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Books by Yusef Komunyakaa
I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head
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Dien Cai Dau
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Magic City /
Neon Vernacular
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Toys
in a Field
Thieves of Paradise /
Talking Dirty to
the Gods / Pleasure
Dome /
Jazz Poetry Anthology /
The Second Set /
Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy
Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and
Commentaries
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* * *
Yusef Komunyakaa--born 1947 and raised in Bogalusa, Louisiana--served in Vietnam as an information specialist, saw
combat, and received the Bronze Star. A graduate of the
University of Colorado, he also received master's degrees from
the University of California, Irvine, and Colorado State
University. After teaching at the University of New Orleans,
Komunyakaa was a professor at Indiana University for over ten
years, and, in the fall of 1997, he began teaching at Princeton
University.
more bio * *
* * * Yusef Komunyakaa is a musical
poet . . . . In
Blue Notes, a collection of his interviews and
occasional prose, there is a short statement about Komunyakaa's
relationship to jazz music, with the instructive title "Shape and
Tonal Equilibrium." He insists, fairly enough, that "As an
African American poet . . . I resist being conveniently stereotyped as a
jazz poet." But jazz is nonetheless a primary inspiration for his
technique: "Jazz . . . has been the one thing that gives
symmetry—shape and tonal equilibrium—to my poetry." It provides a
way to unify the eclectic references and "tonal insinuations"
that crowd his poems. In other words, what Komunyakaa takes from jazz is
improvisation: "I learned from jazz that I could write anything
into a poem."
Talking Dirty Blue Notes Reviews * *
* * * There's a
synthesizing erudition at work in Komunyakaa's poems that makes for some
surprising linkages: a poem about the convict-Blues man Leadbelly morphs
into a poem about that other famed convict artist, Villon; in another
effort the ghosts of Whitman, Billie Holiday, and Crazy Horse commune
and harmonize on a New Orleans street corner. It's as though the
associational play at work in Komunyakaa's metaphors--which have the
oddball but exact quality of surrealism at its best, as when a young
crack dealer approaches "walking on air / solid as the Memnon
Colossi"--can also be found in the way he makes use of literary and
musical allusions.
Komunyakaa's
prosody gives a montage-like pacing to these effects: he favors short
lines, few of them longer than three-beats, and surprising enjambments.
He has an aversion to articles and his unexpected verb choices often
have a jarring resonance. Even when he is working in forms such as the
prose poem, his writing has a jittery and hyper-kinetic quality. As with
Merwin and Creeley, those two other masters of the short line, he's
found a prosody so characteristic that it's hard to mistake one of his
stanzas for anyone else's.
PLEASURE DOME |
