blueprints

We Were Here, and We Are Here | 75
Cave Canem Legacy series organizers archived conversations with the black
poets of the generation broadly interpreted as “elder,” or, better, “foundational”:
Derek Walcott, Lucille Clifton, Michael Harper, Yusef Komunyakaa,
Ntozake Shange, Sonia Sanchez, and others. From these conversations, we
now have a body of extensive interviews that is a tremendous research
resource to present and future scholars and those interested in American
poetry and African American culture. The Legacy series also says, indisputably,
“We were here, and we are here.” These publications are part of the
way that Cave Canem has consciously archived itself and, in so doing,
archived a piece of American literary history that might otherwise be insufficiently
remembered.
Cave Canem has consciously made room for highly divergent spokes of
black aesthetics and identity. The community’s ethos is, to borrow Lucille
Clifton’s words, to live not in “either/or” but in “and/but.” Derricotte and
Eady have insistently modeled “safe space” for all. The space made for the
apparent differences among us makes space for the differences within us,
each of us, as we move through the journeys of our lives and our works. All
of the prismatic faces of blackness show themselves at different times and in
different degrees. So the work itself evolves, one hopes, and gives us radiant,
multivocal black poetry in the new millennium.
If there are any secrets to the organization’s success, they are these:
1. Do it for free. Though it is crucial that poets be paid for their labor
and that overworked people of color shouldn’t be expected to do
more for free, sometimes doing it for free means you move with
the energy of the right idea with the faith that you can work out
the details later.
sometimes doing it for free means you move
with the energy of the right idea with the faith that
you can work out the details later.
2. To quote Haki Madhubuti, “Run towards fear.” By this I mean that
a community that faces its divergences and interprets multivocality
as a power source rather than Babel can build on that energy and