it was meeting her... I have this theory that if you scratch the surface of any poet, at some point, you will find a teacher. [Laughs.] And Joanna was mine. So, that’s the basic start of it. And also, there’s a library connected to it, which is why I’m really happy we’re doing this in a library. I love libraries. Most of my reading, because the bookstores were kind of thin in Rochester, most of my reading, for poetry, was at the Rundell Memorial Library, which is in downtown Rochester, and I really, just, you know, libraries were just places of wonder for me, because it allowed me to—it was quiet. It was stable. It was a lovely place to go and write. I tell this story often about the reading room in the Rundell Library, where, basically, you have long, wooden tables, as you go in, and, back in the day, when I was starting out, they had two machines as you came in. For twenty-five cents, you could buy a writing tablet, and for a nickel you could a pencil. [Laughs.] And that, basically, is what I would do. I spent hours of my time hanging out in the library. Yeah, I love libraries and librarians. I’ve actually been an accidental librarian. About a year ago, I was asked to be Interim Director for a poetry library in New York called Poets House, and that was, in some ways, a dream come true. I became, again, a temporary accidental librarian. So libraries really figure deeply into my makeup, into my DNA, of being a poet. But, the thing about—of course, what you start realizing what poetry is good for, right? My high school teacher was actually the editor of a literary magazine, and my first four poems ever published were published in that literary magazine. One of the poems was about Martin Luther King, who’d just been assassinated. And I wrote this poem called “Why?” It’s a bad poem. But it was a rhyming poem, and it was basically saying, “Why, why, why?” And the magazine came out. It was a big high school. I think, about five hundred students, maybe three to five hundred students in it. And I’d be walking the halls, and I’d notice that people would say, “There he is. That’s him. That’s the poet.” Or students would come up to me and say, “You know, I read that poem you wrote. I loved that poem you wrote about Martin Luther King. That’s how I felt,” and that’s when I started to understand the connection poetry had with the reader. That basically you could be saying things that other people were feeling but couldn’t articulate themselves. So that became—I use this term lately these days—that became kind of a catnip for me, leading me on the path to where I am now.

Alan May: 34:24

You mention writing in rhyme and meter starting out. And I think I’ve noticed that a lot of your poems have either three or four feet per line?

Cornelius Eady: 34:35

Mmm-hmm.

Alan May: 34:36

Is that, kind of, when you’re sitting down and you’re in the writing processes, are you starting out by writing in meter? Or do you use meter to get you going?

Cornelius Eady: 34:46

Well, I call it organization, right? I don’t necessarily write in fixed forms, unless, of course, I’m writing songs. I always tell my students, “It’s either fixed or unfixed forms.” You can call it free verse, but I don’t think there’s anything free about it, at a certain point. You have to organize what’s on the page. And, as you’re noticing, I tend to do that. I tend to organize in three or four-beat lines, right? The start falling into that, so it becomes tercets or it becomes quatrains maybe. It depends on... It’s a combination of the subject matter and the way I’m hearing it as beats in my head. At some point, there’s always some sort of organizational structure to the poem, even if it’s not going to be a sestina or a sonnet.

Alan May: 35:29

Do you have a certain ritual for writing? Do you like to write in a certain time and place? I know that some writers have a very regimented way of writing. Is that true for you?

Cornelius Eady: 35:40

Well, I... People who can make space to write are really fortunate. Because there’s no real good way of doing this, right? At least the way that I understand it. And it certainly hasn’t been my life. I have to sometimes figure out ways of making time in order to write. There’s a certain kind of selfishness you have to have to be a writer. By that, I mean you have to defend your space, your writing space. So sometimes it varies from year to year. To where I am. What’s going on. There’s no real rhyme or reason to it. The only thing that accelerates it—I'm also in theatre, and when I’m always doing plays with my writing partner, Diedre Murray, you know theatre has its own kind of schedule to it. [Laughs.] Time frame to it. Sometimes you have to redo a scene very, very quickly, and you’re like, “I can’t sit and use my poetry brain to contemplate.” You have to, in some ways, jump in, and finish the scene or rewrite the scene because there’s a composer waiting to rewrite the music, and there’s an actor waiting to figure out how to sing it. You can’t be the person that delays that or becomes the stopper, right? So I’ve learned to do a lot of things. I’ve learned how to write quickly. I love being able to spend some time to sit and just contemplate—writing. You know, never--there’s no real pattern to it. Now, if my wife was here sitting next to me, she would definitely say what he does is that he waits until I go to bed. [Laughs.] And then I write. I do that, too. But it’s no real ritual to it.

Alan May: 37:07

I guess you say that you’ve always been writing songs, and that kind of led you to poetry. Do you have any thoughts on the difference between the two, for you? Just in terms of how you write and... You know, I think a lot of poets love music and musicians...

Cornelius Eady: 37:27

Yeah.

Alan May: 37:28

...because they don’t get to collaborate so much, and I think that collaboration means a lot, and it seems like it would be a lot of fun to solitary writers... I guess if you could just talk a little bit about the difference in the experience of being a singer/songwriter in a band, and then, you know, the solitary act of writing as a poet.

Cornelius Eady: 37:50

Well, you know, they all bleed. As you were saying about poets and musicians, you may think of Paul Muldoon, who was the editor for The New Yorker for a while, and, also, Alice Quinn. Alice Quinn actually invited Joni Mitchell to send some lyrics to her, and she printed them in The New Yorker as a poem. And Paul Muldoon is good friends with Paul Simon and other musicians, as well... and, also, Paul McCartney. So, clearly, there’s this free exchange between poets and songwriters, and, of course, there’s the songwriters who use great poetic devices in their work, like Joni Mitchell, like Bob Dylan, like Leonard Cohen, who’s actually a poet. I mean, I think there’s a difference between Cohen and Dylan, in the sense that Cohen is a poet who’s writing songs, and you can see the kind of difference in the line, as opposed to Dylan who uses poetic references and devices. There’s a difference. There’s a slim difference. It may not be enough to, you know, worry about. But to my ear, there’s a distinct difference between the two of them. I love them both. It’s not an either/or, like I prefer one to the other. I notice different things about it. You know, for me, like I said, I started off writing what I call “dry lyrics” without music to it. The difference to me between songs and poetry is the melody. I mean the words are... It’s a different way we use our throat. What you just heard me do was read the poems where it’s almost a song and meter to it, but no melody. When I’m writing a song, it has to be attached to notes, to an arrangement. And if I’m working with other people, it has to be something that allows people to have the ability and the space to add whatever they can to the basic elements of the song. So it’s a work process thing, in some ways, for me, I guess. It’s, basically, my intentions as a song is to actually put a melody to it and figure out a way of singing it, as opposed to simply putting it on the page and reading it to a microphone or to an audience. They are two different styles of delivery, in my mind. I’m sure other people think about this in different ways. But, for me, that’s the way it kind of works for me.

Alan May: 39:50

I always like to ask poets about their favorite writers. Who did you start reading early on, and who are your favorite writers now?

Cornelius Eady: 40:01

Oh, Jeez. Again, it’s just... I’m a big fan [laughs] of so many people. When I was reading poetry in the Rundell Library, as a teenager, I really feel that it was a lucky break, in some ways, because I didn’t have somebody telling me what I should be reading or I shouldn’t be reading. I was simply in the stacks, and I was finding things. So, somebody there, some buyer, whoever bought the poetry books, at that time, for the Rundell Library, was wonderful. All the Beats. The New Directions things, and the City Lights books, they were all there. Books I wouldn’t have found, otherwise. So that was one thing. It was how I first read Anne Sexton, it’s how I first ran into James Wright, it’s when I first ran into Robert Bly. There’s this awkward Story about me and Bly: The Light Around the Body—I think it was his first book, and it was in the library. And it’s the only book I ever stole.

Alan May: 40:51

[Laughs.]

Cornelius Eady: 40:52

[Laughs.] Because I loved the book, and I looked and saw no one was checking it out, so I decided, you know, I took it home and never returned it. Years later, I’m interviewing Bly for a local cable station, and as we’re going through the interview, between takes, I think I need to blurt this out to Bly, and let him know how much I loved his first book.

Alan May: 41:11

[Laughs.]

Cornelius Eady: 41:12

[Laughs.] “I loved this book so much, Robert, I stole it!” thinking he’d be approving of it. [Laughs.] He wasn’t, of course. But it was that kind of passion, maybe another way of putting it, right? You pick up a poet, and I’d be really passionate about it. I was very passionate about the Latin American poets like Neruda and Nicanor Parra, and Lorca. It was just one of those things where, basically, I just absorbed them, and then I’d read, you know, everything I’d get my hands on. I think the young poet, well, just becomes a kind of a sponge, right? You just absorb all of these different things and then you start filtering it out, figure out what’s working for you, and what doesn’t work for you, what you like and what you don’t like. How your position on the writer will change or shift over the years. An example I always like to use is Frank O’Hara. When I was a teenager, I thought, “My God, this guy is brilliant. My God, My God.” Then, a few years later, in my twenties--late twenties/early thirties—I’m reading him again, and I think, “Oh, my God, all he does is list things. My God. I can’t believe I liked this guy.” And then a couple of years later, and then again, “Oh, my God, he knocks me out.” Right? What I tell my students is that when they decide to commit to a program, or they decide to step on this path, they’re starting a conversation with literature. They’re starting a conversation with that larger context. And I think that’s what… I’m having this conversation with Frank O’Hara, even though he’s dead. Right? Or I’m thinking about Walt Whitman, and I’ll see some line of his, and I’ll realize, “Oh, my God, I have a different take on what that line actually means now. It’s a conversation with Walt, even though he’s long gone. One of the poets that I aways return to is Emily Dickinson because I love telling people about the idea The idea of how the voice, if the voice feels real you will follow the voice everywhere and anywhere. And the example I use is her famous poem “I heard a fly buzz when I died,” which no one questions. [Both laugh.] Right? She says it with such authority, you don’t think, “I came back from the dead and I decided to write you a poem.” [Laughs.] It’s just, “I heard a fly buzz when I died. The stillness in the air…” and then on and on we go. She convinces you this, “I am really a corpse talking to you. I have written a poem from the dead about the moment I died.” Right? So I love telling people about these different effects that poets have. I can go on and on. I mean some of the poets that were my favorite poets I never dreamed as a kid, in my first poetry workshop—I had this great poetry workshop in Rochester—run by this poet named Patricia Janus—and we would do things. Maxine Kumin’s first book I read. The Book of Nightmares from Galway Kinnell—it was the first time I read it. There’s a poem called “The Bear.” I have this really big memory of us reading “The Bear” a few stanzas at a time and passing the poem along. It’s a poem where some guy’s in the woods and he gets the bear and he kills the bear and he opens the bear and he goes inside the bear. It’s like this crazy poem. We were reading it like it was contraband, like it was a secret passed among us, right? I never would have dreamed in a million years that I would actually meet Galway Kinnell, when I was a teenager. That thought would never have crossed my mind. If somebody had entered that room, from the future, and said, “You know, not only are you going to meet Galway Kinnell, you’re going to teach in the MFA program at The New School, you’re going to hang out with Galway Kinnell, I would have laughed in their faces, right, cause it would never have crossed my mind that that poetry, that my poetry could get there, right? So a lot of poets that I know are people that I have been fans of. Interviewing Robert Bly, for example, to bring that up again. I never dreamed that poetry would do this. There was a Yiddish poet in Rochester, whose name, unfortunately, I always forget these days, but one of the things that he would say that became one of the hallmarks of the poetry workshop in Rochester: “Poetry is the poet’s passport,” was what he said. And that has proved to be kind of true for me. It’s taken me places I wouldn’t expect. I would never dreamed, as a teenager, I'd end up going. And I got to go to Kenya because of that, and I got to go to France because of that, I got to go to Germany because of that. And, you know, it’s one of those things where, basically, you can’t imagine where the path is going to lead you once you get on the path. And the reason for that, is that some of the poets that I actually admire I actually got to meet. Sharon Olds was one of those poets. Minnie Bruce Pratt was one of those poets. It’s just... You read the books, and then you get to meet the writer. One of my great memories was when I met Sonia Sanchez. It’s a weird story, because, uh, it was at the 92nd Street Y. Audre Lorde had just died. She was supposed to do a reading with Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, and Sonia Sanchez, but Audre Lorde died, and then I got a phone call to come and read with them, with Sonia and Lucille. It was almost like it was a suppressed memory because—since it wasn’t official, I’ve sort of decided that I’ve never read at the 92nd Street Y for some reason over the years, but I actually... This really happened. I get there a little late. The green room there, walking toward the stage, and I’m walking towards this woman, this really smallish woman, and suddenly it occurs to me, oh, my God, that’s Sonia Sanchez, and, I want to tell you something, I mean, I meet a lot of poets, I know a lot of famous poets, and, you know, but certain poets are in another realm for me, and Sonia’s one of those poets. And I went, “Oh, my God, what am I doing? I can’t be with Sonia Sanchez. She’s Sonia Sanchez. That was my panic. That was my needless panic. Sonia Sanchez is one of the sweetest human beings that still walks the planet. And it was a great evening of reading with those two. But I would never dream, as a teenager, that I would ever be at the 92nd Street Y reading with Sonia Sanchez and Lucille Clifton. And that’s part of the library of the poets that I’ve admired through the years.

Alan May: 46:49

I had a similar experience like that with Jean Valentine.

Cornelius Eady: 46:52

Oh, yes! Yes! I taught with Jean Valentine at Sarah Lawrence College. Yes!

Alan May: 47:58

Yeah. She was so incredibly nice and generous.

Cornelius Eady: 47:01

Yes.

Alan May: 47:02

I was at a small university library, and she agreed to come and read, uh, at the library, and it was just a great experience.

Cornelius Eady: 47:12

Oh, that sounds like... That’s totally Jean. Thank you for reminding me of... Yes, that sounds like... It’s a total Jean move! [Laughs.] Yes.

Alan May: 47:20

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming here and reading poems for us and talking to us. I’ve enjoyed this so much!

Cornelius Eady: 47:28

Thank you, Alan. I’ve enjoyed it, too, and thank you again for inviting me.