Cornelius Eady ~ November 6

We're pleased to have Cornelius Eady visit next week as our Creative Writing Writer-in-Residence for Fall 2008. Please join us for his reading:

Thursday, Nov. 6, 7:00pm in 6191 Helen C. White

Eady's newest collection, Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems is now available. He is also author of Brutal Imagination, a finalist for the National Book Award (2001); the autobiography of a jukebox (1997); You Don't Miss Your Water (1995); The Gathering of My Name (1991), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; BOOM BOOM BOOM (1988); Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (1985), which was chosen by Louise Gluck, Charles Simic, and Philip Booth for the 1985 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and Kartunes (1980).

He is currently the director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame and is a cofounder (with the poet Toi Derricotte) and vice president of Cave Canem, which offers workshops, retreats, and other resources to African-American poets.

"Cornelius Eady leads and then cuts a line like no one else: following the laughter and the compassionate pith of a dauntless imagination, these poems beeline or zig-zag always to the jugular, the dramatic and unarguable revelation of the heart." --June Jordan


Handymen

The furnace wheezes like a drenched lung.
You can't fix it.
The toilet babbles like a speed freak.
You can't fix it.
The fuse box is a nest of rattlers.
You can't fix it.
The screens yawn the bees through.
Your fingers are dumb against the hammer.
Your eyes can't tell plumb from plums.
The frost heaves against the doorjambs,
The ice turns the power lines to brittle candy.
No one told you about how things pop and fizzle,
No one schooled you in spare parts.
That's what the guy says but doesn't say
As he tosses his lingo at your apartment-dweller ears,
A bit bemused, a touch impatient,
After the spring melt has wrecked something, stopped something,
After the hard wind has lifted something away,
After the mystery has plugged the pipes,
That rattle coughs up something sinister.
An easy fix, but not for you.
It's different when you own it,
When it's yours, he says as the meter runs,
Then smiles like an adult.

from Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2008 and reprinted in Best American Poetry 2008, edited by Charles Wright.