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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 /
The Chameleon Couch: Poems
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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
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"Facing It" by Yusef Komunyakaa /
Yusef Komunyakaa: Anodyne
Yusef Komunyakaa
Receives Major Poetry Award—New York, 12 September 2011—Yusef
Komunyakaa has been
selected as the recipient of the
2011 Wallace Stevens Award
from the Academy of American Poets. The $100,000 prize
recognizes outstanding and proven mastery About writing,
Yusef Komunyakaa has said: ". . . my work is informed by the
imagination, and that is more than merely autobiographical.
I think it all connects to an image. I rely heavily on an
image. And I suppose if it's autobiographical because it
comes from within one, then everything is autobiographical
in that sense. There are certain things that beckon to each
of us. The whole of the human experience, I'm interested in.
I want to be surprised by everyday things, such as the
maggot or the scorpion, or what have you."—Poets.org
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For me, it was different. I was a combat correspondent for the AMERICAL-PIO. Anytime boys were pinned down, such as Hamburger
Hill, you were expected to get in the chopper to get the story,
to get the picture and to come back and time to digest the
information. As a writer, you were sensitive to the images. So
you internalize the image.
At this time, I was reading everything—poetry,
issues of DownBeat, Negro
Digest, and Black World. I was reading short stories, poetry—Baraka,
Baldwin; magazines like Dissent;
some political analysis of the Vietnam situation. Constantly
wrestling with the conflict. One fact saying, yes. The other,
no. Questioning why I had not gone to Switzerland or jail. And
also by being a combat correspondent, you see numerous
firefights because that’s what you’re expected to do—cover
those things. Consequently, it becomes volumes of images.
Rudy Interviews
Yusef
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When I was in the military, I saw too many officers were hurting
for combat because it aided in their promotions. I know that
many justify their activity in war to their wives and
girlfriends. It’s putting bread on the table. Sex, war,
economics, and violence—all connect and create the overlay
that helps to define what America is all about. I’ll go on the
range and kill Indians. I’ll go to Vietnam and make the little
lady comfortable. I wonder whether women want to be connected to
violence this way—to make bombs so I can vacation in Hawaii.
More than the active participants should be implicated. That’s
part of owning up.
Rudy
Interviews Yusef2
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Let's face it, we internalize everything
and that which is internalized informs the future and
how we actually experience and see things later on.
I was quite aware of Vietnam's history, and I think
that fact had a lot to do with my feelings. A crucial
bond was the concept of the Vietnamese
"peasant." I myself came from a peasant
society of mostly field workers, and my father always
believed if one worked hard enough, he or she could rise
to a certain plateau--a black Calvinism. So I saw the
Vietnamese as familiar peasants because that's what they
are, and, consequently, I could have easily placed many
of the individuals I'd grown up with in that same
situation--especially the sharecroppers.
Yusef Speaks3
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Yusef
Komunyakaa: 2011 National Book Award Finalist,
Poetry
The latest
collection from one of our preeminent poets,
The Chameleon Couch is also one of Yusef
Komunyakaa's most personal to date. Beginning with
“Canticle,” this varied new collection often returns
to the idea of poem as hymn, ethereal and haunting,
as Komunyakaa reveals glimpses of memory, myth, and
violence. With contemplations that spring up along
walks or memories conjured by the rhythms of New
York, Komunyakaa pays tribute more than ever before
to those who came before him.
The book moves
seamlessly across cultural and historical
boundaries, evoking Komunyakaa’s capacity for
cultural excavation, through artifact and place.
The Chameleon Couch
begins in and never fully leaves the present—an
urban modernity framed, brilliantly, in
pastoral-minded verse. The poems seek the cracks
beneath the landscape, whether New York or Ghana or
Poland, finding in each elements of wisdom or
unexpected beauty. The collection is sensually,
beautifully relaxed in rhetoric; in poems like “Cape
Coast Castle,” Komunyakaa reminds us of his gift for
combining the personal with the universal, one
moment addressing a lover, the next moving the focus
outward, until both poet and reader are implicated
in the book's startling world. |
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Conversations with Yusef Komunyakaa
Edited by
Shirley A. James Hanshaw
Conversations with Yusef Komunyakaa brings
together over two decades of interviews and profiles
with one of America's most prolific and acclaimed
contemporary poets. Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1947)
describes his work alternately as "word paintings"
and as "music," and his affinity with the visual and
aural arts is amply displayed in these
conversations. The volume also addresses the
diversity and magnitude of Komunyakaa's literary
output. His collaborations with artists in a variety
of genres, including music, dance, drama, opera, and
painting have produced groundbreaking performance
pieces. Throughout the collection, Komunyakaa's
interest in finding and creating poetry across the
artistic spectrum is made manifest. |
For his collection
Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, 1977-1989,
Komunyakaa became the first African American male to win the
Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Through his work he provides keen
insight into life's mysteries from seemingly inconsequential and
insignificant life forms ("Ode to the Maggot") to some of the
most compelling historical and life-altering events of our time,
such as the Vietnam War ("Facing It"). Influenced strongly by
jazz, blues, and folklore, as well as the classical poetic
tradition, his poetry comprises a riveting chronicle of the
African American experience.
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The Last Holiday: A Memoir
By Gil Scott Heron
Shortly after we republished The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, Gil started to tell me about The Last Holiday, an account he was writing of a multi-city tour that he ended up doing with Stevie Wonder in late 1980 and early 1981. Originally Bob Marley was meant to be playing the tour that Stevie Wonder had conceived as a way of trying to force legislation to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. At the time, Marley was dying of cancer, so Gil was asked to do the first six dates. He ended up doing all 41. And Dr King's birthday ended up becoming a national holiday ("The Last Holiday because America can't afford to have another national holiday"), but Gil always felt that Stevie never got the recognition he deserved and that his story needed to be told. The first chapters of this book were given to me in New York when Gil was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Among the pages was a chapter called Deadline that recounts the night they played Oakland, California, 8 December; it was also the night that John Lennon was murdered. Gil uses Lennon's violent end as a brilliant parallel to Dr King's assassination and as a biting commentary on the constraints that sometimes lead to newspapers getting things wrong. —Jamie Byng, Guardian / Gil_reads_"Deadline" (audio) |
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Black World
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update
31 January 2012
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