In December 1990, poet Cornelius Eady, now 71, was feeling dispirited by the literary world. He’d attended the Assn. of Writers & Writing Programs conference in Denver that year and felt like he was the only Black poet in attendance.
“I wasn’t,” he assures me, all these decades later. “But it felt that way. I was on an island. I felt like I was the only person there. I couldn’t stand it. And I was doing an interview back then and I asked, ‘Well, why can’t we have a place that’s just for us?’”
It would be six years before Eady and fellow poet Toi Derricotte, now 83, came up with a tangible answer. Together, they imagined a place where Black poets wouldn’t have to explain or defend themselves. Eady and Derricotte planned a retreat that would be equal parts literary workshop and summer camp, free of charge, for Black poets. They called it Cave Canem.
Named after a sign in Latin that Derricotte had seen while visiting the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii, Cave Canem (“Beware of the Dog”) was envisioned as a community-building enterprise. There, Black poets of all stripes could tune out the world and instead fine-tune their craft. Eady and Derricotte knew finding institutional support for such a project would be difficult if not impossible. And so, in a fit of brilliant folly, they decided to take it on themselves — financially and logistically.
Close to 30 years later and now a registered nonprofit, Cave Canem is able to offer free tuition for its annual summer retreat. It’s hosted more than 550 fellows, including literary luminary Danez Smith, Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown, Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award winner Ross Gay, and U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. Its faculty, meanwhile, has boasted the likes of MacArthur Fellows Terrance Hayes and Claudia Rankine, PEN award winner Harryette Mullen, and National Book Award winner Nikky Finney.
With yearlong programming and two annual book prizes of its own, Cave Canem’s mission is best exemplified by those two weeks a year spent at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, Pa., where the retreat has been based since 2003.
The first retreat took place at Mount St. Alphonsus, a former seminary in Esopus, N.Y. Those who gathered there in 1996 were encouraged to sit in a circle and introduce themselves to one another. The question posed to these poets in other spaces — “Why are you here?” — was not a hostile challenge but an opening.
“Somebody started crying as they started talking,” Derricotte recalls. “And nobody went over to pat him on the back or hold him or anything. They let him cry. And that’s why it took three hours.” The spirit of that inaugural meeting remains intact.
Cave Canem fellows.
(Cave Canem Archives)
What the opening circle offered and continues to offer Cave Canem fellows is the space to be fully, truly themselves. The exercise is driven by the conviction that what each of these poets bring to the table is enough. And that what they will create or share in that space will be held with care.
For Morgan Parker, author of the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning “Magical Negro” (2019) and a Cave Canem fellow (2012, 2014, 2015), the opening circle was a welcome exercise.
“That introduction sets the bar in terms of vulnerability,” Parker says. “Yes, there will be rigor. And yes, there will be a lot of poetry-making. And yes, there could be poet laureates and prizes in your future. But for right now, this is about opening up and caring for each other as we do that. It makes this space really personal. Obviously poetry is personal, but I’ve been to a lot of different programs and workshops and that’s not always the things we lead with, this caring for the individual.”
As such, Cave Canem prides itself on being a place where belonging and community are one and the same. It’s also why the mix of fellows any given year includes emerging and established writers, recent grads in their 20s and working poets in their 80s, those working within established traditions and those experimenting with form.
“It had to be for all Black poets,” as Eady puts it. “To underscore the idea that there’s no one way of being a Black poet. That it’s all legitimate.”
For Evie Shockley, a Pulitzer Prize finalist who was first a fellow (1997, 1998, 1999) and later returned as a faculty member, Cave Canem has made room for expansive ideas of what that means. She recalls how having Mullen and Rankine as instructors and seeing the experimental Black Took Collective established during the retreat was eye-opening for an emerging poet like herself.
“It was transformative,” Shockley says. “I won’t say that without Cave Canem I wouldn’t have been a poet. But it happened so early in my period of being serious about writing that I have no sense of what my writing would have been without it.”
Similarly, it seems impossible to imagine what contemporary American poetry would look like without this longstanding organization.
“If there was a centrifugal force in American letters over the last 25 years, it is undeniable that it has been Cave Canem,” Reginald Dwayne Betts (2006, 2007) says. “It’s been largely out of the power of literature. It hasn’t been driven by the power of commerce. The work has actually been creating these opportunities for writers to become better at their craft.”
Or, as Derricotte has put it, the focus is on “doing the work” and seeing traditions and aesthetics, lineages and linkages, constantly forged and foregrounded.
Co-founders of Cave Canem Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady.
(Cave Canem Archives)
“The first year I went, I brought a pantoum of sound,” Nikia Chaney (1997, 1999, 2002), a California-based poet, recalls. “It doesn’t really make sense. You just have to kind of follow the sound. I still remember the reception that I got from it. Angela Jackson said, ‘You’re scatting on the page.’ I never really thought that some of my interests had a tradition.”
For Betts, a recent MacArthur Fellow and the author of “Felon: Poems” and “Shahid Reads His Own Palm,” Cave Canem was similarly an entry point into the canon of Black poetry he’d first encountered while incarcerated. Back then he didn’t know that many of the poets he was reading were associated with Eady and Derricotte’s brainchild. When he attended the retreat as a fellow in 2006, he found himself in community with poets he’d long thought of as heroes of his — heroes he’s now in direct conversation with, on and off the page.
“I once called Sonia Sanchez at like 10 o’clock at night to read her a poem,” he says. “But I also got a chance to listen to her about how much she missed her good friend Toni Morrison, and how she missed the days when Amiri Baraka would call her to read a poem in the middle of the night.”
Here was a living, breathing canon of American letters being nurtured across generations. To Lynne Thompson, a former poet laureate of Los Angeles and the current board president of Cave Canem, therein lies the key conceit of the program.
“How can we provide community for them, where they feel free to express themselves as poets, as well as find every way we can to get the reading public to understand that the American voice is very diverse and well worth reading?” she says.
As it nears its 30th anniversary, Cave Canem has lofty ambitions to continue that mission. Just last year it launched a digital archives collection and announced, alongside Ithaka S+R, “Magnitude and Bond: A Field Study on Black Literary Arts Service Organizations,” a research project that will examine the organizational needs, strategies and models behind such institutions.
Most of all, though, Cave Canem is a reflection of the ethos everyone involved in it has brought to bear on the endeavor.
“It’s like writing a great poem,” Derricotte says. “It’s mysterious. You don’t know what’s going to happen. It has taken so much brilliance and so many people coming at the right time. But it’s all about leaving the space for not knowing and believing and trusting Black people. Trusting Black poets. And that’s what happened.”
