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Compliments of the
ASUA bookstore,

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Cornelius Eady's new book,
The Gathering Of My Name,

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from Carnegie Mellon.

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So that will be available
outside after the reading.

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Cornelius has been here
for a couple of days.

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Yesterday, he met with students
at the Poetry Center who

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are in the Honors colloquium.

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And he was talking
about there being

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one line through
American poetry,

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through all our squabbles, and
camps, and schools, and teams.

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Aligned starting
with Anne Bradstreet

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and going through Walt
Whitman and all of them.

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And on a line he called
homemade poetics--

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the necessity for
invention, for us

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to figure out what this American
language of ours can do.

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Of course, Cornelius
Eady continues

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that line of invention.

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And I've been
impressed at how he's

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been able to reinvent his
own poetics with each book

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that he's written, starting with
short poems about the family,

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then spinning off into musical
and metaphoric properties

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of dance.

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And in his new book,
exploring among other things

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what it means to him to
be a Black American poet.

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Eady is the author of
Kartunes; Boom, Boom, Boom;

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Victims of the
Latest Dance Craze,

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which won the Lamont award of
the Academy of American Poets.

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And now, The
Gathering Of My Name.

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He's on the faculty at the
State University of New York

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at Stony Brook, where he
directs the Poetry Center there.

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Please welcome Cornelius Eady.

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[APPLAUSE]

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