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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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 Cho’s Interview (February 27, 1998) – www.sccs.swathmore.edu/org/phoneix/1998-02-27/13.html