Books by Yusef Komunyakaa

I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head / Dien Cai Dau / Magic City / Neon Vernacular / 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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Talking Dirty to the Gods Poems By Yusef  Komunyakaa Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2001)

Blue Notes  Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries By Yusef Komunyakaa Edited by Radiclani Clytus University of Michigan Press, 2000

Review Excerpts  by Adam Kirsch

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." 

"Tone," he writes in another short essay, "is the poem's buried structure. Here I think of Charlie Parker as he played `Cherokee,' incorporating surprised feelings into the composition." But the jazz metaphor leads to a particular, and perilous, interpretation of what it means to improvise in language. For, in the most basic sense, all writing of poetry is partly improvisation; there is no complete certainty as to what the next word, the next image, will be. The real choice is whether to make the improvised words seem composed, to give them the appearance of inevitability; or else to make the poem read as if it were improvised. (This choice is parallel to the choice between formal verse and free verse.) Komunyakaa opts for the latter—not just for the fact of improvisation, but also for the appearance of improvisation; and what it gives in range and energy it takes away in precision and control.

A good example is the poem "1984," from I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head, which appeared in 1986. (Komunyakaa's first seven books are excerpted in Neon Vernacular, which was published in 1993.) The title sets the theme for Komunyakaa's variations—Orwell's dystopia—and he allows a series of associated words and images to swarm together:

The passage can be called jazz-like, if by that we mean a frenetic and wandering attention, but it has nothing intrinsically to do with jazz. (In its fractured narrative it is reminiscent of John Ashbery, a poet who has no proclaimed affinity with jazz.) It proceeds by non sequitur, a weakening of syntactic and semantic logic, and it suggests the same kinds of questions that we ask of Crane. 

Even when the meaning is clearer, there are always particular words and transitions that seem born less of design than of whim. Consider "Diorama," a section of the sequence "Palimpsest," from Komunyakaa's 1998 volume Thieves of Paradise:

Here the "buried structure" is not clearly announced, but it can be teased out: the poem is a set of improvisations on the subject of urban poverty and gang violence. Komunyakaa suggests a continuity between the urchins of Oliver Twist ("Fagin school"), nineteenth-century New York gangs such as the Plug Uglies, and the contemporary African American gangs portrayed in the film Boyz N the Hood. These zones of poverty are, to most people, "terra incognita," inhabited by nameless "have-nots." The "shotgun blast," the effect of violence, reaches everyone in the old New York ghetto of Hell's Kitchen, the modern Boston ghetto of Dorchester, and, by implication, the similar neighborhoods in every American city. But there are wide gaps in this net of inference. How does an avenue ignite a skyline? Why are there "raintrees" in these urban landscapes? Who are the "they" that "look for" the people named (and who are most of the people)? How do you "coldcock" a "sham"?

Interestingly, Komunyakaa's "jazz" style—if it is fair so to call it—recedes before certain subjects, which demand a more straightforward treatment. One of these, oddly enough, is jazz itself, and the lives of its heroes. The section of Thieves of Paradise called "Testimony" is a sequence of fourteen poems about Charlie Parker, and the desire to testify accurately leads Komunyakaa to a plain, prosy style: 

Here, more clearly than in Komunyakaa's wilder poems, we can see that his free verse, like most free verse, is basically made up of prose sentences, arbitrarily lineated. In one of the interviews included in Blue Notes, Komunyakaa says that "when I first write a poem, I will confine it to its initial line breaks, but when I'm reading [aloud], I read basically according to how I'm feeling. . . .When I'm reading, I'm not always looking at the page, but I remember the words." This seems fairly clear evidence that the "initial line breaks" are not created with any sonic pattern in mind, but with that same inchoate drive towards "equilibrium" that informs every aspect of his poems. And as with almost every free-verse poet, the pressure of those line breaks is not strong enough to direct our reading of the verse.

Jazz, too, invites a certain sentimentality from Komunyakaa. The next to last poem in Neon Vernacular is "Blue Light Lounge Sutra for the Performance Poets at Harold Park Hotel," and it is a case study in what happens when poetry reaches for the pre-verbal power of music:

This is a poem about the insufficiency of poetry, of language: a time-honored theme, but always a problematic one. If the need addressed by poetry is "so deep words can't answer" it, what can the poet do but gesture at it, declaring his own limitations? Komunyakaa is driven to synesthesia—indigo notes, gut clinging to the song—to indicate a fulfillment that is natural to music but extremely difficult to achieve in poetry.

The other subject that calls forth a plain style from Komunyakaa is the Vietnam war. He is perhaps best known as a "Vietnam poet," thanks mainly to the poems in Toys in a Field (1986) and Dien Cai Dau (1988). This tortured subject has seldom been handled in a truly poetic fashion—that is, disinterestedly and aesthetically. Perhaps enough time has not yet elapsed. Komunyakaa's poems are, instead, forms of witness, autobiographical and morally insistent. It is an honorable purpose, and one that he fulfills with candor.

We learn from Blue Notes that Komunyakaa was a military reporter in Vietnam, frequently saw combat, and was awarded a Bronze Star. As a journalist, he was already burdened with the task his poetry was to address more completely: "I had to report, I had to witness." And that is what he does, for example, in "Please":

These poems, for all their awful subject matter, are unsurprising; the writing of the world wars, and other Vietnam writing, has taught us what to expect. The merit of Komunyakaa's Vietnam poems lies in their precision, like this fine description of a captured Vietnamese soldier "surrendering halfway: the small man inside / waits like a photo in a shirt pocket, refusing / to raise his hands." Komunyakaa is also striking in his descriptions of what it was like to be a black soldier in the American army, divided from both fellow soldier and enemy. "Hanoi Hannah," a poem about listening to the North Vietnamese radio propagandist, is restrained but telling:

What Komunyakaa calls, in that same interview, the "vicious arguments with oneself" that he underwent in Vietnam are only alluded to in his verse, but their violence is well communicated by his reticence.

Talking Dirty to the Gods  is Komunyakaa's tenth book, and it is a departure from his previous work. It contains 132 poems, all in the same form, a loose semi-sonnet of four quatrains. It is the first time that he has so comprehensively submitted to a regular form, though it is not a very constricting one: there are no rhymes, the line lengths vary, and the basic structure of the poems remains that of the sentence. Still, the form provides a measure of tension that has been missing from much of his earlier work. Even such flexible limitations have led Komunyakaa to produce his best poems so far.

The nearest analogy to Talking Dirty to the Gods is Robert Lowell's History, another collection of irregular sonnets. Like Lowell, Komunyakaa meditates brokenly on violence, natural and human; esoteric details from his reading provide many of his subjects and images. The poems do not tell a single story, but the repetition of form and the return to a few subjects and fields of reference make the book feel unified. Komunyakaa looks to Greek antiquity, to nature, and to contemporary America for his subjects, and he mixes the three to good effect.

"Eros," for instance, sounds one of the collection's main themes, the power of sex:

The irony here—Eros is not a graceful boy, but a jaded American sex tourist—is rather heavy, especially the stereotypical "Muriel back in Boise," a Babbitt wife. Yet the particulars in the poem, the juxtaposition of registers—the gross "wad of greenbacks" delicately "nestled" against the groin—is very effective. And in this limited compass, Komunyakaa's usual obscurities—who or what is the "counterfeit gift dipped in fire"?—seem better calibrated, more jarring, than when they come in a continuous stream. 

Another poem, "October," is equally striking in its respect for archaic violence:

The sudden introduction of Actaeon is a much more unlikely and pleasing use for Greek myth than most contemporary poets can find. Komunyakaa's wary respect for the hunter, his pity for the elk in domesticated New Jersey, are in keeping with the book's general distrust of modern life, which has not eliminated violence, but casts it in new and less honest forms. Modernity is derided as an "endless situation comedy," as mere "modern reason."

Komunyakaa is nostalgic for a world before Darwin, when "what the worm / Taught us was sacred, / Serene as the beetle / Grub the bird now jabs / With her spear"—for the insect world that he conjures in "Bedazzled":

Instead we now have the far more destructive and vulgar violence of man. One modern specimen is exhibited in the book's first poem, "Hearsay":

One advantage of the sonnet sequence—and Talking Dirty to the Gods is more or less a sonnet sequence—is that not every poem needs to succeed equally. The momentum of repetition carries us over the limper or more confusing poems. The latter occur when Komunyakaa attempts too many disjunctions in the short space that he has to work with, as in "The God of Broken Things":

The leap from the rather banal list of synonyms to the elevated, wandering, syntactically wounded lines is unsatisfying. And the last sentence is more or less unreadable—a screw opens a space that wings inside a heart that slips into a dream—all dreamy connotation, no precise denotation. It is an example of the kind of improvised, "musical" verse that Komunyakaa has often written in the past, and its weakness is the more evident in this more regular form.

Indeed, this is a good example of the virtue of form: it urges a certain objectivity and openness, it prevents the poet from improvising and demands that he compose. If the form in Talking Dirty to the Gods were stricter, Komunyakaa could perhaps get away with more obscurity, since the pattern would enforce a sense beyond the literal sense. That is what Lowell often achieves in the sonnets in History, such as "Bird?":

With Lowell's poem, too, we can ask many questions about sense: what, for example, is the "perilous passage"? And yet the heavy, perfectly tuned lines, each accelerating into its end-stop, create a verbal music that carries all before it. Komunyakaa, by contrast, still takes his direction from prose, not from verse, and so he does not make the most of his chosen form. But even with this limitation, Talking Dirty to the Gods is his best and most beautiful book so far.

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Adam Kirsch is a poet and critic living in New York City. He writes frequently about poetry for The New Republic. 

New Republic, 02/26/2001, Vol. 224 Issue 9, p38, 4p.