blueprints

74 | elizabeth alexander
Pompeii and the House of the Tragic Poet. Subsequent worries about how
to fund the workshop were allayed when Sarah Micklem, Eady’s wife, said,
“Why don’t we do it for free?” They recruited teachers (myself included)
who went in June of 1996 to the Mount St. Alphonsus monastery in Esopus,
New York, along the Hudson River. We were all happy to trade a paycheck
for the opportunity to work in what turned out to be one of the
most vital American creative communities of the past two decades.
When people are trying to build community, they need to know something
that can be difficult to articulate. They need to feel and know the
time is right. And I think what we also knew at Cave Canem is that sometimes
simply bringing people together in a light-handedly organized space
is how you can find out what the organization ought to be. In other words,
the work itself and the being together is how to define what the organization
is and can be. We didn’t do a whole lot of long-range planning in those
early days. We simply created the conditions for people to write poems and
also the “safe space” in which black poets could see what was possible. Who
we are emerged from that simple purpose and from the fact of gathering. It
is a particular form of genius that understands that without a community in
which to make sense, the work might as well be floating in outer space. Toi
and Cornelius possessed that genius.
sometimes simply bringing people together
in a light-handedly organized space is how you find out
what the organization ought to be.
Observers of the poetry scene regularly say that Cave Canem is supporting
the finest American poetry that is being written today. What began
as a “safe space” for black poets to make their art turned into a vibrant community
in the hundreds. Through the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the organization
publishes some of the most exciting first books being written
today—Natasha Trethewey’s Domestic Work was the choice for the inaugural
book prize, and she went on to win the Pulitzer Prize just two books later.
Other winners of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize would be on many lists of
the finest American poetry debuts in the last ten years: Major Jackson, Lyrae
Van Clief-Stefanon, Kyle Dargan, and Ronaldo Wilson, among others. The