Yusef Komunyakaa's Blues: The Postmodern Music of Neon Vernacular

If the ultimate sources for poetry and jazz are the life of the emotions, the extreme difficulty of describing that life, and the great spiritual cost of not trying to describe it, then poetry and jazz are rooted at the very center of what it's like to be human.

—William Mathews¹

     A loneliness
lingers like a silver needle
under my black skin,
as I try to feel how it is
to scream for help through a horn.

Yusef Komunyakaa, from "February in Sydney"²

In his 1993 volume Neon Vernacular, Yusef Komunyakaa, whose poetry is often associated with jazz, includes poems that suggest that the most important and most fundamental component of jazz music and of his own poetics is the individual artist's improvisational expression of a fundamental human loneliness lingering beneath black skin. More important than the form of the music and the heritage from which it comes is the mind that makes it, a mind isolated in more fundamental ways than can be accounted for by analyzing the operations of racism. With this definition, which is ultimately of the nature of consciousness rather than of the nature of music, Komunyakaa's verse refutes longstanding ideas about absolute racial difference at the heart of both Anglo-American and African-American literary study and posits introspection as an alternative to the social logic of identity politics that guides both bodies of criticism. On the one hand, instead of seeking only to characterize an exclusive racial community in terms of its social circumstances, Komunyakaa asserts that the African-American experience of social exclusion and consequent "loneliness" exemplifies a universal human condition of existential isolation and a necessity for self-expression. On the other hand, rather than claiming to transcend difference, Komunyakaa implies that this expressive necessity is necessarily manifest in distinctive cultural forms. Not just the "'always already' of Afro-American culture," as Houston Baker called them, the improvisational forms of African-American music are the public enactment of the African-American individual's common human agency to define and to validate him or herself through personalized, idiosyncratic versions of the received cultural forms and discourses that might otherwise isolate the person in a world without absolute meaning (Baker 3). Improvisation also allows such persons to expect to garner the sympathy of others who share this isolation. Neither exclusively ethnic cultural self-definition nor an erasure of difference, improvisation in Komunyakaa's verse is a postmodern introspective practice that rewrites the social discourses that create and justify exclusion, including but not limited to racism, making it the defining activity of the mind. Improvisation therefore becomes the defining process of all human identity.

This approach to African-American identity and jazz poetics constitutes a distinctive and fairly new strategy for using African-American music in poetic artistry. Komunyakaa's practice turns attention away from the idea in African-American literary and cultural studies that ethnic affirmation needs to be predicated entirely upon principles of difference, without falling into the opposite trap of suggesting that the primary ideal of the artist is to articulate some putative "universal" that transcends the limits of race into models of cultural homogeneity. In fact, his notion of jazz improvisation is so unconventional that his use of the music in his poetry is largely neglected in most studies of his work, much of which favors the more explicitly political analysis of his Vietnam poems—as in Kevin Stein's discussion of the African-American soldier's internal life as a private mode of public history, or Stein's direct concern with race politics, and in Alvin Aubert's discussion of Komunyakaa's poetry as a critique of canon politics. After all, most jazz-poetry scholars define the subgenre in terms of how closely the written text of a poem mirrors musical sound, providing only limited terms for characterizing Komunyakaa's practice, which is based on his belief that jazz poems "need not have...