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Notable African American Writers

Yusef Komunyakaa

by Danny Robinson, S. Thomas Mack, Robert C. Evans

(James Willie Brown)

Poet

Born: Bogalusa, Louisiana; April 29, 1947

POETRY: Dedications and Other Darkhorses, 1977; Lost in the Bonewheel Factory, 1979; Copacetic, 1984; I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head, 1986; Toys in the Field, 1986; Dien Cai Dau, 1988; February in Sydney, 1989; Magic City, 1992; Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, 1993; Thieves of Paradise, 1998; Talking Dirty to the Gods, 2000; Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems, 2001; Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part One, 2004; Gilgamesh: A Verse Play, 2006 (concept and dramaturgy by Chad Gracia); Warhorses: Poems, 2008; The Chameleon Couch: Poems, 2011; Testimony: A Tribute to Charlie Parker: with New and Selected Jazz Poems, 2013; The Emperor of Water Clocks, 2015.

NONFICTION: Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries, 1999 (Radiclani Clytus, editor); Covenant: Scenes From an African American Church, 2007 (photographs by Tyagan Miller; essay by Komunyakaa); Condition Red: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries, 2017 (Radiclani Clytus, editor).

EDITED TEXTS: The Jazz Poetry Anthology, 1991 (with Sascha Feinstein); The Second Set: The Jazz Poetry Anthology, Volume 2, 1996 (with Feinstein).

TRANSLATIONS: The Insomnia of Fire, 1995 (with Martha Collins, of poetry by Nguyen Quang Thieu).

OTHER: Slip Knot: An Opera in Two Acts, 2000 (Music by T.J. Anderson; Komunyakaa; Based on a Historical Paper by T. H. Breen).

Achievements

Many readers, critics, and fellow poets have long recognized Yusef Komunyakaa as a major poet of his generation. His poems about the Vietnam War place him among the finest writers who have explored this difficult terrain. His use of jazz and blues rhythms places him in the tradition of poet Langston Hughes and the best Southern writers. Of his many awards and honors, perhaps the most impressive is the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Neon Vernacular, which also won the Kingsley Tufts Award and the William Faulkner Prize. Thieves of Paradise was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Komunyakaa has also won the Thomas Forcade Award and the Hanes Poetry Prize. In 1999, he was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

He has been awarded creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the Louisiana Arts Council. He has served as a judge for numerous poetry competitions and has been on the advisory board for the Encyclopedia of American Poetry (1998, 2001). His work has appeared in all the major poetry journals, as well as national magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly and The New Republic. One indication of Komunyakaa’s appeal is the number of diverse anthologies that include his work. He appears repeatedly in the annual The Best American Poetry, collections of verse about Vietnam, and numerous periodicals.

Photo by James Keyser, courtesy of Getty Images

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In 2001 he received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for extraordinary lifetime accomplishments and in 2011 was granted the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. He was named the 11th State Poet of New York and his books Thieves of Paradise, Talking Dirty to the Gods, and The Chameleon Couch were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the latter was shortlisted for the 2012 International Griffin Poetry Prize.

Biography

The oldest of five children, Yusef Komunyakaa had a strained relationship with his father, which he vividly chronicled years later in a fourteen-sonnet sequence titled “Songs for My Father,” which appears in Neon Vernacular. The Bogalusa of Komunyakaa’s childhood was a rural community in southern Louisiana that held few opportunities economically or culturally, especially for a young black man. The main industry was the single paper mill, one that turned “workers into pulp,” according to one poem. There was a racially charged atmosphere. The public library admitted only whites; the Ku Klux Klan was still active. In “Fog Galleon,” Komunyakaa writes of these difficulties:

I press against the taxicab

Window. I’m black here, interfaced

With a dead phosphorescence;

The whole town smells

Like the world’s oldest anger.

Daydreaming and reading were ways of escaping and coping with a slow life. Daydreaming, which Komunyakaa now sees as an important creative act of his youth, is evident in his early identification with his grandfather’s West Indian heritage. He took the name Komunyakaa from his grandfather, who, according to family legend, came to America as a stowaway from Trinidad. In the poem “Mismatched Shoes,” Komunyakaa writes of this identification:

The island swelled in his throat & calypso leapt into the air,

I picked up those mismatched shoes & slipped into his skin. Komunyakaa.

His blues, African fruit on my tongue.

The Bible and a set of supermarket encyclopedias were his first books. He has noted the influence of the Bible’s “hypnotic cadence,” sensitizing him to the importance of music and metaphor. James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name (1961), discovered in a church library when Komunyakaa was sixteen, inspired him to become a writer. Jazz and blues radio programs from New Orleans, heard on the family radio, formed a third important influence. Komunyakaa speaks fondly of those early days of listening to jazz and acknowledges its importance in his work.

After graduation from high school in 1965, Komunyakaa traveled briefly and in 1969 enlisted in the army. He was sent to Vietnam. He served as a reporter on the front lines and later as editor of The Southern Cross, a military newspaper. The experience of being flown in by helicopter to observe and then report on the war effort laid the groundwork for the powerful fusion of passion and detached observation that is a hallmark of his war poems, written years later. He was awarded the Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam.

Upon being discharged, Komunyakaa enrolled at the University of Colorado, where he majored in English and sociology, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1975. A creative writing course there inspired him to pursue a master’s degree in creative writing at Colorado State University, which he earned in 1978. He received his master of fine arts degree from the University of California, Irvine, in 1980. During this period he published limited editions of his first two short books of poems, Dedications and Other Darkhorses and Lost in the Bonewheel Factory.

Komunyakaa taught poetry briefly in public school before joining the creative writing faculty at the University of New Orleans, where he met Mandy Sayer, whom he married in 1985. That year he became an associate professor at Indiana University at Bloomington, where in 1989 he was named Lilly Professor of Poetry. He later became a professor in the Council of Humanities and Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.

Analysis: Poetry

Because Yusef Komunyakaa’s poetry is so rich in imagery, allusion, metaphor, musical rhythms, and ironic twists, it possesses a freshness and a bittersweet bite whether the subject is the raw beauty of nature or the passions and follies of human nature. He has said that poetry does not work for him without “surprises.” His poetry surprises both in its technique—the juxtaposition of disparate images and sudden shifts in perspective—and in its subjects. Generally his poems have a sensual quality even though the subject matter varies greatly: childhood memories, family feuds, race, war, sex, nature, jazz. Scholar Radiclani Clytus commented early in Komunyakaa’s career that the poet’s interpretation of popular mythology and legend gave readers “alternative access to cultural lore. Epic human imperfections, ancient psychological profiles, and the haunting resonance of the South are now explained by those who slow drag to Little Willie John and rendezvous at MOMA.” Komunyakaa’s comment that “a poem is both confrontation and celebration” aptly captures the essence of his own work.

Copacetic

Two early books, the first ones published by a major university press, introduce many of Komunyakaa’s subjects and techniques and were the first to win him critical acclaim. Copacetic focuses primarily on memories of childhood and the persuasive influence of music. The narrator speaks of “a heavy love for jazz,” and in fact musical motifs run throughout Komunyakaa’s poetry. He has compared poetry to jazz and blues in its emphasis on feeling and tone, its sense of surprise and discovery, and its diversity within a general structure. Poems such as “Copacetic Mingus,” “Elegy for Thelonious,” and “Untitled Blues” convey the power of this kind of music, in which “Art & life bleed into each other.” Depending on the poem, music can serve as escape, therapy, or analogy. Often it is combined with richly sensual images, as in “Woman, I Got the Blues.”

I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head and Dien Cai Dau

I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head continues this motif while adding new subjects and themes. The ugly side of race relations in the United States is suggested in several poems. Komunyakaa also begins to explore the pain of the Vietnam War. “For the Walking Dead” is a moving account of “boyish soldiers on their way to the front” who seek respite with Veronica in a local bar.

The past wounds and present scars of the Vietnam War are the subjects of Dien Cai Dau, whose title means “crazy” in Vietnamese. The powerful yet exquisitely sensitive—and sensual— way in which Komunyakaa conveys the pain, loss, and psychic confusion of his experience in Vietnam found a receptive audience. Most present a moment or a reflection in a richly nuanced but undogmatic way. In “We Never Know” he juxtaposes a delicate image of dancing with a woman with the reality of an enemy in the field, whom he kills and whose body he then approaches. The moral ambiguity of the moment is highlighted by the tenderness with which the soldier regards the body:

When I got to him, a blue halo of flies had already claimed him. I pulled the crumbled photograph from his fingers. There’s no other way to say this: I fell in love. The morning cleared again, except for a distant mortar & somewhere choppers taking off. I slid the wallet into his pocket & turned him over, so he wouldn’t be kissing the ground.

Poems such as “Tu Du Street” and “Thanks” are even more complex in their multiple, often conflicting, images. The former presents the bizarre reality of racial prejudice even in Vietnam, “where only machine gun fire bring us together.” The women with whom the soldiers seek solace provide one common denominator:

There’s more than a nation inside us, as black & white soldiers touch the same lovers minutes apart, tasting each other’s breath, without knowing these rooms run into each other like tunnels leading to the underworld.

In “Thanks” the narrator gives thanks to an unspecified being for the myriad coincidences that saved him one day in the jungle as he “played some deadly/ game for blind gods.” The poet provides no resolution or closure, just a series of powerful, haunting images:

Again, thanks for the dud hand grenade tossed at my feet outside Chu Lai. I’m still falling through its silence.

Sunday Afternoons

“Sunday Afternoons” is one of a number of poems in which Komunyakaa explores childhood memories. In this case, it is the remembrance of how his parents would expel their four boys from the house in order to have the space and time for sexual relations.

The poem is divided roughly into two parts. The first four stanzas focus on the collective experience of the speaker and his siblings as they run wild outside the house, intoxicated by their temporary freedom from parental restraint. The final three stanzas focus on the speaker, the individual “I” of the poem, and his personal quest for knowledge.

In the first part of the poem, the children unconsciously replicate the behavior of their parents, who indulge in their libidinous urges behind “latched” doors. For their part, the children, “drunk” on the tart juice of crabapples and the reddish fruit of the hawthorn, act on natural impulse, like birds flying through green briers to reach their nests. Yet, like their parents, the adult nest builders within the shuttered house, Komunyakaa and his siblings instinctively seem to know that they possess the power to destroy what they have made. “There in the power of holding each egg” taken from an unprotected nest or in the lesson to be learned from “the hawk’s slow, deliberate arc” rests the flip side of humanity’s creative urges.

The children know that there is a thin line between cries of passion and shouts of anger, the ear-piercing utterances of a “Saturday-night argument about trust and money.” From the auditory evidence provided by their own parents, they realize that they “were born between Oh Yeah & Goddammit.”

In the second part of the poem, while the speaker’s brothers back away from the house and the “cries fused with gospel on the radio,” Komunyakaa presses harder against the screen door, peering into the interior of the family home. The boy seeks greater knowledge, the light of truth, but what he discovers is the reflection of a “dresser mirror” cut in half by the bedroom door “like a moon held prisoner in the house.” Moonlight is reflected light, and the reader is left to wonder if the troubles of the boy’s parents prefigure whatever adult relationships he himself may have in store.

Thirteen Kinds of Desire

Komunyakaa has long been fascinated by and acknowledged for his interest in the fusion of poetry and music. With poet and jazz saxophonist Sascha Feinstein, for example, Komunyakaa edited two volumes of The Jazz Poetry Anthology (1991 and 1996), and many of his own poems have been incorporated in larger musical compositions, such as Fire Water Paper: A Vietnam Oratorio, composed by Elliot Goldenthal in 1995 and featuring two poems from Dien Cai Dau.

Komunyakaa’s own poems are often filled with musical allusions or shaped like musical compositions. In the latter regard, critics have noted the poet’s use of short lines whose rhythm is often unbalanced, a condition reminiscent of syncopated jazz riffs. Good examples of the poet’s style can be found in the thirteen poems that he expressly wrote as song lyrics for a collaboration with American jazz vocalist Pamela Knowles. Between 1995, when he met Knowles at a jazz festival in Australia, and 2000, when the recording Thirteen Kinds of Desire was released, Komunyakaa penned thirteen pieces whose “jagged symmetry” he felt would translate effectively into song.

A representative selection, one reprinted in Komunyakaa’s Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries (1999), is “New Blues,” which begins with the stanza: “We are hurting/ We are dying/ For a new blues/ One that doesn’t rhyme/ With worn-out shoes.” This desire to produce updated lyrics for an old musical style rooted in the imagery of farm labor and urban poverty Komunyakaa himself satisfies with reference to problematic contemporary issues, such as the power of multinational corporations, the threat of computer viruses, and the homogenizing pervasiveness of pop-culture icons such as Batman. The poem is a good example of the poet’s characteristic tendency to merge levels of diction, formal and informal, and periods, past and present, to create a “nouveau blues/ To underline/ What’s left behind.”

Thieves of Paradise

Komunyakaa won an Academy of Arts and Letters Award given to writers with “progressive and experimental tendencies.” This book is an example of this artist’s ability to experiment with form and ease the reader into accepting poetry that is unfamiliar. Much of the subject matter is familiar—the grim reality of war and its psychological aftermath, the body’s hungers and betrayals, the allure of memory and imagination—but the presentation is fresh and intriguing. “Palimpsest” is a seemingly random, kaleidoscopic series of four-quatrain poems that move from “slavecatchers” to tanks in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to the backwoods to jazz musician Count Basie. By confronting uncomfortable truths, the poet writes, “I am going to teach Mr. Pain/ to sway, to bop.”

Several, such as “Nude Interrogation,” “Phantasmagoria,” and “Frontispiece,” are prose poems that force one to rethink the nature of the form, while Komunyakaa’s images work on the emotions. “The Glass Ark” is a five-page dialogue between two paleontologists.

This collection includes the libretto “Testimony,” about Charlie Parker, written in twenty-eight fourteen-line stanzas. It captures the reckless allure of the man and the time:

Yardbird could blow a woman’s strut across the room . . . pushed moans through brass. . . . High heels clicking like a high hat.

Black-beaded flapper. Blue satin Yardbird, he’d blow pain & glitter.

Talking Dirty to the Gods

This volume stands apart from earlier works in its adherence to a strict, traditional form. Each of its 132 poems consists of sixteen lines, in four unrhymed quatrains. Much of the appeal of this collection stems from the freedom and friction Komunyakaa creates by presenting his unusual images and bizarre juxtapositions in a tightly controlled format. The gods he discusses are taken from the ancient and the modern worlds, the exotic and the commonplace. Whether discussing the maggot (“Little/ Master of earth”), Bellerophon, or Joseph Stalin, he is able to humanize his subject enough to win at least some sympathy from the reader.

Neon Vernacular

Neon Vernacular won considerable critical acclaim as well as the Pulitzer Prize. In addition to culling the best from earlier books, it adds gems of its own, including the unrhymed sonnet sequence “Songs for My Father,” fourteen powerful poems that chronicle the poet’s complicated relationship with his dad. In “At the Screen Door,” in which a former soldier murders because he cannot separate the past from the present, Komunyakaa returns to the psychological aftermath of Vietnam.

Pleasure Dome

The publication of Pleasure Dome led to laudatory reviews not only for its poetic achievement but also for its high purpose: “Nearly every page of these collected poems will pull you from your expectations, tell you something you did not know, and leave you better off than you were,” said the reviewer for Library Journal, while Booklist praised Komunyakaa’s “fluent creative energy, and his passion for living the examined life.” Pleasure Dome is an extraordinarily rich collection of more than 350 poems. All earlier books except Talking Dirty to the Gods are represented. There is also a section titled “New Poems” and another, “Early Uncollected.” Among the new poems is “Tenebrae,” a moving meditation on Richard Johnson, the black Indiana University music professor who committed suicide. The lines “You try to beat loneliness/ out of a drum” are woven throughout the poem with a cumulative, haunting effect.

Other Literary Forms

Despite his impressive poetic output—a book of poems every few years since 1977 and publication in all the major poetry journals—Yusef Komunyakaa has not been content to stay within these traditional confines. He has made a number of sound and video recordings of his readings of his work. One of the more interesting of these is Love Notes from the Madhouse, a live reading performed with a jazz ensemble led by John Tchicai. He has written two libretti, “Slip Knot,” with T. J. Anderson, about an eighteenth-century slave, and “Testimony,” about jazz great Charlie Parker. In Thirteen Kinds of Desire, vocalist Pamela Knowles sings lyrics by Komunyakaa. Of his fight against traditional poetic boundaries, he notes: “I am always pushing against the walls [that categories] create. I will always do this Theater and song won’t be the last of me.”

Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries, edited by Radiclani Clytus, is an eclectic mix of seven interviews with the poet from 1990 to 2000, as well as twelve short impressionistic essays by him and five new poems with commentary by the author. With Sascha Feinstein, he edited The Jazz Poetry Anthology. Together with Martha Collins, Komunyakaa translated the work of Vietnamese poet Nguyen Quang Thieu. His own poetry has been translated into Vietnamese as well as Russian, Korean, Czech, French, and Italian.

Bibliography

1 

Conley, Susan. “About Yusef Komunyakaa: A Profile.” Ploughshares 23, no. 1 (Spring, 1997): 202-207. Conley gives a concise overview of the poet’s career, his central themes and motifs, his views on race relations in America, and his usual method of writing poetry.

2 

Gordon, Fran. “Yusef Komunyakaa: Blue Note in a Lyrical Landscape.” Poets & Writers 28, no. 6 (November/December, 2000): 26-33. Gordon terms Komunyakaa “one of America’s most receptive minds” and “one of its most original voices.” This interview provides a glimpse into the poet’s thoughts on his background and early reading, his interest in nature and mythology, and his use of imagery and music in his poetry.

3 

Gotera, Vincente. “Depending on the Light: Yusef Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau.” In America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War, edited by Owen Gilman. New York: Garland, 1990. Komunyakaa differs from other war poets in his “devotion to highly textured language”; he refuses “to present Vietnam to the reader as exotica,” but rather “underline[s] the existential reality” of his experience. That same year Gotera published an interview with the poet in Callaloo; he includes Komunyakaa’s poetry in his 1994 Radical Visions: Poetry by Vietnam Veterans, published by the University of Georgia Press.

4 

Hanshaw, Shirley A. James, ed. Conversations with Yusef Komunyakaa. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2010. An important collection of numerous interviews covering various topics, works, and periods in Komunyakaa’s career.

5 

Hedges, Chris. “A Poet of Suffering, Endurance and Healing.” The New York Times, July 8, 2004, p. B2. An article that focuses on Komunyakaa’s childhood and path to his later position at Princeton University.

6 

Komunyakaa, Yusef. “Still Negotiating with the Images: An Interview with Yusef Komunyakaa.” Interview by William Baer. Kenyon Review 20, nos. 3/4 (Summer/Fall, 1998): 5-21. A conversation with the author that delves into his experiences in Vietnam during the war and again in 1990. Also discusses Komunyakaa’s relationship to his hometown, Bogalusa, Louisiana.

7 

Ringnalda, Don. Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. As he does in “Rejecting ‘Sweet Geometry’” (Journal of American Culture 16, no. 3, Fall, 1993), Ringnalda suggests that much of the poetry about Vietnam is too safe in both form and content. Because Komunyakaa realizes that the old paradigms are shattered, he “gains the freedom to explore subterranean, prerational landscapes. This results in a poetry of rich, disturbing associations.”

8 

Salas, Angela. Flashback through the Heart: The Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa. Selinsgrove, Pa: Susquehanna University Press, 2004. Includes discussions of such topics as human empathy; negative capability; wartime memories; childhood and memory; the past; and the infinitude of language.

9 

__________. “Race, Human Empathy, and Negative Capability: The Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa.” College Literature 30, no. 4 (Fall, 2003): 32-54. Deconstructs the notion of a single African American perspective and explains the ways in which Komunyakaa’s work seeks to avoid this oversimplification.

10 

Stein, Kevin. “Vietnam and the ‘Voice Within’: Public and Private History in Yusef Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau.” Massachusetts Review 36, no. 4 (Winter, 1995/1996): 541-562. Attempts to place Komunyakaa’s work in an autobiographical context while simultaneously keeping it open to public interpretation.

11 

Weber, Bruce. “A Poet’s Values: It’s the Words Over the Man.” The New York Times Biographical Service 25 (May, 1994): 666-667. Written three weeks after Komunyakaa won the Pulitzer Prize, this brief account adds several new and interesting anecdotes about the poet’s early years and his views on his craft.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Robinson, Danny, and S. Thomas Mack, and Robert C. Evans. "Yusef Komunyakaa." Notable African American Writers, edited by Robert C. Eevans, Salem Press, 2020. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=AAWriter2e_0060.
APA 7th
Robinson, D., & Thomas Mack, S., & Evans, R. C. (2020). Yusef Komunyakaa. In R. C. Eevans (Ed.), Notable African American Writers. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Robinson, Danny and Thomas Mack, S. and Evans, Robert C. "Yusef Komunyakaa." Edited by Robert C. Eevans. Notable African American Writers. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2020. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.