It’s the
stuff of his life in all its variety
that Komunyakaa blends with a musical,
psychological probing to make his
kind of poetry. In ‘Poetry and
Inquiry’, one of his essays
in Blue Notes, Komunyakaa
tells us that ‘poetry is the
primary medium I have chosen because
of its conciseness, the precision,
the imagery, and the music in the
lines’.
Komunyakaa’s work is surely
marked by a precise and musical use
of language. At times almost hypnotic,
his poems tend to proceed imagistically,
carrying the reader along through
narrative, insinuations of mood, and
descriptions of landscapes, physical
and metaphysical, with a nearly opiate-effect.
Oftentimes you wake at the end of
a poem and have to re-trace your steps
carefully to recognize the seamless
path that Komunyakaa has cleared and
directed you down. The first stanza
of ‘Millpond’ demonstrates
these qualities clearly,
They look like wood ibis
From a distance, & as I got closer
They became knots left for gods
To undo, like bows tied
At the center of weakness.
Shadow to light, mind to flesh,
Swamp orchids quivered under green hats,
Nudged by slate-blue catfish
Headed for some boy’s hook
On the other side…
Gods lived under that mud
When I was young & sublimely
Blind. Each bloom a shudder
Of uneasiness, no sound
Except the whippoorwill.
They conspired to become twilight
& metaphysics, as five-eyed
Fish with milky bones
Flip- flopped in oily grass.
Although he ‘resists being conveniently stereotyped as a jazz poet’ (‘Shape and Tonal Equilibrium’, BN, 5), Komunyakaa freely admits the impact that the traditions of blues and jazz music have had on his poetry. He insists that ‘often the blues singer can get us closer to the truth than the philosopher’ (‘Forces That Move the Spirit’, BN, 13). In ‘No Good Blues’, Komunyakaa plays with the admixture of the blues tradition with his formal education, which was dominated by Euro-centric voices,
I tried to hide in Proust,
Mallarme, & Camus,
but the no-good blues
come looking for me. Yeah,
come sliding in like good love
on a tongue of grease & sham,
built up from the ground.
…
…I rhyme Baudelaire
with Appolonaire, hurting
to get beyond crossroads & goofer
dust, outrunning a twelve-bar
pulse-beat. But I pick up
a hitchhiker outside Jackson.
Tasseled boots & skin-tight
jeans. You know the rest.
Komunyakaa contends, ‘I learned from jazz that I could write anything into a poem. The music played off irony and from this I grasped the dynamics of insinuation. Jazz projects tonal insinuations. Discovering this, I now had access to an expanded spectrum of emotions and a palette of linguistic colors that only enhanced the awareness that my intellectual pursuits provided’ (6, BN). Jazz gave Komunyakaa the tools to plumb his experiences: the poverty, racial tension, and family life of his Louisiana up-bringing, the surreal quality of his time as an army journalist in Vietnam and its aftermath, along with his living in a variety of locales in the States (Colorado, California, Indiana, and now New Jersey, where he is a professor at Princeton University), as well as in Japan and Australia. Jazz has helped enable Komunyakaa to riff through the layers of his life, to its core, and to play the notes of the reality that he finds there in a way that connects readers with the story and gives them the space in which to listen to the music of their own lives more clearly.
If you are looking for a poet whose music is both smooth and profound, then Komunyakaa is your man. In the States he is a poet of much renown, winning the Faulkner Prize, as well as in 1994, the Pulitzer Prize for his selected poems, entitled Neon Vernacular. In 1999 he was elected a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets. To date he has published eleven volumes of poetry, along with several books of critical essays. In the UK, however, as is often the case with fine poets on both sides of the Atlantic, Komunyakaa is not as widely known. His sole collection by a UK press is Scandalize My Name, a selected poems collection put out by Picador in 2002. To find out more about Yusef Komunyakaa, check out the following links:
Academy
of American Poets
The Cortland Review with downloadable tracks of Komunyakaa reading his work
Modern American Poetry
Internet Poetry Archive with texts and downloadable tracks of Komunyakaa reading his work
