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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 Speaks
on
the Art of Poetry
Excerpts
from an Interview
with Elizabeth Cho
On Bogalusa
Well, in retrospect I realize that it
[Bogalusa] is a place where I could discover the landscape. I
remember my early rituals as being excursions out into the
vegetation. It was a learning process for me because I was very
inquisitive about everything but also I knew that there was a
sort of violence overlaid with silence so....There was always
talk of Klu Klux Klan activities. . . . Usually, we talk about
the violence in urban centers around the country but I think the
most exact and scary violence for me is really rural violence
because of that immense silence.
Music
& Silence
Music is important but I love silence. . .
.We're talking about a different kind of silence, of course it's
not silence to cover up anything. It's silence to become part of
because I don't think we can have music without silence.
Jazz
Beginnings
I remember my mother's. . . radio that was
like a shrine, in a way, because it was huge, and I would ease
behind the radio because I think it had what they call vacuum
tubes in the radio and they glowed like bright invitations. I
remember them being very hot, as well, because that was my first
experience with fire but I was sort of mesmerized by the voice
coming out of the box. . . .Usually the radio station was tuned
to New Orleans so that was blues, jazz, gospel music, coming
into. . .that early environment. . . . I realize that as far as
jazz [goes], especially modern jazz, I probably moved away from
Louisiana to experience modern jazz to experience Charlie
Parker, Coltrane. My early experiences with jazz is considered
classical jazz, traditional jazz.
It was difficult the first few times, I
think, to connect to that new sound, but because of the music
itself. . .there was also a magnet. So I listened to it over and
over and I understood perfectly the link of modern contemporary
jazz with traditional jazz what it came out of.
Sources
of Inspiration
I have this feeling that everything is about
literature and this by the fact that we observe what's around
us. . . .we have to see what's around us in order to know what's
happening to us because we're part of everything around us. . .
.I think there's a kind of writing that's happening even when
I'm not facing the fearful white space of the page. . . .It's
informed by a certain kind of need and the need is informed by a
certain kind of music so inspiration can be found. I wonder
sometimes.
Carpentry
& Writing
It was quite an interesting relationship
because. . . I was taught a lot about human possibility. He was
a carpenter and I learned. . . about precision how he would
measure a board five or six times at home, always going back and
forth, always trying to get it right and I think that in a way
relates to my writing process, always revising.
On
Writing Process
I write everything down. Initially, a poem
perhaps could be a hundred and twenty lines long [and I will ]
cut back to forty lines. So, I write in that way and I think
that perhaps is related to jazz improvisation. But if we think
about improvisation, it's not where everything flies apart it's
where everything connects, driven by a certain kind of need and
a certain kind of energy and passion.
[T]one is the barrack structure of the poem.
. . .It automatically takes us back to the most traditional
forms of literature because early poetry I think would have been
free verse and then those structures and literary conceits
imposed on the language and such. But I do think that one has to
know what those so-called traditional forms are such as the
sestina, sonnet, in order to break the rules.
Literary
Beginnings
Yusef: In my graduating high school class, I
raised my hand and volunteered to write a poem for my class. I'd
never written a poem before but. . . I sat down and wrote a
hundred lines and then I didn't write again for a long time. I
kept reading poetry I wouldn't write poetry until I found myself
at the University of Colorado in the arriving class in 1973, and
I've been writing ever since.
I was too shy to read it [in high school].
The person who read it, [the Drama Club President] says she
still has it and consequently she has promised to keep it a
secret.
I remember very pat rhymes, traditional
poetry. The English language isn't really given to sophisticated
natural rhymes, which is entirely different from a Romance
language.
I'd been reading a lot of the British poets,
memorizing passages of Shakespeare, reading closely Tennyson but
even closer reading of Blake and Hughes. . . .Hughes led me
towards the Harlem Renaissance poets and [they] sort of led me
to read earlier African-American poetry like Paul Laurence
Dunbar.
What
Is Poetry?
For me, it's really a process of discovery.
It's not so much to answer questions but just to discover what
the various possibilities are so it's a kind of a discourse with
myself, often. Source: Elizabeth Chos Interview (February
27, 1998)
www.sccs.swathmore.edu/org/phoneix/1998-02-27/13.html
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Mockingbirds at Jerusalem
(poetry
Manuscript)
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The Black Arts Movement
Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s
By
James Edward Smethurst
Emerging from a matrix of Old Left, black nationalist,
and bohemian ideologies and institutions, African
American artists and intellectuals in the 1960s
coalesced to form the Black Arts Movement, the cultural
wing of the Black Power Movement. In this comprehensive
analysis, James Smethurst examines the formation of the
Black Arts Movement and demonstrates how it deeply
influenced the production and reception of literature
and art in the United States through its negotiations of
the ideological climate of the Cold War, decolonization,
and the civil rights movement.
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Taking a
regional approach, Smethurst examines local expressions
of the nascent Black Arts Movement, a movement
distinctive in its geographical reach and diversity,
while always keeping the frame of the larger movement in
view. The Black Arts Movement, he argues, fundamentally
changed American attitudes about the relationship
between popular culture and "high" art and dramatically
transformed the landscape of public funding for the
arts.Publisher,
University of North Carolina Press
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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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