Poet Dances with Inanimate Object

By Cornelius Eady b. 1954 Cornelius Eady

for Jim Schley

The umbrella, in this case;

Earlier, the stool, the

Wooden pillars that hold up

the roof.

This guy, you realize,

Will dance with anything—

—He likes the idea.

Then he picks up some lady’s discarded sandals,

Holds them next to his head like sea shells,

Donkey ears.

Nothing,

his body states,

Is safe from the dance of ideas!

Cornelius Eady, “Poet Dances with Inanimate Object” from Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon Uniersity Press, 1997). Copyright © 1985 by Cornelius Eady. Used with the permission of the author.

Source: Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1997)

Biography

Poet and cofounder of Cave Canem, Cornelius Eady has published more than half a dozen volumes of poetry, among them Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (1985), winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; The Gathering of My Name (1991), nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; and Brutal Imagination (2001), a National Book Award finalist. Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems appeared in 2008.

Brutal . . .

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