Got to Get Over the Hump!

funny how time flies when you're having fun...

--Janet Jackson (as if I needed to tell you)


It's already Friday. It was just Wednesday, just Sunday, just the frantic week before. The last day and a half has been a beautiful blur. Last year, I referred to CC as "poetry camp." This year, I realize it's boot camp! That's the middle of the week for you. There was some really intense energy among the fellows yesterday. Intense, yet exhausted. We were all a little edgy and it came out in the work. Several fellows mentioned a somber, heavy tone to the work that was workshopped. After tapping our souls for three days straight, we need a collective nap. Or another cup of coffee, one.

I can't make this too long because I, too, have fallen behind, but I didn't want to leave y'all hanging. Some magnificent things have happened in the midst of this whirlwind schedule. We held an impromptu poetry jam in Village Hall at 2:30 in the morning. Rachel Eliza Griffiths has spirited a bunch of us up to her studio in Selene House where she has taken the most exquisite photos. That is a bad sista! We've had spades games, tarot readings, astrological conversations, religious discoveries, pizza parties, and sangria. We've swapped war stories from classrooms and MFA programs and traded techniques on every aspect of our lives. Each of us are students, each of us, teachers. We have pushed each others buttons, pushed our own limits, experimented with forms, techniques, attitudes.

Yet in the midst of it all, real life encroaches. Perhaps encroaches is too sinister a word. Life is. If life was not, what would we write about? And yet, life has a way of squeezing out reflection, if we let it, even here, at Cave Canem. There are children to check on, bills that need to be paid, work that needs to be done. Exhausted as I was, I managed to pump out an (overdue) article and advertisement this morning. That's one thing I've learned this week: if I push myself, I can lift mountains. But what a strain on the muscles!

It's time to s l o w d o w n. It's already Friday. I have done a lot, yet I've missed a lot. You can't do it all. I missed the fellows workshops (again). I also missed the remembrance ceremony for the fellows who have left this phase of life behind. (Ross Gay is going to help me fill you in soon.) I have made all the evening readings, which as you well know, are unbelievable. There is enough talent in these four dormitories to raise the dead. Last night, we went to Westmoreland Museum of American Art to witness the power of our three new fellows (it's hard to count Carl Phillips as new because he was last year's guest poet): Ed Roberson, Claudia Rankine and Collen McElroy.

I have the tremendous honor and pleasure of hosting tonight's fellows reading. It is the polyurethane coating on my CC experience. Well, it smells a lot better than polyurethane, lol. I hope Einstein is right. I hope time is relative, and I can stretch each second into an hour. Because otherwise I will blink and it will be Sunday morning, and I will be packing my bags for the last time. But there is not enough room in my luggage to carry all that I have gathered here. I guess that's why God blessed me with this all this body ;)

Love,
Deidre

"I have personal knowledge of the wind..."

***this blog was supposed to go up last night, but blogger was trippin***

So I had my first of what I'm sure will be many emotional moments today. It wasn't the first tear I've shed since my arrival. Ms. Ntozake Shange ripped that bad boy clean out of the duct with a wicked piece called "Crack Annie" that she read for us during this morning's craft workshop. Not to rub it in, but she and her companion Clyde also blessed us with an exclusive preview of a new vignette for the upcoming Broadway production of For Colored Girls...


The week's first workshop didn't do it either. I am honored to be in the marvelous company of Group C this year, and we had a wonderful experience with Colleen McElroy, who is a dynamic first-year faculty member. It is always amazing to see how many different children the night (and wee hours of the morning) gives birth to. I worked hard on my poem, harder than I've worked on any poem I've written here except maybe the final poem of last year's workshop. I found myself whining to my suite mates and new-found friends because the poem wasn't coming together.


"I wish my poems were like pre-fab houses," I complained. "This is like sawing down the tree first." But in that moment, I recognized the process at work. We are creating from scratch, and it is messy business. Suddenly, I knew what it meant to sweat for a poem. To have something so important to say that it is worth the effort to find the right words, the right metaphor, to apply a substantial amount of the advice I have heard here over the years. To craft something that is powerful and beautiful and true in equal measure.


That poem didn't make me cry, either. What did it, was Cornelius. You know, everybody says Toi is the tear jerker of our founding duo. I have yet to cry in one of her workshops. Cornelius is supposed to be the laid back one, right? But while he was reading "Gratitude" this evening, transporting us back to those classrooms, those cold places where Gwendolyn Brooks' pushmen and our own demonic doubts lurk, I imagined what my life would have been like if I had never come to Cave Canem. I imagined what my life would be like after this week, after this summer... no more faculty readings, no more fellows readings. A sista got a little misty, you know what I'm saying? I know that's not "in the moment" but can a poet ever truly practice that Zen state? Isn't our craft dependent upon weaving together existence, memory, and projection?


I just want to say how grateful I am for this experience, for the opportunity to know you (all of the fellows I have come to know), to spend time with you, to laugh with you, to cry with you, to party with you, to write with you, to learn from you, to grow with you. I feel one of those good gut-deep church balcony crying sessions coming on. That first year, I got up on the fellows stage, and you guys leapt to your feet. Your appreciation of my words, of the person behind the words was so sincere. It was so pure and spontaneous. It knocked me to the ground, and when I got up, I was not the same Deidre. That kicked off something inside me that goes so much deeper than ego or pride. Something started to heal in me.


I know people laugh at us and think we are crazy because we speak of Cave Canem so deeply. To the outside, it sounds cultish. Certain people who shall remain nameless seem to enjoy poking holes in Cave Canem. Zora put it best: you got to go there to know there.


So to each of them, Love.

~Deidre