Apr

19

All Jazzed Up: Yusef Komunyakaa (Part 1)

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

April 19, 2007 |

On April 29th, 2007, poet Yusef Komunyakaa will celebrate his sixtieth birthday. His career as a poet began more than thirty years ago, and his first book Dedications and Other Darkhorses (R.M.C.A.J. Books), was published in 1977. Since then he’s become not only one of the best poets writing today but also one of the most prolific, having written fourteen volumes of poetry, the most recent being Taboo (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004), the first book of a trilogy, as well as a verse play of Gilgamesh (Wesleyan University Press, 2006), written with Chad Garcia, adding his own voice to the long line of that epic’s interpreters. Neon Vernacular (Wesleyan University Press, 1993), a collection of new and selected poems, won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize. The volumes that followed, Thieves of Paradise (Wesleyan University Press, 1998) and Talking Dirty To The Gods (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), as well as Pleasure Dome: New And Collected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2001) not only added to his growing body of work but continued taking it in new directions. Talking Dirty To The Gods in particular was a major departure: while many of his poems are uninterrupted columns of free verse, this volume consisted of 132 poems, each one four stanzas of four lines, with numerous classical allusions as well as poems about slime mold, raccoons, and maggots. The poems in this volume also tend to be less personal than much of his other work, although one unifying factor of his work is the influence of jazz. While it’s generally regarded as improvisational, the tradition of jazz also comes from craftsmanship and practice that gives its practitioners a solid footing before they make that leap. It’s this quality of well-crafted improvisation that makes his poems so fun to read. Here’s Meditations In A Swine Yard:

A god isn’t worth the salt
In our bread if we can’t
Stamp our feet & shake balled fist
At eaters of the brightest insects

On their first day here.
Sometimes we must tug him out
Into the hog’s bloody mud.

His beauty is our blue
Derision, like a child banging
Her ragdoll against the floor, Calling for Daddy.
A god isn’t worth
A drop of water in the hell of his good

Imagination, if we can’t curse
Sunsets & threaten to forsake him
In his storehouse of belladonna,
Tiger hornets, & snakebites.

He’s also a powerful and passionate speaker. I was lucky enough to hear his keynote address to the Millenial Gathering of the Writers of the New South, in which he talked about William Faulkner’s story “A Rose For Emily” and then, as a special treat, read some of his poems.

Yusef Komunyakaa was born James Willie Brown in Bogalusa, Louisiana, on April 29, 1947. His great-grandmother “slipped into this country from the West Indies”, as he explains in an interview with Muna Asali in his book Blue Note: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries (University of Michigan Press, 2000).  In the same interview he explains his decision to change his name, saying, “I had to go back and accept my history in order to take steps forward.”

His own personal history includes a journey from Bogalusa to Vietnam, where he served as a correspondent for U.S. Army publications. The experience affected him profoundly; he began to write poetry shortly after his return to the United States, but it was not until his sixth, and perhaps most widely-read book, Dien Cai Dau (Wesleyan University Press, 1988) that he dedicated an entire book to the subject of Vietnam. It was a staggeringly powerful book, and relentless, opening with the poem Camouflaging The Chimera, and these lines:

We tied branches to our helmets,
We painted our faces & rifles
with mud from the riverbank,

blades of grass hung from the pockets
of our tiger suits. We wove
ourselves into the terrain,
content to be a hummingbird’s target.

(Listen to Komunyakaa read this poem.)

Angela M. Salas, in her book-length study of Komunyakaa’s poetry, Flashback Through the Heart (Susquehanna University Press, 2004), writes about Komunyakaa’s three poems that address the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., which occurred while he was serving in Vietnam. The event had a serious impact on black soldiers not only because they were serving in a foreign country while in their home towns segregation was still alive and well, but white soldiers also raised confederate flags at Da Nang and burned crosses at Cam Rahn Bay. Komunyakaa effectively captures the complex and difficult emotions in his poems Hanoi Hannah, The One-legged Stool, and Report From The Skull’s Diorama. These poems stand as a solemn testament to the experiences of soldiers who were serving a military that, if it didn’t condone such behavior, allowed it, and fighting for a country where they would, on returning home, still be subjected to segregation.

There is hope in the end. The book’s final poem is about Komunyakaa standing in front of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. The complex feelings this evokes are effectively captured in the poem’s  concrete details:

Facing It

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn’t,
dammit: No tears.
I’m stone. I’m flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way–the stone lets me go.
I turn that way–I’m inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet’s image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I’m a window.
He’s lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.

(Listen to Komunyakaa read this poem.)

This does not mean that Vietnam is behind him, however. His book Thieves of Paradise has a section titled “Debriefing Ghosts”, which includes the prose poem Nude Interrogation. As a woman undresses in front of him in preparation for making love, she asks, “Did you kill anyone over there?…Did you use an M-16, a handgrenade, a bayonet, or your own two strong hands pressed against that little bird in the throat?” He gives the only answer he can.


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