About the Workshop
I’m a singer/songwriter/poet and I very often get asked the question, “what’s the difference (if any) between the song lyric and the poem?” This workshop will explore that line, what I called “the cousins”. We will listen to and explore various forms–lullaby, ballad, blues, some of the players of that form, both on the page and on the mic, and poems that have been set to music. There will be exercises, but the main idea is to hopefully have a week-long adventure with words and music. This is not a songwriting workshop per se, and you will not need to know how to play an instrument or sing, though if you have one, feel free to bring it along. I’m a big fan of collaboration, and a few of the exercises will involve the class working on writing and setting an original group work to music, or a long gone poet–Whitman, Dickerson, Hughes, etc. At the end of the week we will have a “singing book” which we can decide how best to present what we came up with. Come with a sense of sharing and adventure.
About the Instructor
Poet/Playwright/Songwriter and Cave Canem Co-Founder Cornelius Eady (he/him) was born in Rochester, NY in 1954, and has recently retired from his position as Professor of English and John C. Hodges Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In addition to his teaching duties at UT, from 2021-2022 he served as Interim Director at Poets House, a poetry library and cultural center located in New York City. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; Brutal Imagination; and Hardheaded Weather. He wrote the libretto to Diedra Murray’s opera Running Man, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Theatre in 1999, and his verse play Brutal Imagination won the Oppenheimer Prize in 2001. Eady’s pandemic folk song project Don’t Get Dead, recorded with his Trio, was released in 2021 by June Appal Recording. His work and songs have been featured on NPR, BBC Radio 4 and the PBS Newshour. His awards include the 2025 Wallace Stevens award from the Academy of American Poets, Fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and Lifetime Achievement Awards in Poetry from The Poetry Foundation, The National Book Foundation, Brooklyn Poets, Poets and Writers Foundation, Furious Flower Foundation and the Lannan Foundation.
