Cave Canem '06....A New Decade Dawns

Hi -

This is a blog devoted to Cave Canem - a place started in 1996 when Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady decided to create a safe place for Black poets to give birth to all the messy, mojoed, razzmataistical, school-booked, fomal and informal, whisper-screeched poetry that they possibly could. A safe place where we could sing our multi - tongued voices in as many dialects and languages as we saw possible, a place where we could get as gutter-high downlow or downright highbrow as we could, often in the space of the same poem or dialogue or workshop or dancefloor - and as often as possible.

It is a place where I have witnessed soul-to-soul resuscitation through words and tears and stanza breaks - and a place that, over ten years, has produced a prodigious amount of heat from poets who have scribbled, published, and taught their way into the world.

CC has gone through a lot of changes, and is now in a time of transition. A new Executive Director, a new Web Forum, a new anthology, and a new decade have been tha hall marks of 2006. From here I will try to give a view into what has happened in the past, a candid look at what is happening here in Greensburg this week, and whatever I can glean about the future of CC. If the next ten years is anything like the last, then 2016 is gonna be off the chain. (Wow - I can't believe I just wrote 2016!)

I will keep you posted daily - or as daily as I can, given all the liveliness that happens around here in the space of a week. Ya'll be sure to holla back, and let me know what you think , ok?

Until later...

Tyehimba Jess