About Yusef Komunyakaa: A Profile
Yusef Komunyakaa speaks in a gravelly Southern baritone, tinged with a Cajun flavor that reflects his childhood years in Louisiana. He is a man who chooses his words carefully, splicing his speech with long silences, until his conversation resembles something close to a jazz riff -- very fitting for this acclaimed poet who says "oral language is our first music, and the body is an amplifier."
Music, more specifically radio music, playing from a waist-high, wooden radio in his mother's living room, was Komunyakaa's first link to the world outside his hometown of Bogalusa, Louisiana. Born in 1947, Komunyakaa grew to revere the radio, and it became a shrine for him: he would listen to Louis Armstrong, Dinah Washington, and Mahalia Jackson and feel a connection to something larger than the rituals of sports and hunting in his own rural town. The jazz and blues Komunyakaa heard as a child have gone on to inform much of his nine published books of poetry. Not afraid to confront complex moral issues, much of Komunyakaa's work embraces the duality of despair and hope, and music often provides the panacea. All kinds of musicians show up to play: Otis Redding, John Coltrane, Ray Charles, Charles Mingus, and Thelonius Monk, to name a few. The result is a celebration of African American heritage and culture.
In 1994 Komunyakaa received the Pulitzer Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, and the William Faulkner Prize from Université de Rennes for
Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, a collection that prompted many to deem him the progenitor of a wholly new poetic vernacular. Fiercely autobiographical, the spare poems in the book deftly interweave surrealistic imagery, montage, and folk idiom. They offer detailed glimpses of Komunyakaa's rural upbringing, his identity as an African American, as well as his experience in the jungles of Vietnam. Komunyakaa's lines are consistently short and unrhymed, strung together with consonance to arrive at a unique syncopation. The compression and jazz-inspired enjambment create a music-like tension:
Heat lightning jumpstarts the slow
afternoon & a syncopated rainfall
peppers the tinroof like Philly Joe
Jones' brushes reaching for a dusky
backbeat across the high hat. Rhythm
like cells multiplying . . . language &
notes made flesh. Accents & stresses,
almost sexual. Pleasure's knot; to wrestle
the mind down to unrelenting white space,
to fill each room with spring's contagious
changes. Words & Music . . .
-- from "Changes"
Growing up in Bogalusa in the 1950's was not easy for Komunyakaa. He describes it as "a typical Southern town: one paper mill that dominated the place, and a public library that did not admit blacks." The oldest of six children, his relationship with his father became "a kind of contest early on" -- one which Komunyakaa worked hard to win. His father, a carpenter, adhered to a "black Calvinist illusion that menial labor could lead to great heights." Komunyakaa took two after-school jobs on the side and spent most of his hours "in far-off mental landscapes" trying to "daydream myself away from the place."
In retrospect, he supposes daydreaming, as well as being a coping mechanism, was his first important creative act -- one that may have kept him alive. Bogalusa was the backdrop for an active Ku Klux Klan. In "Fog Galleon," Komunyakaa writes: "I press against the taxicab / Window. I'm back here, interfaced / With a dead phosphorescence; / The whole town smells / Like the world's oldest anger." Komunyakaa considers a James Baldwin quote about racism as a perfect mirror to his own childhood: "if a black boy, by the time he's fourteen years old, doesn't know the score, there's no way he can survive."
The only problem, as Komunyakaa sees it, is that he never really learned the score. He never knew how precarious his life was in Louisiana -- a place where race was "too important, and caused so much tension," a place where you sat "in the back of the bus, and there wasn't a black policeman." His grandmothers, with whom he has remained very close, tried to explain "the dos and the don'ts" of life in the South. They also stressed to him the importance of his family name. People have often assumed Komunyakaa's name implies he is Muslim, and during the 1970's, he did nothing to dispel the notion. He was drawn to the religion and read its literature. However, the name was actually brought to America by Komunyakaa's grandfather, a stowaway, on a ship from Trinidad.
The first book Komunyakaa found time to read as a boy was the Bible -- which he read twice in its entirety. He cannot underestimate its effect on his own writing: "The hypnotic Biblical cadence brought me close to the texture of language, to the importance of music and metaphor." After Poe, Tennyson, Shakespeare, the Harlem Renaissance writers, and Gwendolyn Brooks, he also got his hands on works by James Baldwin, and even wrote a poem for his graduating high school class: one hundred lines in rhyme.
Komunyakaa left Bogalusa briefly for Phoenix and then Puerto Rico, but within a couple of years, after basic training and Infantry OCS, he was on an airplaine to Vietnam, where he served as an information specialist and later an editor for the military newspaper
The Southern Cross. Politically against the war and its senseless violence, Komunyakaa had thought of going AWOL. However, the idea of "bearing witness" lured him. Once he arrived, "the pressures of survival were so woven into who I was, into who we are as humans, that if placed against a war, one reacts to survive." Only in retrospect did Komunyakaa realize how dangerous his tour in Vietnam was: "Every time anything happened within the area of operation, I found myself on a chopper, out to the action."
Before returning home Komunyakaa received the Bronze Star for his duty in Vietnam. However, he preferred not to talk about the war with anyone. He enrolled in the University of Colorado in 1973 and took a creative writing class with Dr. Alex Blackburn; he has been writing ever since. After a double-major in English and sociology, and a last-minute decision not to pursue a Ph.D. in psychology, Komunyakaa went on to get an M.A. in creative writing from Colorado State. At this point, Komunyakaa knew he needed more time to hone his craft and headed to the University of California, Irvine, to pursue an M.F.A. During this time he read widely: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Paul Celan, Aimé Césaire, Baudelaire, the French Surrealists, Jean Toomer, Robert Hayden, Bob Kaufman, Helene Johnson, and Amiri Baraka. He also kept developing his musical ear-listening to what he calls "world music": jazz, blues, classical, Latin, as well as others.
He published his first chapbook,
Dedications and Other Dark Horses, in 1977 and his second,
Lost in the Bonewheel Factory, in 1979. By 1981 Komunyakaa had received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the National Endowment for the Arts. His next book,
Copacetic, an evocative collection of jazz-inspired poems examining his childhood, came out with Wesleyan University Press in 1984 and gained resounding praise from reviewers. His fourth volume,
I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head, which followedin 1986, began to tap into the violence of Vietnam: "I am a man. I've scuffed / in mudholes, broken teeth in a grinning skull / like the moon behind bars" (from "Unnatural State of the Unicorn"). The book gained national attention and won the San Francisco Poetry Center Award, but it was not until
Dien Cai Dau in 1988 that Komunyakaa gained full access to his Vietnam experiences.
Dien Cai Dau, which means "crazy" in Vietnamese, stands as a watershed. Fourteen years after returning from Vietnam, instead of merely "writing around the war," Komunyakaa finally "uncapped a hidden place" inside himself. "I tend to tell people that we are walking reservoirs of images. We take in everything, even what we're not overly conscious of, it's still there, pulsating in the psyche." Komunyakaa was standing on a ladder, renovating his house in New Orleans, when poems about Vietnam started spilling out.
The Village Voice wrote that
Dien Cai Dau "drove a shaft of light into the inarticulate spectacle of the Vietnam War." The poems grapple with the numbing violence of the war and with the frustrations of black soldiers in predominantly white platoons. Empathy with the enemy is also explored, as in "Starlight Scope Myopia," where the speaker of the poem looks to the other side: ". . . Caught in the infrared / what are they saying? / / Are they talking about women / or calling the Americans
/ / beaucoup dien cai dau?/ One of them is laughing. / You want to place a finger / / to his lips & say 'Shhhh.' . . ."
In
Magic City, published in 1992 by Wesleyan, Komunyakaa turned back to his youth, revisiting it with an unflinching eye. The result is poetry that refuses to offer a simple reprieve for our history of racism, poetry that insists we pay witness to life in all its contradictions. At times, these poems are achingly personal, as in "My Father's Love Letters," where the speaker must transcribe letters to his mother for his illiterate father: "On Fridays he'd open a can of Jax / After coming home from the mill, / & ask me to write a letter to my mother / Who sends postcards of desert flowers / Taller than men. He would beg, / Promising to never beat her / Again . . ."
In 1982 Komunyakaa began teaching at the University of New Orleans. He also worked as a visiting poet for the public school system, teaching enthusiastic fourth and fifth graders that poetry "is a sharing of feelings and ideas." It was in New Orleans that he met his future wife, Australian fiction writer Mandy Sayer. They then moved in 1985 to Bloomington, where he was a professor of English at Indiana University until 1996. Recently, his life has been considerably more peripatetic. He completed a year-long stint as the Holloway Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and is now on a one-year stopover at Washington University in St. Louis before a permanent position at Princeton University begins next year.
Komunyakaa is not choosy about when he lets his muse descend; he often has enough subject matter to work on three collections simultaneously. He prefers to write every day. He finds the early morning full of "very surprising moments," and jots down notes on a pad beside his bed upon waking. His method is inclusive: he first writes absolutely everything down. "The work is driven by a certain cadence. The whole shaping of the poem becomes important later on-going back and cutting, and thinking about each line as an increment of the whole, and each word as an increment within the line." A new book,
Thieves of Paradise, will come out this fall from Wesleyan.
Currently, Komunyakaa is hard at work on a long collection of poems concerning "the African diaspora." Entitled
Pleasure Dome, these poems go "hand in hand with the excavation of black America" taking place today. Frustrated that very few people recognize famous black figures like Alexandre Dumas, Ira Aldridge, St. Benedict the Moor, Alessandro de Medici, Jean-Louis, Hatshepsut, Zenobia, Mary Seacole, Sosthene Mortenol, and Makeda, nor these men and women's important roles in history, Komunyakaa hopes the new poems will paint the missing colors in "the larger canvas" of history and race.
During his lifetime Komunyakaa concedes that a great deal of progress has been made in the context of race. He believes apartheid existed not only in South Africa, but also "right in this country, and is still here to an extent," but that there has been substantial change, especially in the South. Guardedly optimistic, he believes now is the time for America "to face up to what's happening and to move forward." Komunyakaa's poems will "continue to confront the fear" he sees in society, while simultaneously celebrating life. He writes because he needs to. Whether he's "having a good time, or trying to figure out more desperate questions that plague the psyche," he always finds himself scribbling notes down. He couldn't stop writing if he wanted to.