Komunyakaa in Colorado

Nowadays the literary world is recognizing Yusef Komunyakaa as perhaps a major poet and perhaps the most original poet of his generation, and I would change the word "perhaps" to "very likely" and "almost certainly" and add that his generation includes all Americans, not just blacks. When I met him some thirty years ago, he was an undergraduate and I an untenured visiting professor of English in the College of Letters, Arts & Sciences at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (UCCS).

A new university in old buildings, it was situated on desert bluffs (elevation 6,300 feet) that fronted Pikes Peak (elevation 14,110 feet) from the top of which Katharine Lee Bates in July 1893 composed the opening lines of "America the Beautiful." Had she composed the anthem a century later, she would have seen not a fruited plain and an alabaster city but a sprawling metropolis with a population rapidly approaching five hundred thousand, a place where God sheds His grace on NORAD, Fort Carson, Focus on the Family, and the "U.S." Air Force Academy, Space Command, and Olympic Training Center—though not, I think, on the University of Colorado. It was begun in 1965 as a branch of the University of Colorado at Boulder and had not been legally established as a more or less independent institution until 1972. Yusef and I arrived the next year. There were only twelve hundred students, all of them commuters (because there were no dormitories), and only a few dozen members of faculty, few of whom either published or perished. Our brethren in Boulder regarded us as an embarrassment even though some professors had doctorate degrees from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne. We were, collectively, the country cousin, freckle-faced and carrot-topped and perpetually holding out a tin cup to the politicians in Denver for alms that would not be forthcoming for a couple of decades. Young students fresh out of local high schools usually went to Boulder, one of the most notorious "party" universities in America, whereas UCCS students tended to be "mature," that is, had daytime jobs, families to support, divorces, and foreign wars to forget. Accordingly, our students were not expected to amount to anything.

We nevertheless enjoyed a golden age of education. We, the professors and students, met in small classes, occasionally even off campus in private homes and beer joints, and actually conversed with one another; there were few administrators and campus cops to breathe down our necks. In my romantic, heretical, nonpuritanical, nonviolent, and utterly practical opinion, one based upon the methods of Socrates and Jesus, all one really needs to make a university is a loose conglomeration of sages and pupils who sit down in the shade of an olive grove and talk of cabbages and kings— no managers and administrators, coaches, parents, and vice-chancellors for football affairs allowed. In those days at UCCS we all learned together in the presence of a mountain and of the Garden of the Gods, both regarded as sacred by Native Americans. At night our buildings were lit up like Depression-era hosiery mills in the Deep South, sweatshops for the hardworking proletariat.

Nowadays, with almost everything geared to materialism, management, and empire, UCCS has ten thousand students and may be secretly aiming for twenty thousand. It has hundreds of professors, dozens of administrators paid on the scale of fugitive Enron executives, and a burgeoning bureaucracy. Its mission, so-called, is tilted heavily in favor of business and engineering and away from the arts and humanities. Chances are, it may never again include among its graduates a future winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Lacking an olive grove, we in the golden age made the best of a few decrepit buildings scattered among pines and cottonwoods. From the very top of the mesa a mysterious symbol, seemingly erected in ancient times, looked down upon our buildings and our still half-pagan hearts. Colossal as a statue on Easter Island, this god was red with one huge white eye. Unfortunately, our first chancellor, an expert on Russian...