Cornelius Eady

Poet and cofounder of Cave Canem, Cornelius Eady has published more than half a dozen volumes of poetry, among them Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (1985), winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; The Gathering of My Name (1991), nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; and Brutal Imagination (2001), a National Book Award finalist. Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems appeared in 2008. Eady also collaborated with Diedre Murray on a libretto for a roots opera, Running Man, based on his poems, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Music is a central theme of Eady’s work, along with family and the challenges unique to the African American experience. In You Don’t Miss Your Water (1995), a prose-poem cycle of elegies for Eady’s father, traditional song titles—blues songs, mainly, but also jazz and rock ’n’ roll—become the titles of his poems. Eady 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 poet Toi Derricote founded Cave Canem, a nonprofit organization that supports emerging African American poets through a summer retreat, regional workshops, a first-book prize, annual anthologies, and events and readings across the country. Source

I'm a Fool to Love You

Some folks will tell you the blues is a woman,

Some type of supernatural creature.

My mother would tell you, if she could,

About her life with my father,

A strange and sometimes cruel gentleman.

She would tell you about the choices

A young black woman faces.

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,

When we need to talk straight.

My mother chooses my father

After choosing a man

Who was, as we sing it,

Of no account.

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.

And is the blues the moment you realize

You exist in a stacked deck,

You look in a mirror at your young face,

The face my sister carries,

And you know it's the only leverage

You've got.

Does this create a hurt that whispers

How you going to do?

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.

Compared to this,

My father seems, briefly,

To be a fire escape.

This is the way the blues works

Its sorry wonders,

Makes trouble look like

A feather bed,

Makes the wrong man's kisses

A healing.

Published:

1997

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2025

Themes:

Agency

Family

Identity

Love & Relationships

Music & Sports

Racial Injustice

Womanhood