Compliments of the ASUA bookstore,
Cornelius Eady's new book, The Gathering Of My Name,
from Carnegie Mellon.
So that will be available outside after the reading.
Cornelius has been here for a couple of days.
Yesterday, he met with students at the Poetry Center who
are in the Honors colloquium.
And he was talking about there being
one line through American poetry,
through all our squabbles, and camps, and schools, and teams.
Aligned starting with Anne Bradstreet
and going through Walt Whitman and all of them.
And on a line he called homemade poetics--
the necessity for invention, for us
to figure out what this American language of ours can do.
Of course, Cornelius Eady continues
that line of invention.
And I've been impressed at how he's
been able to reinvent his own poetics with each book
that he's written, starting with short poems about the family,
then spinning off into musical and metaphoric properties
of dance.
And in his new book, exploring among other things
what it means to him to be a Black American poet.
Eady is the author of Kartunes; Boom, Boom, Boom;
Victims of the Latest Dance Craze,
which won the Lamont award of the Academy of American Poets.
And now, The Gathering Of My Name.
He's on the faculty at the State University of New York
at Stony Brook, where he directs the Poetry Center there.
Please welcome Cornelius Eady.
[APPLAUSE]