Cave Canem fellow Cedric Tillman extricates beauty from the banality of daily life and crafts it into works of art

By Tamryn Spruill

“Sometimes I go through lengthy dry spells and wonder if I’m still a poet,” said Cedric Tillman. ” I think a lot of times a poet doesn’t know if he or she is a poet between poems. Every time you write a new poem, you feel like you get to call yourself a poet again for a few more days.”

Photo by Makia TillmanLife between poems for Cave Canem fellow Cedric Tillman is comprised of roles both mundane and appealing. A husband, a father, a professional editor and a college sports fiend, Tillman is half-everyman, half-eccentric poet. Relying on life – in all its sorrow, glee, banality and excitement – to feed his aspiration, he uses verse to name the specific, but in a way that seems universal.

The muse was awakened in Tillman during his hormonally-charged teen years. In high school, he knew he wanted to put words together like the “dead old white men” of the Romantic era or the British poets of the 17^th century. “I envied (and still envy) them,” Tillman said. “And I beat myself up a lot for being unable to convey meaning within the strictures of forms they used.” It was Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” that made Tillman want to be a poet, but his first love inspired his first poem.

Claiming to have written poems about modified versions of 20 or 30 different women in his life, Cedric Tillman calls God his muse, not the fairer sex. “My muse is the need I believe he gave me to write,” Tillman explained. “Life is my muse and women are muses, of course. They’ve been the subject of a disproportionate amount of my work since I started writing.”

Cedric Tillman rode his muse to an English degree from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 1999 and an MFA in Creative Writing from American University in 2004. During his graduate school years, Tillman transformed from a roving-eyed bachelor into a married man and, eventually, into a father. Today, Tillman’s work focuses less on the angst of love and more on daughter, Charis, who is now three. With the angst of girl troubles behind him, Tillman has been able to switch gears and turn his attention to projects that focus on other themes, like his early years living in rural North Carolina.

Oh, yeah. Cedric Tillman is African-American. And he seems to resent being labeled an “African-American poet” instead of “poet” or “American poet”. In fact, he seems to have little respect for labels in general. Gratefully, it would be nearly impossible to classify poetry by African-Americans as anything homogenous. From slam poetry and the vernacular of Paul Lawrence Dunbar to the disparate talents of Audre Lorde and Cornelius Eady, the poetic landscape of our brown-skinned brothers and sisters is dotted with all of the elements of the seasons, the mountains and the valleys, desert lands and lush greenery.

When forced to identify a quality common to black poets, Tillman mentions the theme of loss. Of black poetry, Tillman said, “It’s frequently aspirational about the future and angry about the past, haunted... by what its creators think we might have been had history been kinder to us... mournful of lost potential and then, [often] within the same poem, reveling in the idea that we’re still here through it all.”

With that said, Cedric Tillman is emphatic about his refusal to categorize himself. While he respects the acknowledgement of the shared past of African-Americans, in his own work he appreciates that it often doesn’t go there, but appeals to “any and all”, regardless of race, gender, nationality or political ideology. “So there are times when I want to just be a male and an American, without the hyphenated prefix,” Tillman said.

”And there are times when I’m moved to remind myself and potential readers that no prefix clashes [more] with ‘American’ like ‘African’, because the marriage of the two was so forcibly arranged.” Yet, Tillman is quick to acknowledge the unspoken pressure he feels to use his work to address issues of the world today as well as the past.

And this is where chains get broken.

The Cave Canem logo portrays the image of a growling dog on a chain. If you look carefully, you notice the chain is broken. The Cave Canem website reports its mission as “to protect the poets and, by breaking the chain... unleash these vital new voices into the literary world.” Cedric Tillman attended the Cave Canem retreat in 2008 at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg under the tutelage of guest writer Ntozake Shange of for colored girls who have committed suicide/when the rainbow is enuf fame.

“At Cave Canem, I felt empowered to take risks I don’t think I might have in the MFA program I attended,” Tillman said.“I brought poems to the Cave Canem workshops with slang and colloquialisms and uses of idiom that I would’ve been more tentative to share with a different audience.”Amongst peers, Tillman felt comfortable engaging in frank discussions about issues related to vernacular and the delivery of black speech without compromising the universality of the work.

“For me, the broken chain represents the absence of self-censorship a black poet might experience in the average MFA program or workshop setting,” Tillman explained. “[And] the chain [itself] is sometimes just feeling or knowing that the likelihood is low that someone who shares your life experiences will be on the receiving end of the work you submit.” But Cave Canem helped him to simply break free from the constraints of daily life which prevent him from writing and exploring ideas – a conundrum faced by most creative types unlucky enough to still be holding down day jobs. Yet, to be viewed as a poet, unencumbered by the burdens of gender or skin color, perhaps would be the ultimate evidence of a shackle broken.

But Cave Canem would provide another kind of stimulus to Cedric Tillman, too. The intensity of the workshop, in the company of 50 other “super-talented, multifaceted and extraordinary African-American artists” prodded Tillman to step up his game to become more assiduous about the process of writing new material and editing, or rehabbing, older works that have potential. Enveloped in a camaraderie that only could be found in such a communally creative environment, Tillman walked away from Cave Canem not only with the feeling of belonging to a new artistic family, but with a restored sense of competition. The work habits of his fellows, along with their rich talents, urged him into becoming a better craftsman of poems. “To not work, to not produce, is like being the weak link in the chain,” Tillman said. “And there’s such a strong sense of family amongst the attendees. Many of us remarked to one another how alone in the world you feel sometimes until you come to this space, where you make friends with kindred spirits from Detroit and LA and Atlanta and Mount Airy, NC and DC and New York and all over.”

Back home in Charlotte, North Carolina, the creative high of being in the company of Cave Canem fellows and receiving guidance from modern day poetry masters waned and gave way to ordinary life. Cedric Tillman returned to a 40-minute daily commute to work and the responsibilities of caring for a family. Before he could fully process the glory of the summer, his mind was filled yet again with the demands of daily living. The quest for just the right word or turn of phrase was relegated to late nights in front of the computer after the house had fallen asleep. And in the breath of his sleeping child, the smile of his devoted wife or the knowing eyes of a grandparent, Tillman finds the muse.

But what’s it all for? Poetry sections are among the smallest in bookstores, so where does the vast portfolio that Tillman is amassing lead? “Hopefully some of the judges of the contests I’m interested in will take an interest in my work,” he said. “Like most writers, I’m looking for an excuse to have more time to write. Very few poets sell enough books to create the space to write that we fantasize about, [but] I believe my poetry is accessible and approachable enough to do better than average sales.”

Cedric Tillman is doing something right. For the third time in four years, he has had a poem selected for publication in Kakalak: Anthology of Carolina Poets. His poem "ram in the bush: Mr. Sturdivant's story" was recently accepted into Kakalak 2009 for publication later in the year. But with poetry readership at dismal lows in the U.S. and overall challenges plaguing the publishing industry, Tillman remains pragmatic on the topic of having his dream career as a paid poet. The dearth of African-American males in the U.S. education system compels him to want to teach one day.

But for the time being, he continues to write. And for a poet who questions the accuracy of the label, Cedric Tillman rises to the occasion.

By Cedric Tillman

The sun makes the evening hot and thick

but he barely sweats.

On cool summer nights

he might burn the gas wall heater on low.

Most days, one of his girls

or the grands from over the river

come to check on him

but they never spend the night.

Momma says they argued

as long as she could remember.

And Grandma yapped back

like the best of ‘em.

When she was 78,

he pushed her down the four steps

that led up to the front door

and put her in the hospital.

When she got out she came to Bible study

and Ms. Johnnie said

if you want I got something

that’ll bark over here and bite over yonder

but Grandma was nothing like that.

It’s hard to tell what hurts him more

The fact that she’s gone

or that she was more fragile,

hard to say

if he truly misses her or simply

finds life inconvenient

without her

Maybe his memories explain

this constant look of pain and frustration

as if he’s trying to revise his life,

trying to save over something

that won’t erase.